The Books of Catullus is the first full English translation to take the Roman poet at his word. Simon Smiths versions are scholarly yet eccentric, mapping theme and register to contemporary equivalents (such as poem 16, which echoes Frank OHara). He divides Catulluss complete verses into three `books, the form in which it is thought the poems were originally received. `Smith gets the all-important rhythm of Catullus, whose meters, like all else about this poet, are deceptively complex, writes Vincent Katz. `He achieves a delicious frisson again and again by fusing the classical and the contemporary. The reader is repeatedly pleasured by unexpected felicities. (Peter Hughes)
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Product Details
Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
Publication Date: 29 Mar 2018
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Publication City/Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781784105501
About Gaius Valerius Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus was born in Verona northern Italy in 84 BCE and died in Rome in 54 BCE. Little detail about his life survives. What is known is inferred from the poems or from indirect secondary sources. He was a contemporary of Cicero and Caesar the latter a friend of his father and an immediate antecedent of the Augustan poets Horace Propertius and Ovid. His surviving poems are among the finest lyric verse of ancient Rome.; Simon Smith has published five collections of poetry. His third collection Mercury (Salt) was long-listed for the Costa Prize in 2007. A selected poems More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry appeared from Shearsman in 2016 and his latest pamphlet is Salon Noir (Equipage 2016). He is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent was a Hawthornden Writing Fellow in 2009 and a judge of the National Poetry Prize in 2004. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow.