After Callimachus
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 Greeks and Romans, 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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The delightful fifth book from poet and critic Burt (Advice from the Lights) brings the ancient poet Callimachus, respected by later Greeks and Romans, to 21st-century audiences. Burt's contemporary translations and adaptations musically and playfully build on Callimachus's themes. Love, desire, tyranny, and death, meet technology, pop music, bigotry, and politics. Epigrams ignite with political urgency as they meet contemporary narratives: "Every time I go home there's a monument/ to a man whose culpable indifference/ sent my peers to their early graves,/ a glib smiler, a bad dad who deserves infamy" ("Epigram 8"). Burt finds pathos in parallels, expanding the world of the ancient Greeks in unexpected ways: "As in Hamlet, but harmless,/ I put the ear-infection medicine drop/ by drop into my baby's ear./ Then my baby awoke. The horses of Poseidon/ did not thrash so hard,/ nor did the god of the sea feel half so helpless,/ nearly choked with pointless fear." Burt engages deeply and originally with Callimachus, and the result is a wonderfully rich collection that reveals how the past can cast new light on the present.