false 15385 0 0 27425 0374530319 9780374530310 3 <![CDATA[The Georgics of Virgil: Bilingual Edition]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167880882m/27425.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167880882s/27425.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27425.The_Georgics_of_Virgil_Bilingual_Edition 4.44 27 Georgics, written between 37 and 30 B.C.E., "the best poem by the best poet." The poem, newly translated by the poet and translator David Ferry, is one of the great songs, maybe the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in difficult--and beautiful--circumstances, and in the context of all we share in nature.</div><div> </div><div>The Georgics celebrates the crops, trees, and animals, and, above all, the human beings who care for them. It takes the form of teaching about this care: the tilling of fields, the tending of vines, the raising of the cattle and the bees. There's joy in the detail of Virgil's descriptions of work well done, and ecstatic joy in his praise of the very life of things, and passionate commiseration too, because of the vulnerability of men and all other creatures, with all they have to contend with: storms, and plagues, and wars, and all mischance.
</div></div>]]> 15385 3.64 337 72 2006 874288 0374525722 9780374525729 8 <![CDATA[The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179097424m/874288.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179097424s/874288.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/874288.The_Odes_of_Horace_Bilingual_Edition 4.33 18 The Odes of Horace represents the first truly distinguished translation of the complete odes into the American idiom. The translator has managed to retain the poet's moral tone while purging any taint of sententiousness. How? By recasting the structure of "Carpe Diem," for example, he gives this familiar poem a power one would have not thought possible. Ferry even manages a Latin-English rhyme at the end, by shifting the position of the addressee's name: "Leuconoe-- / Hold on to the day."

Ferry's Horace is always a specific personality, with his own identity, background, and attitude. Yet he is also a conduit of history. Turning to "Delicta maiorum immeritus lues..." (which Ferry straightforwardly calls "To the Romans"), we are plunged into a devastating meditation on the imperium. At this point, of course, it's commonplace to point out similarities between the American empire and that of ancient Rome. But this translation gives us a feeling for just how contemporary Horace really is. The best example would probably be "To Dellius":

Dellius, don't be
Too unrestrainedly joyful in good fortune.
You are going to die.

It doesn't matter at all whether you spend
Your days and nights in sorrow,
Or, on the other hand, in holiday pleasure.
Drinking Falernian wine

Of an excellent vintage year, on the river bank.
It helps to know that the historical Dellius was exiled in Egypt at the time, making those Italian vintages strictly off-limits to him. What's more, he was a double or perhaps triple agent, which gives him an additional Cold War coloration. In any case, the allusiveness of the odes--and the taut, bone-dry English of Ferry's translation--should gain Horace a legion or so of new readers. --Mark Rudman

]]> 15385 3.64 337 72 1998 27427 0374526966 9780374526962 3 <![CDATA[The Eclogues of Virgil: Bilingual Edition]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167880883m/27427.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167880883s/27427.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27427.The_Eclogues_of_Virgil_Bilingual_Edition 4.12 16 The Odes of Horace and Gilgamesh

The Eclogues of Virgil gave definitive form to the pastoral mode, and these magically beautiful poems, which were influential in so much subsequent literature, perhaps best exemplify what pastoral can do. "Song replying to song replying to song," touchingly comic, poignantly sad, sublimely joyful, the various music that these shepherds make echoes in scenes of repose and harmony, and of hardship and trouble in work and love.

A bilingual edition, The Eclogues of Virgil includes concise, informative notes and an Introduction that describes the fundamental role of this deeply original book in the pastoral tradition.
</div>]]> 15385 3.64 337 72 2000 607824 0374528527 9780374528522 1 <![CDATA[The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176253342m/607824.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176253342s/607824.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/607824.The_Epistles_of_Horace_Bilingual_Edition 4.67 6 My aim is to take familiar things and make
Poetry of them, and do it in such a way
That it looks as if it was as easy as could be
For anybody to do it . . . the power of making
A perfectly wonderful thing out of nothing much.
--from "The Art of Poetry"

When David Ferry's translation of The Odes of Horace appeared in 1997, Bernard Knox, writing in The New York Review of Books, called it "a Horace for our times." Now Ferry has translated Horace's two books of Epistles, in which Horace perfected the conversational verse medium that gives his voice such dazzling immediacy, speaking in these letters with such directness, wit, and urgency to young writers, to friends, to his patron Maecenas, to Emperor Augustus himself. It is the voice of a free man, talking about how to get along in a Roman world full of temptations, opportunities, and contingencies, and how to do so with one's integrity intact. Horace's world, so unlike our own and yet so like it, comes to life in these poems. And there are also the poems -- the famous "Art of Poetry" and others -- about the tasks and responsibilities of the writer: truth to the demands of one's medium, fearless clear-sighted self-knowledge, and unillusioned, uncynical realism, joyfully recognizing the world for what it is.
</div>]]> 15385 3.64 337 72 2002 785589 0226244865 9780226244860 1 <![CDATA[Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets Series)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178331234m/785589.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178331234s/785589.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/785589.Of_No_Country_I_Know_New_and_Selected_Poems_and_Translations 4.50 6 Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations provides a wonderful gathering of the work of one of the great American poetic voices of the twentieth century. It brings together his new poems and translations, collected here for the first time; his books Strangers and Dwelling Places in their entirety; selections from his first book, On the Way to the Island; and selections from his celebrated translations of the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the Odes of Horace, and of Virgil's Eclogues. This is Ferry's fullest and most resonant book, demonstrating the depth and breadth of forty years of a life in poetry.

"Though Ferry is perhaps best known for his eloquent translations of Horace and Virgil, "Of No Country I Know" demonstrates that he deserves acclaim for his own poetry as well."—Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times Book Review
</div>]]> 15385 3.64 337 72 1999 4830855 0313200203 9780313200205 0 <![CDATA[The Limits of Mortality: An Essay of Wordsworth's Major Poems]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4830855.The_Limits_of_Mortality_An_Essay_of_Wordsworth_s_Major_Poems 4.00 1 15385 3.64 337 72 1959 4314587 0226244784 9780226244785 0 <![CDATA[Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets Series)]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4314587.Dwelling_Places_Poems_and_Translations 3.00 1 "David Ferry's Dwelling Places is a marvelous, extremely moving book, distinguished by Ferry's characteristic formal virtuosity, extraordinarily fresh and 'inner' translations, and a kind of driven anguished rage at both the social conditions in which human beings have to live and the mysteriously unchangeable tragedies of individual human lives. The translations amplify and deepen the contemporary scenes. I feel that in the future this will be perceived as a great book."--Frank Bidart

"Not until I had read Dwelling Places several times did I see how ingeniously resourceful, ambitious, and admirably modest a book David Ferry has made."--Boston Review

]]> 15385 3.64 337 72 1993 2457429 0226244709 9780226244709 0 <![CDATA[Strangers: A Book of Poems (Phoenix Poets Series)]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2457429.Strangers_A_Book_of_Poems 2.00 1 New York Times Book Review

"Strangers is a remarkably good book for a reader sufficiently attentive to hear its quiet power, to let it work in its distinctive way."—Boston Globe

"The poems of David Ferry's Strangers are in fact one book, and it is a splendid one. There is the same austere and poignant voice throughout, asking the unanswerable things, speaking of all that is withheld from us, confronting the unknownness that dwells even in the familiar and dear. Painful and touching, the book offers a distinctive vision which is at the same time inescapably true."—Richard Wilbur</div>]]> 15385 3.64 337 72 1983 6804021 0226244695 9780226244693 0 <![CDATA[Strangers: A Book of Poems]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6804021-strangers 0.0 0 New York Times Book Review

"Strangers is a remarkably good book for a reader sufficiently attentive to hear its quiet power, to let it work in its distinctive way."--Boston Globe

"The poems of David Ferry's Strangers are in fact one book, and it is a splendid one. There is the same austere and poignant voice throughout, asking the unanswerable things, speaking of all that is withheld from us, confronting the unknownness that dwells even in the familiar and dear. Painful and touching, the book offers a distinctive vision which is at the same time inescapably true."--Richard Wilbur

]]> 15385 3.64 337 72 1983 6579727 0887548563 9780887548567 0 <![CDATA[He Speaks: Monologues for Men]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6579727-he-speaks 0.0 0 "The monologue is like the tip of one of those seasonal icebergs that float so majestically down the Newfoundland coastline. They catch one's breath, but underneath lies the other nine-tenths of the beast, an ice-blue bedrock, glowing as if with an inner light."-from the introduction by David Ferry

An anthology of modern Canadian monologues for the male voice, for use in classes and auditions, or for general interest.

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