Poems from the Greek Anthology: Expanded Edition

by Kenneth Rexroth (Translator), David Mulroy (Introduction)

"The first translation from the Greek that I ever did was the apple orchard of Sappho in my fifteenth year. It left me so excited with accomplishment that I couldn't sleep well for nights. Since that time, on the freight trains of my youthful years of wandering, in starlit camps on desert and mountain ranges, in snow-covered cabins, on shipboard, in bed, in the bath, in love, in time of loneliness and despair, in jail, while employed as an attendant of the insane, and on many other jobs and in many other places, the Anthology and the lyric poets of Greece have been my constant companions." --Kenneth Rexroth from the Foreword
Friend to the Beats, organizer of the Six Gallery poetry reading in 1955, and iconoclastic poet extraordinare, Kenneth Rexroth here turns his imagination to a selection of verses from the Greek Anthology. In his lively style he successfully captures the spirit of the originals by such poets as Sappho, Anyte, Glykon, Antipatros, Leonidas, Askelpiades, and Ammianos. Students of the classics as well as poets and translators will welcome this collection for the insight and dexterity of its unconventional editor.
Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), poet, critic, and translator, is also noted for his translations from the Chinese and Japanese. Widely prolific, he helped usher in the Beat movement in the 1950s and is widely considered to have invented the idea of San Francisco as a center of literary innovation. David Mulroy is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He is the translator of Early Greek Lyric Poetry and Horace's Odes and Epodes .

Genres: Poetry, Greece, Classics

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist.

He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.

Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic themes and forms.

Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, California, on June 6, 1982. He had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America and overseas.

Reviews

[Steve]

[Nota bene: I have combined the reviews of three books into one and used the same review for each. So if you have read one, you have read all three.]


Meleager brings you his lamp, O Venus,
For it knows how he celebrates you in the dark.


The Greek Anthology is an unusual text with roots in an anthology of epigrams first compiled by Meleager of Gadara in the 1st century BCE and supplemented over the centuries by various editors/compilers until it contained over 4,000 poems of various length and type including epitaphs and prayers.(*) The poems date between the 7th century BCE through the 6th century CE. It is the richest source we have of ancient Greek lyric poetry, as opposed to their more familiar epics, didactic poetry and poetic dramas. The Greek Anthology has a very complicated textual history, not the least reason for which is the fact that many of the sentiments expressed by poems in the collection, particularly of a sexual nature, were not of the sort that soothed Christian spirits. So the text suffered some serious violations at the hands of medieval monks and self-righteous Victorians, among others.

An additional complication is that there are dozens and dozens of translations of selections of poems from the Anthology, and that all these translators have very different ideas of how to render the poems into English. So, one is faced with the problem of deciding which selections and translators one should read. To read the entire anthology would be quite a task, though it is available in English in a five volume bilingual edition by W.R. Paton in the Harvard Loeb series (and therefore in some of the stiffest English imaginable).

After casting about for guidance here and there and then sampling some of the texts, I settled on M.L. West's Greek Lyric Poetry, Burton Raffel's Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments, and Kenneth Rexroth's Poems from the Greek Anthology, at least to begin. These books are very different from each other, nor do they all restrict their selection to the Greek Anthology.(**) But all three give us an interesting glimpse into ancient Greek lyric poetry.

Raffel's Pure Pagan (2004) is a slim volume of selections of "less well known poems and poets" from the 7th century BCE to the 1st century CE, and Raffel has chosen to give the poems a modern face. Though he writes that he neither "embroiders" the work nor puts "words into their mouths," his line breaks, stanza shapes and tendency towards linguistic spareness are modern. Consider, as an extreme example, what he does with the following fragment of Alkaios (also anglicized via Latin as Alcaeus; born c. 620 BCE)

Trees:
All right,
Plant trees.
But first
Plant
Vines.

West, who translates all extant lyric poems dating prior to 450 BCE (excepting the extensive works of Pindar and Bacchylides) in his Greek Lyric Poetry (1993), renders this fragment soberly as

Let the vine be the first fruit-tree you plant: others can wait their turn.

Rather a difference there.(***)

Rexroth, whose fine translations of classic Chinese and Japanese poetry I much appreciate and have reviewed elsewhere, makes his selection only from the Greek Anthology, a book, he assures us in his introduction, that accompanied him everywhere for decades.(4*) An accomplished poet himself, Rexroth states that the classical Greeks and Chinese made him the poet he was. His primary goal in this collection was to create beautiful English poems that were faithful to the meaning of the originals; the complicated metric structure of the elegiac couplets was left aside. Unlike the other two, Rexroth's selection favored the Hellenistic poets over those of the archaic and classical periods.

Though West has the advantage of completeness over both Raffel and Rexroth, within the indicated limits, this advantage is also a drawback. For reading fragment after fragment after fragment results in the same sense of exasperated frustration one feels when one reads the remnants of the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Because they have the luxury of choice, the other two translators can select fragments that mimic some kind of wholeness. Though Raffel provides some background material and some notes of explanation (Rexroth let's them "stand on their own"), West's introduction and notes are notably more informative.

As usual, no perfect choice can be made here, so I purchased the lot. Let's turn the stage over to the poets now.

By Sappho (born between 632 and 612 and died around 570 BCE) - translated by M.L. West

Rich-throned immortal Aphrodite,
scheming daughter of Zeus, I pray you,
with pain and sickness, Queen, crush not my heart,

but come, if ever in the past you
heard my voice from afar and hearkened,
and left your father’s halls and came, with gold

chariot yoked; and pretty sparrows
brought you swiftly across the dark earth
fluttering wings from heaven through the air.

Soon they were here, and you, Blessed Goddess,
smiling with your immortal features,
asked why I’d called, what was the matter now,

what was my heart insanely craving:
“Who is it this time I must cozen
to love you, Sappho? Who’s unfair to you?

“For though she flee, soon she’ll be chasing;
though she refuse gifts, she’ll be giving;
though she love not, she’ll love despite herself.”

Yes, come once more, from sore obsession
free me; all that my heart desires
fulfilled, fulfill—help me to victory!

There are other women poets in the Anthology. One of them wrote a favorite of Rexroth:

By Anyte (early 3rd century BCE) - translated by Kenneth Rexroth

The children have put purple
Reins on you, he goat, and a
Bridle in your bearded mouth.
And they play at horse races
Round a temple where a god
Gazes on their childish joy.

By Anacreon (582 BC – 485 BCE) - translated by M.L. West

He used to wear a rough cloak, pinched in at the waist,
and wooden baubles in his ears, and round his ribs
a hairless cowhide, the unwashed

covering off a cheap shield; and he used to go
with baker-women and with rent-boys on the make,
seeking a phony livelihood.

His neck was often in the stocks or on the rack,
his back flogged with a rawhide whip, his hair and beard
plucked out, the “poor wretch” Artemon.

And now he wears gold ear-rings, rides about in traps,
“Koisyra’s son”, and holds an ivory sunshade up,
as ladylike as anything.

By Krates (I don't know which Krates this is) - translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Time’s fingers bend us slowly
With dubious craftsmanship,
That at last spoils all it forms.

And, finally, a lament common to every time and every place:

By Menecrates (born c. 340 BCE) - translated by Burton Raffel

We all pray for it
Before it comes,
Then blame it
When it arrives.
Old age is a debt
We like to be owed,
Not one we like to collect.


(*) To speak of "it" is misleading. What we have now is a folding together of a number of medieval manuscripts, primary among which are the Planudean Anthology and the Palatine Anthology. The Planudean text is named after the monk Maximus Planudes, who took serious liberties with the Byzantine manuscript which came into his hands. The Palatine Anthology is believed to be the only extant, though partial copy of that Byzantine manuscript, compiled around 1,000 CE by Constantinus Cephalas.

(**) For example, both Raffel and West chose some poems from the three volume Lyra Graeca, but those books are themselves based partially on the Greek Anthology and partially on fragments found elsewhere. I'm not obsessive enough to care if a particular poem comes from the Greek Anthology or not...

(***) West's version gives a fair rendering of the rhythm of the Greek original, whereas Raffel makes no efforts in that direction at all.

(4*) More precisely, he added a handful of poems from the Latin originally intended for a similar volume of Roman poetry, a project he discarded.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/958...

[Edgar Trevizo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me encanta Rexroth como traductor. Su libertad, su pasión, su instinto de poeta. Siempre hace resplandecer lo que traduce. Es inmenso.

[Lynnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful if liberally artful (admitted by Rexroth himself) translations and interpretations. My edition is an incredible first printing paperback in pristine condition, and a gift from my friend that will be cherished forever. It has page illustrations in large, dark blocky abstract style that make the poems come alive.

Speaking of coming alive: many votive dedications and epitaphs are collected here, which makes those and the other, more traditional poetry glow in contrast to each other.

This is the last poem in the quick book:

Zonas: “Pass me the sweet earthenware jug,
Made of the earth that bore me,
The earth that someday I shall bear.”

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rexroth's cuttings from the Greek Anthology. He's interested in the bawdy boast, the invective, the pun. He claims he said these to himself, writing the translations we read, as he hopped trains in the late Twenties. That is a highly epigrammatic process. This is an indelible record of mid-century attitudes toward sex, marriage, comradeship, costuming, aging, and the troubadour spirit.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A broader selection of poetry from the Greek anthology (a lot of it Hellenistic, which is after the "Golden Age" of Greek history, so lots of stuff I hadn't seen). Rexroth's translations of ancient Chinese/Japenese work was good, but this one is great: so incredibly compact, condensed, and human.

While reading it I think I understand why I've spent the last few months reading so much of this ancient Greek poetry--how there's this intense fire burning in it, of life and lust and fresh bodies, and then (usually in less than eight lines): that fire extinguishes itself. There's something incredibly human in the work, which (even though it comes from a defined tradition of artifice) becomes this amazingly beautiful, authentic thing when it's translated in a certain way, since I'm not so much interested in an accurate version as a glorious transformation.

Rexroth mostly passes on my favorites (though Archilochus and Sappho make appearances), and like most of his anthologies, the poets blend together, but there's a kind of beautiful balance that comes from it. They read almost like Haiku but better than any I've seen. His translations are smoother, more balanced than Barnstone even if he doesn't cover nearly as much material, though no one so far has touched to beautiful insanity of Guy Davenport's 7 Greeks.

[Charles JunkChuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definitive translation. These poems and fragments, impressive in their own right, demonstrate how little difference there is between poets who lived, loved, and worked thousands of years ago, and us. These stark, but evocative verses are well served by Rexroth's restrained interpretations. I've read this book too many times to count and always find a new reason to appreciate it.

[ronny · Rating 3 out of 5]

i always love Rexroth translations, so maybe my issue here was the selection: it's as lecherous and raunchy as ancient poets get, but with too little of the enlightened mysticism to balance it out.

[Lynette · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no scholarly critique. I just can't in good conscience give this any higher of a rating lest someone think I'm recommending it. There are a few good poems, but most is far too crass to make it worth it. I did find value in reading this part of who the ancient Greeks were and appreciate even more how similar our modern world really is to theirs. (Of course after reading the introduction I can't trust how much that's purely the case and how much is due to the "translation."

[Rufussenex · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Rexroth's English: his and Waleys's and their use in translation were my seminal influences. It was through them that the possibilities of modern free verse had their first powerful impact. These translations of Greek poetry are fine, but not as impactful as his Chinese translations were to me. A solely personal bias, I know, but ni modo.

[Lightsey]

I was just glancing through this again for class and was reminded what a pleasure this little book is. Frank Greek hedonism (which can be moving, too) + Rexroth's clean momentum (those line breaks!)=everyone ought to read this.

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cool book. Has silly pictures inside it too.

[Bradford · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely small collection of translated and transfigured poetic passages from ancient Greek, Roman, and even Medieval writers that captures both cultural distance and human connections.

[Angelina Tenuta · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rexroth is a terrific, fluid translator, and does great work on the Greek Anthology.