Books November 1995
Davenport’s pleiad
On Seven Greeks: Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, Anakreon, Herakleitos, Diogenes, Herondas edited by Guy Davenport.
In volume, at least, the American age of translation from classical poetry has already far surpassed the Elizabethan and Augustan ages. The tide of verse really began to flow with Lattimore's Iliad and the Chicago Complete Greek Tragedies in the 1950s; yet even now, at least two Iliads, three Odysseys, three Aeneids, and uncounted Greek dramas later, we still look in vain for any informed survey of this staggering literary phenomenon, let alone of its impact on American education, American taste, and American poetry itself.
Anyone who undertook such a survey would probably have to begin by recognizing the single most profound difference between our twentieth-century verse translators and their Elizabethan and Augustan predecessors. In those ages most of the reading public knew and loved the Greek and Latin classics in the original tongues. What they asked about the latest translation of, say, a Roman...
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