Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God (Croom Helm Classical Studies)

by Various, W.H. Parker (Editor & translator)

English, Latin

Genres: Poetry

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 50

About the author

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If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.

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Reviews

[Eleanor Atterton]

Read for an essay.

[Hal Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these poems are fascinating -- a rewrite of the Iliad and the Odyssey explicating the action by the relative sizes of characters' wangs, for example -- but the translation makes an attempt at formal verse and comes across as sub-doggerel. They don't work as poems, because they're not very good and because an attempt at literalness forces the verses into absurdities of poetic inversion and bizarre word choices; but the exigencies of prosody prevent them from being literal, either. So that's too bad. There's accompanying Latin text, though; and the poems are fun.