After Callimachus: Poems

by Stephanie Burt, Callimachus (Contributor), Mark Payne (Foreword)

Contemporary translations and adaptations of ancient Greek poet Callimachus by noted writer and critic Stephanie Burt

Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt's attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today's poetry readers.

Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus's whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our current times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt's renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context.

After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Fiction

160 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2020

About the author

Stephanie Burt is the author of fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism, including Super Gay Poems and Don’t Read Poetry. A past judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she served as a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Raritan, and other publications. She is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Nadia Tivvis]

Hilarious! Loved it!

[Tyler]

Stephanie Burt's adaptations of the Ancient Greek poet Callimachus are conversational and elegantly chatty, and thus lyrically sparse; the rhymes are stiff and not so recognizable, any meter is subtle, and enjambments are never too punchy. These aesthetic choices aren't so much my cup of tea, but that didn't bother me so much as some poems felt preachy in their reappropriations: some re-gender lovers for a non-binary mould, -- supposedly for no reason besides gratuitous representation (?). Others, probably more faithful to Callimachus, engage in heavy-handed reminders that immigrants shouldn't be killed on site, as if Burt weren't preaching to the choir. I appreciate the willingness to vigorously "modernize" poems from the ancient world, repurposing their themes to create a literary Frankenstein -- what Stephanie Burt calls Sci-Fi: a world set in a kind of Greece that believes in the pantheon but also has Minecraft and Pogs. So be it. Yet less credible for me than this "Sci-Fi" was the slew of adults constantly talking about their "crushes" and acting in ways that seemed flauntingly inconceivable and akward.

[Lincoln Day]

Funny. Witty. Learned. Creative. What more could you want in a poetry collection?

Obviously, this is not the place you should go for a faithful translation of Callimachus, as she herself notes, but she manages to really capture Callimachean style and the feeling of ancient poetry while still modernising it. It is apparent that this is not Callimachus and still Callimachus at the same time. The anachronisms work perfectly and are not overdone.

[Clarissa K]

Burt is able to update Callimachus such that the spirit of the text is preserved in a way that's relatable to a modern reader. Reading this, it is now clear what Propertius & co. took away from the text in their era beyond mere content.

[Hailey Leithauser]

Good stuff, much enjoyed

[Matt]

I’m speechless. I’m overwhelmed. I will read it again.

[Jack Silvernagel]

A strangeness of time. I liked the succinctness.