Poems of Meleager

by Peter Whigham

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Genres: Poetry, Ancient History, Classics

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 71

Reviews

[Dorthe]

This is a compund rating: 5 stars to Meleager himself, as always; 4 stars to the literal - and useful - translations by Peter Jay, and 1 star to the silly verses by Peter Whigham.

[Mike]

This is a frustrating collection for several reasons. We are told in the introduction that this slim volume comprises about half of Meleager’s known work. Why not just give us translations of all his extant poems, since they are such a small number? Secondly, the “modern verse” translations are just awful. (In this, I am in complete agreement with the one other person who reviewed this collection on Goodreads!) Whigham attempts to force the Greek into modernist English verse, complete with halting enjambment, excessive punctuation, and hip modern lingo (i.e., 1960’s-era British slang). It’s distracting and unfortunate. Thankfully, editor Peter Jay salvages this mess with literal prose translations and notes.

Which brings us to the final problem: the layout of the text. Why must the reader flip back-and-forth from the modern verse translations to the prose translations and notes when there is more than enough room to include the latter at the bottom of the page? The short epigrams (two-to-eight lines) are given in Greek and English on facing pages, with a huge amount of margin space on all sides. It would have been simple to place the notes and prose translations as footnotes for easy access, which would have meant that all of Meleager’s poems could have been provided -- along with notes and prose versions -- in the same number of pages that currently contain only half of his poems.

It’s unfortunate that this is the only stand-alone edition of Meleager I was able to track down. I also picked up the Peter Jay edited version of The Greek Anthology from the library, but it contains the same “modern” verse style translations. It looks like I’ll just have to turn to the good ol’ Loeb volumes to read Meleager and the rest of the epigrams in the Anthology.

[Marijn Taal]

Mooie vertaling van al Meleagros van Gadara's gedichten uit de Griekse Anthologie.