The Poets’ Translation Series
The object of the editors of this series is to present a number of translations of Greek and Latin poetry and prose, especially of those authors who are less frequently given in English.
This literature has too long been the property of pedagogues, philologists and professors. Its human qualities have been obscured by the wranglings of grammarians, who love it principally because to them it is so safe and so dead.
But to many of us it is not dead. It is more alive, more essential, more human than anything we can find in contemporary English literature. The publication of such classics, in the way we propose, may help to create a higher standard for poetry than that which prevails, and a higher standard of appreciation of the writers of antiquity, who have suffered too long at the hands of clumsy metrists. We do not deny that there are many good translations in English of classical writers—Lang’s Homer and Theokritos, Mackail’s Anthology or Aldington’s Apuleius, for instance; but too often such works are lonely and austerely expensive.
THE POET’S TRANSLATION SERIES will appear first in The Egoist (starting September 1st) and will then be reprinted and issued as small pamphlets, simple and inexpensive, so that none will buy except to read. The translations will be done by poets whose interest in their authors will be neither conventional nor frigid. The translators will take no concern with glosses, notes, or any of the apparatus with which learning smothers beauty. They will endeavor to give the words of these Greek and Latin authors as simply and as clearly as may be. Where the text is confused, they will use the most characteristic version; where obscure, they will interpret.
The first six pamphlets, when bound together, will form a small collection of unhackneyed poetry, too long buried under the dust of pedantic scholarship. They range over a period of two thousand years of literature—a proof of the amazing vitality of the Hellenic tradition.
If this venture has the success its promoters look for, other similar and possibly larger pamphlets will be issued.
1. (Ready September) The complete poems (25) of Anyte of Tegea, now brought together in English for the first time: translated by Richard Aldington. (8 pages) 2d. (2½d. post free).
2. (Ready October) An entirely new version of the poems and new fragments, together with the more important of the old fragments, of Sappho: translated by Edward Storer. (12 pages) 4d (4½d. post free).
3. Choruses from the Rhesos of Euripides: translated by H. D.