The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Composed between the early-agricultural ‘song culture’ of 800 BCE, when praise poems and dirges mingled in a world peopled with gods and monsters, and the time of Imperial Rome, the corpus of Greek and Latin lyric poetry is as densely rich in formal interrelation and allusion as anything we know in English verse. Poets like the Greek Callimachus and the Roman Horace self-consciously modelled themselves on earlier bards – Sappho and Mimnermus, Pindar and Alcaeus – and produced poetry thick with references and resonances from the work of their exemplars. One translator approaches a given poet in one way; another translator approaches the next poet in another. We receive the part, but lose the whole. Chris Childers has sought to remedy this situation by translating the most representative and significant poems from both languages, and according to consistent principles of translation.