The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, edited by Christopher Childers,
afterword by Glenn W. Most (Penguin, 2023)

Chris Childers’s Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, over a decade in the making, is a remarkable achievement by any standard. Its range, authority and ambition places it in an entirely different category from most popular anthologies. Aside from its sheer size – running to nearly 1,000 pages in my hardback edition – there are four distinctive features of the book. The first two go together: Childers has made every one of the English translations, of over eighty individual poets and many hundreds of poems, himself, and almost all his translations are into metrical, usually rhyming, English verse of a broadly traditional kind. The third feature explains the sheer heft of the thing: the volume also contains a massive 320 pages of detailed endnotes in addition to brief introductory essays to each section. The fourth feature is evaluative: the project amounts to an interpretation of the classical lyric tradition that often differs in shape and detail from existing accounts, whether scholarly or popular. Anyone with a serious interest in how classical poetry can be presented to the general reader will want to have a copy.

The last of these features – its element of critical originality – will be the least obvious to most of the book’s intended audience, but it is arguably the most important. Any fresh assembly of a canon is a critical intervention, and this is quite a striking one. Two ...