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Title: The Homeric Hymns; A Verse Translation by Homer (attributed to), Thelma Sargent ISBN: 0-393-00788-X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 1975 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Nice work if you can get it!
Comment: I found the translations included in this book beautiful and clear. A good example that narrative poems can also be translated in verse as contrasted to prose, preserving rhythm and imagery. A brief and precise introduction completes the work by helping the reader into the context of the poems and offering a very short but lucid discussion of Greek meter for those who like me can't read Greek. I just pity so elegant a book being less than 100 pages (but this probably contributes even more to its elegance, I acknowledge) and not having found the translation of Theocritus' Idylls by the same Thelma Sargent.
Rating: 5
Summary: Really beautiful
Comment: I found "The Homeric Hymns" the most satisfying version of these ancient myths I have read; far superior to modern prose retellings. Thelma Sargent's elegant translations of these poems inspire a great sense of the sacred. The longer poems, especially "To Demeter" and "To Hermes" also develop a sense of the personalities of the gods. Those who love Homer's epics will also love these short poems, even if scholarship has taken the honor of authorship from him.
Rating: 5
Summary: But I will remember you in another song too.
Comment: After reading the Loeb translation of the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, I was inclined to look askance on this slim little volume by Thelma Sargent. Upon opening the cover, however, I found I had been mistaken. Not only are these verse translations of short invocations and hymns to the Greek Gods and Godesses lovely and effecting (to which I will give credit where credit is due to Homer,an unlikely but romantic notion,or whichever ancient bard had the presence of mind to create them), they manage to be quite readable as well (credit for which I am willing to divide up between said bard and Thelma Sargent). The hymns are very straightforeward, utilizing in conjunction with the familiar stories of the Gods and Godesses, imagery common to the times and people for which they were written. Taking this alone into consideration, their beauty is impressive; rather like poetry invoking a Goddess to be present in your daily coffee making and data processing. Then again, maybe not, to have survived two and a half centuries, they would have to be pretty good little poems. I found the Hymns to Demeter, Delian Apollo, and the Mother of the Gods particularly elegant. It is from some of these hymns that we get our primary source material for some of our knowledge of Greek mythology. It is interesting to me, who was weaned on English re-tellings of these same myths, to read them in, at least closer to, their origional form. They are much deeper, the language much more sweeeping, than I had ever imagined- like the Psalms or Song of Solomon. We don't often think of those well-worn myths as religious tales. The way (I guess I mean the words and rythms)in which they were written, and then translated in this edition, makes the fact that they are religious texts decidedly apparant. It was, if not mind-blowing, than at least mind-stretching and intriguing to have them presented in this way.
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Title: Metamorphoses (Oxford World's Classics) by Ovid, A. D. Melville, E. J. Kenney ISBN: 019283472X Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Hesiod's Theogony (Focus Classical Library) by Hesiod, Richard S. Caldwell ISBN: 0941051005 Publisher: Focus Publishing / R. Pullins & Co Pub. Date: 01 June, 1987 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Theogony, Works and Days by Hesiod, M. L. West ISBN: 0192839411 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 1999 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: A Short Guide to Classical Mythology by Gordon MacDonald Kirkwood ISBN: 086516309X Publisher: Bolchazy Carducci Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides/Alcestis/Medea/Helen/Iphigenia at Aulis (The New Classical Canon) by Ruby Blondell, Mary-Kay Gamel, Bella Zweig, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz ISBN: 0415907748 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: December, 1998 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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