Pure Pagan
Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
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“For there is indeed something we can call the spirit of ancient Greece–a carefully tuned voice that speaks out of the grave with astonishing clarity and grace , a distinctive voice that, taken as a whole, is like no other voice that has ever sung on this earth.”
–BURTON RAFFEL, from his Preface
For centuries, the poetry of Homer, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Sappho, and Archilochus has served as one of our primary means of connecting with the wholly vanished world of ancient Greece. But the works of numerous other great and prolific poets–Alkaios, Meleager, and Simonides, to name a few–are rarely translated into English , and are largely unknown to modern readers. In Pure Pagan, award-winning translator Burton Raffel brings these and many other wise and witty ancient Greek writers to an English-speaking audience for the first time, in full poetic flower. Their humorous and philosophical ruminations create a vivid portrait of everyday life in ancient Greece –and they are phenomenally lovely as well.
In short, sharp bursts of song, these two-thousand-year-old poems speak about the timeless matters of everyday life:
Wine (Wine is the medicine / To call for, the best medicine / To drink deep, deep)
History (Not us: no. / It began with our fathers, / I’ve heard).
Movers and shakers (If a man shakes loose stones / To make a wall with / Stones may fall on his head / Instead)
Old age (Old age is a debt we like to be owed / Not one we like to collect)
Frankness (Speak / As you please / And hear what can never / Please).
There are also wonderful epigrams (Take what you have while you have it: you’ll lose it soon enough. / A single summer turns a kid into a shaggy goat) and epitaphs (Here I lie, beneath this stone, the famous woman who untied her belt for only one man).
The entrancing beauty, humor, and piercing clarity of these poems will draw readers into the Greeks’ journeys to foreign lands, their bacchanalian parties and ferocious battles, as well as into the more intimate settings of their kitchens and bedrooms. The poetry of Pure Pagan reveals the ancient Greeks’ dreams, their sense of humor, sorrows, triumphs, and their most deeply held values, fleshing out our understanding of and appreciation for this fascinating civilization and its artistic legacy.
Burton Raffel
Translated by
Burton Raffel spent two years in Indonesia in the early 1950's as an English language instructor under a Ford Foundation program. While there he began translating Indonesian poetry with the help of Nurdin Salam, one of his students; this collaboration resulted in the publication of Chairil Anwar: Selected Poems. Later he published An Anthology of Modern Indonesian Poetry, one of the few sources of this poetry available to readers of English. Public readings and lectures on Indonesian poetry led him to the research which resulted in the present volume. Mr. Raffel has also translated from the French, Spanish, Dutch, and Anglo-Saxon, and has done collaborative translations from Thai, Urdu, and Vietnamese. His publications include Poems From the Old English, Beowulf, Short Story 3 (with Robert Creeley and others), and numerous translations and articles on Eastern and other poetry. As might be expected, he is also a poet in his own right, and his poems have appeared widely in the literary magazines and anthologies. He earned his B.A. at Brooklyn college, his master's at Ohio State University, and his LL.B. (he is a member of the New York State bar) at Yale. In addition to his Indonesian teaching assignment, he has taught at Brooklyn College, Ohio State, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and is presently Associate Professor of English at State University of New York at Buffalo.
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