Widely praised for his translations of Boethius and Ariosto, esteemed translator David R. Slavitt here returns to Ovid, once again bringing to the contemporary ear the spirited, idiomatic, audacious charms of this master poet. The love here described is of the anguished, ruinous kind, like a sickness, and Ovid prescribes cures.
Widely praised for his translations of Boethius and Ariosto, esteemed translator David R. Slavitt here returns to Ovid, once again bringing to the contemporary ear the spirited, idiomatic, audacious charms of this master poet. The love here described is of the anguished, ruinous kind, like a sickness, and Ovid prescribes cures.
This is a full-scale commentary devoted to the third book of Ovid's Ars Amatoria. It includes an Introduction, a revision of E. J. Kenney's Oxford text of the book, and detailed line-by-line and section-by-section commentary on the language and ideas of the text. Combining traditional philological scholarship with some of the concerns of more recent critics, both Introduction and commentary place particular emphasis on: the language of the text; the relationship of the book to the didactic, 'erotodidactic' and elegiac traditions; Ovid's usurpation of the lena's traditional role of erotic instructor of women; the poet's handling of the controversial subjects of cosmetics and personal adornment; and the literary and political significances of Ovid's unexpected emphasis in the text of Ars III on restraint and 'moderation'. The book will be of interest to all postgraduates and scholars working on Augustan poetry.
We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. For love is a complex, bewildering, and ecstatic emotion covering a welter of different feelings and moral judgments. Drawing on poetry, fiction, letters, memoirs, and art, and with the aid of a rich array of illustrations, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein explores five of our most enduring fantasies of love: like-minded union, transcendent rapture, selfless giving, obsessive longing, and insatiable desire. Each has had a long and tangled history with lasting effects on how we in the West think about love today. Yet each leads to a different conclusion about what we should strive for in our relationships. If only we could peel back the layers of love and discover its “true” essence. But love doesn’t work like that; it is constructed on the shards of experience, story, and feeling, shared over time, intertwined with other fantasies. By understanding the history of how we have loved, Rosenwein argues, we may better navigate our own tumultuous experiences and perhaps write our own scripts.
Venantius Fortunatus, a master of the short praise poem and a canonical Christian Latin poet, wrote eleven volumes of hymns, epigrams, elegies, and other religious and epistolary verses addressed to kings, bishops, and abbesses. This volume presents for the first time in English translation all of his poetry, apart from a single long saint's life.
Wells argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter. Wells offers a new take on old Pindaric questions: genre, unity of the victory song, tradition, and epinician performance.
Essays and critical writing drawn from a wide-ranging fifty-year career in letters Drawn from a body of essays and reviews written over the course of nearly fifty years, Work to Be Done showcases both the depth and breadth of Bruce Whiteman’s critical work. Widely published across Canada and the United States, Whiteman is an accomplished poet, translator, and scholar, and his broad interests have never been limited to any one subject area. He moves between classical and contemporary literature, and music, book and literary history, shifting seamlessly from the close reading of a poem to the consideration of the life and oeuvre of an artist. In these thirty-four selected essays, Whiteman demonstrates the cohesion of his varied body of work, which ranges from essays on such poets as Sappho, Goethe, Samuel Beckett, P.K. Page, Leonard Cohen and Philip Larkin, to insightful readings of the biographers and translators of such great writers as Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. Work to Be Done is an erudite and eclectic tour of Whiteman’s finest critical investigations.