Callimachus: Hymns, Epigrams, Select Fragments / Edition 1

by Callimachus, Stanley Lombardo, Diane Rayor

Overview

Having found his translators, may Callimachus now find the public he deserves. —D.S. Carne-Ross

A Poundian figure who summed up the possibilties of a new era's response to an old and rich poetic tradition, Callimachus (ca. 305 B.C.-ca. 240 B.C.) was the first learned scholar-poet in Western literature.

The leading poet of the Alexandrian school, Callimachus served as a model to Vergil, Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid. With remarkable grace and sensitivity to nuance, Stanley Lombardo and Diane Rayor provide the first translation of Callimachus's works into the American poetic idiom. Lombardo and Rayor translate the six hymns and sixty-one epigrams that are the only complete extant poems of a writer credited with having produces some eight hundred books in his lifetime. In addition, they offer a generous selection from among the surviving fragments, inclduing the prologue and selected passages from the Aetia ("The Origins"), Callimachus's greatest achievement in narrative verse. Theiry annotations elucidate the poet's rich mythological allusions; an introduction places Callimachus within his cultural and poetic contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801832819
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/01/1987
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.35(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stanley Lombardo is an associate professor of classics at the University of Kansas.

Diane Rayor holds a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by D.S. Carne-Ross
Introduction
Part I. Hymns
Part II. Epigrams
Part III. Fragments
Notes

Editorial Reviews

This is an exceptional translation of the works of an exceptional poet. Though little known in modern times, Callimachus is one of the high-water marks of ancient Greece: a literary giant in the Hellenistic period, leader of the Alexandrian school, model of poetic craft for Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, and others. But up to now the path to his greatness has been hard for Greekless readers to follow. Nourished in a venerated poetic tradition, scholarly and allusive, he preferred "the trickling dew from a mountain's holy spring" to the muddy current down river. This translation—clear-flowing, graceful, witty—revives a fading giant. A literary triumph
—Library Journal

From the Publisher

This is an exceptional translation of the works of an exceptional poet. Though little known in modern times, Callimachus is one of the high-water marks of ancient Greece: a literary giant in the Hellenistic period, leader of the Alexandrian school, model of poetic craft for Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, and others. But up to now the path to his greatness has been hard for Greekless readers to follow. Nourished in a venerated poetic tradition, scholarly and allusive, he preferred ``the trickling dew from a mountain's holy spring'' to the muddy current down river. This translationclear-flowing, graceful, wittyrevives a fading giant. A literary triumph.Stephen Scully, Boston Univ.

Library Journal