Christopher Childers’ The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse is a vast undertaking with a great deal to offer those like me who enjoy reading classical literature but can’t read it in its original languages. Epic and drama are excluded, as is the prose literature, but ‘lyric’ is defined very widely indeed, covering both what the ancients would have understood by the term – poems written for performance to the lyre and in a range of metres associated with such performance – and more broadly short or medium length poems speaking in the first person and / or … Continue Reading

In his introduction to the FSG Book of Twentieth Century Italian Poetry, Geoffrey Brock describes Umberto Saba as one of the three poets who were to leave the deepest imprint on twentieth century Italian poetry, the other two being Ungaretti and Montale. His reputation in Italy was apparently much slower to emerge than theirs and my impression is that he’s still much less well known in England. This is partly because of the nature of his writing. Like Ungaretti and Montale, he moved away from the highly rhetorical style that had dominated the work of the previous generation of Italian … Continue Reading

Five Scenes From a Failed Revolution by Ashur Etwebi, translated by James Byrne,

Arc Publications, £11.99 paperback, 106 pp.

You can find my review on The London Grip by clicking here.

I’ve recently reread Yorgos Theotokas’s Leonis for the first time in years. How odd it is as a novel, and at the same time, how compelling. Both the oddity and the power come from the book’s extreme compression, and from its being in some ways less like a novel than a long narrative poem in prose.

Sadly, it isn’t on the rather short list of modern Greek books that have gained currency in English, though I gather there is a translation. In brief outline, Leonis – the hero – starts as a little Greek boy in Istanbul or Constantinople – or … Continue Reading

A New Divan celebrates the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s great West-Eastern Divan in which the poet expresses both a personal sense of creative renewal and his love of Middle Eastern poetry, particularly that by the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz.

In A New Divan, twelve major poets from the ‘East’ and twelve from the ‘West’ were each commissioned to write on one of twelve themes in Goethe’s collection. Only Khaled Mattawa and Don Paterson wrote in English. Other poems appear in both English and their language of composition. The English versions are by poets, usually working from someone else’s literal … Continue Reading

Sarah Maguire (ed) My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre, 384 pp, £12 pb, Bloodaxe Books and the Poetry Translation Centre.

My response to My Voice is divided. Containing 111 poems translated from 23 different languages, bringing together the work of many gifted poets and poet translators, clearly laid out and generously spaced, showing each poem in its original language and script as well as in its English version, this is a book to treasure. The translations are nearly all collaborative efforts involving an Anglophone poet or poets and a linguist. Except in the case of a … Continue Reading

Ritsos is one of the great twentieth century poets and has been quite widely translated. Harsent doesn’t try to compete with the scholars of Modern Greek on the level of close translation. His outstanding achievement is to make the poems live and breathe in an English so natural and so finely honed that one seems to be reading poetry in the language of its original composition.

Many pieces reflect horrifying and depressing aspects of twentieth century Greek history and of Ritsos’s own experience, but their tone is never really gloomy.

This is partly a matter of style. They don’t press feelings on … Continue Reading

I stumbled on this bit of Victor Hugo in a book on nineteenth century French poetry[1]:

Sara, belle d’indolence
……….Se balance
Dans un hamac, au-dessus
Du bassin d’une fontaine
……….Toute pleine
D’eau puisée à l’Ilyssus ;

Et la frêle escarpolette
……….Se reflète
Dans le transparent miroir
Avec la baigneuse blanche
……….Qui se penche,
Qui se penche pour se voir …

My first thought was simply how lovely this is; it makes you wish English could dance in rhyme as easily as French can. My second was how like a lot of Wallace Stevens it is – the Wallace Stevens of … Continue Reading

Arc Publications, £9.99 paperback, 154 pp; £ 12.99 hardback 154 pp

I enjoyed this book immensely.

It’s the work of a highly cultured novelist, poet and literary critic, so not surprisingly there are many poems about writers or about places and people on the international literary circuit, as well as translations or adaptations of pieces by Catullus, Montale and Jaccottet. At the same time, it’s immensely grounded.

A fundamental motive of Stead’s writing appears in the title of “Stay Alert”. In this, the poet’s companion is startled by an unexpected intensity of blue striking her peripheral vision, asks what it is, then laughs, … Continue Reading

I’m very much enjoying The Yellow Buoy by the veteran New Zealand poet C. K. Stead. One little poem or section of a longer poem that leapt out at me was this from a translation of Jaccottet:

Viper
alive as running water
gone as quickly as
…….a quick glance
…….a cool kiss

That’s wonderfully alive with the movement of the reptile, of the water, of the poet’s mind. The lack of punctuation speeds everything up, makes you feel that the impression’s been caught and stabilised in all its transience and volatility. The idea of a cool kiss plays brilliantly against … Continue Reading