Adage
Amphiaraus
Aretus
Automedon
Body hair
Boredom
Brow
Callimachus
Catamite
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Conflagration
Courtesan
Cyclops
Damis
Daphnis
Diocles (mythology)
Dionysus
Diphilus
Doggy style
Drinking
Empedocles
Epigram
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eq_biography-true-stories
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Evenus (mythology)
Fireplace
Flaccus
Foreplay
Frankincense
Ganymede (mythology)
Hephaestus
Hesiod
I Wish (manhwa)
Idomeneus
Ignoramus
Ismenus
Laughter
Libation
Long hair
Love's Labour's Lost
Meleager
Midriff
Mimnermus
Misery (novel)
Month
Muse
Native Son
Nicander
Nickname
Philocles
Philodemus
Philostratus
Pity
Polyphemus
Posidippus
Praxiteles
Priam
Prick
Pubic hair
Pythian Games
Rest in peace
Slavery
Solicitation
Spirit away
Strato I
Telephus
Theocritus
Thero (Greek mythology)
Troilus
Two Kinds
Wreath
Product details
- ISBN 9780691088204
- Weight: 170g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 13 May 2001
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Elegiac lyrics celebrating the love of boys, which the translator terms Puerilities, comprise most of the twelfth book of The Greek Anthology. That book, the so-called Musa Puerilis, is brilliantly translated in this, the first complete verse version in English. It is a delightful eroticopia of short poems by great and lesser-known Greek poets, spanning hundreds of years, from ancient times to the late Christian era. The epigrams--wry, wistful, lighthearted, libidinous, and sometimes bawdy--revel in the beauty and fickle affection of boys and young men and in the fleeting joys of older men in loving them. Some, doubtless bandied about in the lax and refined setting of banquets, are translated as limericks. Also included are a few fine and often funny poems about girls and women. Fashion changes in morality as well as in poetry. The sort of attachment that inspired these verses was considered perfectly normal and respectable for over a thousand years. Some of the very best Greek poets--including Strato of Sardis, Theocritus, and Meleager of Gadara--are to be found in these pages.
The more than two hundred fifty poems range from the lovely to the playful to the ribald, but all are, as an epigram should be, polished and elegant. The Greek originals face the translations, enhancing the volume's charm. A friend of Youth, I have no youth in mind, For each has beauties, of a different kind. --Strato I've had enough to drink; my heart and soul As well as tongue are losing self-control. The lamp flame bifurcates; I multiply The dinner guests by two each time I try. Not only shaken up by the wine-waiter, I ogle too the boy who pours the water. --Strato Venus, denying Cupid is her son, Finds in Antiochus a better one. This is the boy to be enamored of, Boys, a new love superior to Love. --Meleager
Daryl Hine is the author of fourteen collections of original poetry, three plays, a novel, and nonfiction prose, as well as translations from the Greek and Latin classics, including the Homeric Hymns and the works of Theocritus and Ovid. He was editor of Poetry from 1968 to 1978 and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
