Pure Pagan: Burton Raffel brings the ancients to life

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	• Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments (Modern Library Classics) Modern Library, 2005 - 112 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The sad, spiritual poetry of Ancient Greece

"I hate poems that go on & on", writes Callimachus, an ancient Greek whose poetry has been translated and compiled in this anthology, along with the work of other bards both familiar and obscure, and his is a credo which the Greeks seem to have lived up to admirably: the poems here represented possess an extraordinary power and descriptive beauty despite their extreme, often jarring brevity. Take the poetry of Alkaios:

Boy:

Boy:
Wine

and

Truth

Or Alkman:

The thread runs thin

The need runs hard

Hard.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Greek's lyrics are their timelessness and universality. The Greeks were a people evidently much preoccupied with death, and the transitory nature of all things: thus a large number of their poems and fragments are comprised of poignant elegies and "epitaphs".

Plato:

I am a drowned man's tomb/there is a farmer's.
Death waits for us all/ whether at sea or on land.

Anonymous:

"I'm dead, but waiting for you/and you'll wait for someone/the darkness waits for everyone, it makes no distinctions"

Yet the writing of the Greeks could also be marvelously comic and erotic:

A boy bent to drape flowers on his stepmothers grave/thinking that death had changed her/but the stone toppled and killed him/Stepsons! Be wary even when they're dead!

"We'll be four, each with his woman/eight's too many for one keg of wine/Go tell Aristus the keg I bought/is only half-full, a gallon short, maybe two...hurry!
They're coming at five.

Many of the Greek's poems are also heartbreakingly human.

Alkaios:

Friend's? My friends are nothing/And I weep for them, and for me.

Philodemus:

I came through the rain, soaked/dodging my husband/and now we sit and do nothing,neither talk/nor sleep as lovers ought to sleep/

As the title attests, many of these poems are "fragments": consequently their language and style is at times rough and awkward.

Again, again/pigs whip up/ muck, mud, slop, again

Yet ultimately this anthology, despite a few crude temple scrawls, is littered throughout with magnificent gems of literature, providing, without the use of annotations or footnotes of any sort, but through their own words, an incredibly fresh and fascinating glimpse into the lives of an artistic and philosophical people who, though physically vanished, will endure forever in the treasures they left behind.

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Misses the Magic

'Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments.' Selected and Translated by Burton Raffel. Introduction by Guy Davenport. New York: The Modern Library, 2004. Hardcover. 81 pp.

Although this book certainly has some fine things in it, and although it comes with an extremely interesting Introduction by Guy Davenport, for me it seems somehow to miss the magic. There is a freshness and clarity of sensibility to these early poems, a feeling that they are coming to us from the dawn of the race, that Raffel just doesn't seem to have captured. He also seems to have missed a lot of the joy.

Vastly superior, in my opinion, are the renderings given by Kenneth Rexroth in his 'Poems from the Greek Anthology,' and there are some who feel that in this book Rexroth gave us the best poetry he ever wrote. My own copy is the Ann Arbor Paperback first edition of 1962, a superbly produced book, sewn and on high quality paper, that includes a series of powerful woodcut illustrations by Geraldine Sakall which greatly add to the impact of the poems. A new edition appeared in 1999 as 'Poems from the Greek Anthology: Expanded Edition.' Introduction by David Mulroy. Translated by Kenneth Rexroth (ISBN 0472086081), though whether it includes the original illustrations I don't know.

Three other editions that are well worth looking at by anyone interested in this early poetry are 'Greek Lyrics' by Richmond Lattimore (ISBN 0226469441) 1960; 'Greek Lyric - An Anthology in Translation' by Andrew M. Miller (ISBN 0872202917) 1996; and 'The Greek Anthology' by Peter Jay (ISBN 0140442855) 1981. This last is a huge Penguin anthology of 440 pages and contains work of varying quality by a large number of translators including Rexroth and other notables.

Fuller information about these books can be found by simply typing in the relevant ISBN number in the Amazon search box, but I think that anyone who reads them will have to agree that, despite their various excellences, Rexroth remains The King.

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Nice collection of Greek fragments

This volume of Greek poetry is a great find. If you have even the slightest interest in ancient Greece, this book is indispensible. Essentially a collection of short poems--mostly epitaphs, inscriptions, and fragments of otherwise long-lost authors--Pure Pagan is moving, hilarious, and always enjoyable.

My only complaint is a very small one. In the introduction, Guy Davenport makes note of the hundreds of fragments left over from the Hellenic world--so why is this collection so short? What's here is so enjoyable I was left wanting much, much more.

Highly recommended.

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Pure Pagan: Burton Raffel brings the ancients to life

First of all, this book has the greatest title ever. Guy Davenport didn't seem to like it, though; in his otherwise fantastic introduction he subtly pokes fun at it. But I find it a great choice for the collection. Burton Raffel is one of my favorite translators; his "Don Quijote" and "Gargantua and Pantagruel" translations are the only ones for me. So I was very happy to discover this, a collection of Raffel translations of ancient Greek lyric and epigrammatic poetry spanning from the 7th Century BCE to the 1st Century CE. I'm sure there are some dilettantes out there who will quibble that some of the poems are not "exactly" translated, but I'm not one of them. Raffel makes it clear in his preface that he did not want to produce a literal translation, and so much the better for the poems themselves. The effect is, rather than a stuffy tome of exact translations, a little book filled with the wit and wonder of these long-forgotten bards.

Several poets are spotlighted, most represented by a few lines of their surviving poetry. The depressing part is that the majority of their work is lost. Raffel has a brief bio for each poet in the back of the book; most of the bios state either "No reliable data" or "Such and such was a famous poet. None of his work survives." And that's the heart of it. The deeper one gets into the study of the ancient world, the more fully one understands how MUCH has been lost. It's not only sad, it's despicable. And I'm sure we all know what religious group to blame for the loss...

"Pure Pagan" is filled with lines that stick in your brain. There's Meleager, who taught his muse "to run on barbed feet," Antipater of Sidon, who in his poem to Ares claims that the god of war wants "trophies hacked by the sword," Callimachus with his nihilistic poem on the fact that there is no afterlife (yet "meat is cheap down here"), Menecrates with his poem on old age: "Old age is a debt/We like to be owed/Not one we like to collect." There are also a wealth of anonymous epigrams, no less insightful or meaningful for their anonymity.

Guy Davenport's introduction is one of the best I've read. In just a few pages he brings the ancient Greeks to life, recreating the milieu in which these poems were created and appreciated. I've read entire books on the ancient world which didn't convey the detail and enthusiasm that Davenport provides. I've yet to read his own collection of ancient Greek poetry translations, "7 Greeks," but I've already ordered it.

I first read this book on a rainy day, a bottle of wine by my side. I couldn't imagine a better atmosphere. These poets speak across the ages to us, through the centuries of change, death, and destruction, and they sound very much alive. In today's mediated, euthanized, Christian Right-ruled times, perhaps we need a "Pure Pagan" message from the depthless past more than ever.

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WHAT BECOMES A CLASSIC MOST?

Simplicity can go a long way and a few well-chosen words can carry great weight. This seems to have been the idea behind Greek lyric poetry. In some cases, an entire poem is hardly more than a sentence, and that suffices. The poems are less anchored in image than idea. If the reader is looking a progenitor of modern Imagism, it isn't here. What the reader will find are philosophic musings on life, death, love and other always timely topics.

reviews: page 1, 2

?For there is indeed something we can call the spirit of ancient Greece?a carefully tuned voice that speaks out of the grave with astonishing clarity and grace , a distinctive voice that, taken as a whole, is like no other voice that has ever sung on this earth.?
?BURTON RAFFEL, from his Preface

For centuries, the poetry of Homer, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Sappho, and Archilochus has served as one of our primary means of connecting with the wholly vanished world of ancient Greece. But the works of numerous other great and prolific poets?Alkaios, Meleager, and Simonides, to name a few?are rarely translated into English , and are largely unknown to modern readers. In Pure Pagan, award-winning translator Burton Raffel brings these and many other wise and witty ancient Greek writers to an English-speaking audience for the first time, in full poetic flower. Their humorous and philosophical ruminations create a vivid portrait of everyday life in ancient Greece ?and they are phenomenally lovely as well.

In short, sharp bursts of song, these two-thousand-year-old poems speak about the timeless matters of everyday life:
Wine (Wine is the medicine / To call for, the best medicine / To drink deep, deep)
History (Not us: no. / It began with our fathers, / I?ve heard).
Movers and shakers (If a man shakes loose stones / To make a wall with / Stones may fall on his head / Instead)
Old age (Old age is a debt we like to be owed / Not one we like to collect)
Frankness (Speak / As you please / And hear what can never / Please).
There are also wonderful epigrams (Take what you have while you have it: you?ll lose it soon enough. / A single summer turns a kid into a shaggy goat) and epitaphs (Here I lie, beneath this stone, the famous woman who untied her belt for only one man).

The entrancing beauty, humor, and piercing clarity of these poems will draw readers into the Greeks? journeys to foreign lands, their bacchanalian parties and ferocious battles, as well as into the more intimate settings of their kitchens and bedrooms. The poetry of Pure Pagan reveals the ancient Greeks? dreams, their sense of humor, sorrows, triumphs, and their most deeply held values, fleshing out our understanding of and appreciation for this fascinating civilization and its artistic legacy.

From the Hardcover edition.

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