The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse
by Christopher Childers
(Penguin Classics, March 2024, 1008 pp., £45)
The Latin poet Horace, whom you might recognize as the most influential lyric poet of all time, wrote the following lines in the second poem of his fourth book of odes (translation mine):
Pindar: whosoever attempts to ape him,
Julus, counts on wings made of wax—those shaped by
Daedalus—who’s doomed to at once baptize some
hyaline ocean.
Rains that gush in rivulets down a mountain,
washing banks away, ripping through the treeline,
boiling, rushing, deep beyond mark or measure—
aye, that is Pindar.
If you are familiar with Horace, you know this is an ambivalent endorsement. Yet even if these lines partially serve to unfairly caricature Pindar (and parody his style), casting him as a blustering foil to the Roman poet’s Callimichean precision, modesty, and care—easy fodder for an ironic recusatio—the awe and admiration are sincere. Good Horatius was an avid student of Greek verse, and, following the promising Neoteric forays of Catullus, saw it as his mission to fully naturalize Archaic Greek meters in Latin. Horace emulated the techniques of several Greek poets (Alcaeus and Sappho in particular), and would certainly have made close study of Pindar. However, despite the occasional pastiche of the elder poet’s high register (see Ode 4.4.), Pindar is the major Greek lyricist whom the Augustan master (of the ode, no less!) explicitly shrunk from seriously imitating. Pindar, the Theban eagle, soars in air so rarified and perilous that it would be death to anyone else.
Horace’s legendizing but tentative attitude toward Pindar has largely—influenced by Horace himself—been the attitude of posterity: fascination and even veneration, but at a distance. Despite being perennially recommended by classicists, often in fanciful terms which rival Horace’s (a favorite, from F.L. Lucas’s Greek Poetry for Everyman: “Pindar’s power….lies in a splendor of phrase and imagery that suggests the gold and purple of a sunset sky”), Pindar has always been more praised than read, more popular as an idea than as a poet.
Nowhere is this truth more evident than in the goofy Restoration fad, pioneered by Abraham Cowley, for “Pindarique Odes”: irregularly metered and rhymed compositions which supposedly imitated the intuitive, inspired looseness of Pindar himself. As anyone who has read Pindar knows, this perception could not have been further from the truth—while the Boeotian is prone to rapid shifts in thought, his triadic choral form is as consistent, complexly patterned, and disciplined as a Bach fugue (for proof of this, see Elroy Bundy’s seminal Studia Pindarica).
Not everyone was taken in by such unscholarly fantasy, of course. In 1712, Richard Steele wrote dryly in The Spectator:
I saw Pindar walking all alone, no one daring to accost him till Cowley joyn’d himself to him, but, growing weary of one who almost walk’d him out of breath, he left him for Horace and Anacreon, with whom he seemed infinitely delighted.
Even in this playful rebuke, we hear the old Horatian song: “Pindar is untouchable.” And indeed, we may ask, what poet since has managed to capture something of the Pindaric spark? His coeval Aeschylus has a language of comparable strangeness and grandeur, as do Marlowe and Milton, Greek readers both; Classicist D.S. Carne-Ross has argued (in his Pindar) that Hölderlin possessed the true spirit of his idol. On the whole, however, we find that despite his hefty canonical status, Pindar possesses bewilderingly few descendants, contributing little to subsequent poetic practice other than the (now hopelessly inclusive) genre of “Ode.” Perhaps on Horace’s advice, few have dared to scale the eagle’s heights, while those who have dared have mostly embarrassed themselves (need I mention Boris Johnson’s faux-Pindaric recitation at the 2012 Olympics?).
There is no doubt however that the absence of Pindar’s influence can be attributed not so much to intimidation as to alienation. One would think that the figure widely acknowledged as Greece’s greatest lyric poet would be required reading for every schoolchild. Instead, he is, almost uniquely in literature, as unknown as he is prestigious. Why?
Frankly, because he is forbidding. Not only is Pindar’s language dense and adventurous, his thought patterns obscure, his forms byzantine, and his local references overwhelming, but the genre in which he has been by far best preserved—the Epinician, or Victory Ode—is a highly context-dependent, culturally specific genre which was only popular for two generations (Pindar’s Archaic ritualism was already becoming old-fashioned in his own day as Athenian Classicism began to dawn) and has never been revived since. His odes, written for specific parties celebrating specific athletic victories at the panhellenic games, full of arcane personal, regional, and mythological references, deeply pious, and intended, in their final form, to be sung and choreographed, are about as close to the modern understanding of the lyric as a leaf of illuminated plainsong is to a pop song. Sappho, who wrote simple, intensely emotional, angst-filled lyrics of homoerotic desire, is far more readily suited to the contemporary palate. Many people, even serious lovers of poetry, who give Pindar a shot based on his reputation come away feeling bored and bewildered. Contra highly enthused classicists, Voltaire gives us the common man’s view of Pindar: “Stuff everyone’s supposed to praise / and nobody can comprehend.” If only Voltaire had known about John Ashbery!
Those who really know him (i.e. classicists) love Pindar. Those who don’t tend to be put off. The question arises: must one be able to read ancient Greek dialects and be conversant in the history and social mores of 5th century Greece to appreciate this poet? If so, we might as well wash our hands of Pindar immediately and leave him to the scholars. If a poet is not universal, he is not great, and if he is not great, he is only of historical interest. Yet the canon insists: Pindar is great; and not just great—the greatest lyric poet of the greatest and most foundational culture of Western civilization. This claim merits investigation.
Let us admit at once that athletes and athletic games from well over two thousand years ago do not matter much to us. As for the telling of myths (the other principal content of Pindar’s odes), we have heard most of them before elsewhere. If Pindar’s poems are to intrigue us, they must do so on other merits—lyric merits. Firstly, how they are told—what is valuable about the language and the form? Secondly, what they signify—what are the ideas, emotions, and attitudes expressed, and why are they valuable? Let us let these questions ring in our heads while we place them in the background for a moment—in Pindaric fashion, we are shifting gears so that we may return with greater force.
***
In the contemporary world of letters, there are very few accomplishments which can guarantee artistic immortality. If any 21st century poet asserted, with Ovid, that he had written a work which “the corruption of time will not destroy” he would be dismissed as woefully naive. This year, however, Christopher Childers may have produced just such a work. His gargantuan tome of translations, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, the Hesperidean fruit of fourteen years of labor, is not only magnificent poetry, but, objectively speaking, a herculean, historically significant achievement. For the first time in English, a vast proportion of extant Classical short poetry has appeared in a single book by a single hand, translated into metrical, rhyming verse.
This would be impressive enough, but let us tread deeper into astonishment—for every single Greco-Roman meter Childers has assigned an English equivalent, and then consistently translated every single poem from its original meter into its determined equivalent. What is dactylic hexameter in Greek appears (with some noted exceptions) as blank verse in English; what is composed in elegiac couplets in Latin appears as heroic couplets in English. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: from Glyconic tercets to Sapphics to Phalaecian hendecasyllables, Childers has assigned an English alter ego for them all.
The result of all this prosodic rigor is a panoramic vista of Classical literature which was once available to classicists alone. From Archilochus to Martial, a period spanning 800 years and two titanic cultures, the reader can now not only track the development and popularity of various poetic forms and genres, but observe how poets have inspired and referenced one another, maintained, revolutionized or subverted conventions, and developed a centuries-long conversation which Childers has likened, beautifully, to a vast Platonic dialogue.
Finally, the fifty-ton cherry on top: Childers provides thorough endnotes for every single poem, and insightful, convivial introductions to every single poet and period discussed. Read cover to cover, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse offers the reader an unprecedented and shockingly complete grasp of the most influential lyric corpus in the Western world. This is not a book one should simply “check out.” This is a book to own and treasure all one’s life, shelved beside one’s preferred Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Collected Shakespeare. This book is one of the major literary events of this decade.
Of course, the entire effort would be a mortifying failure if Childers was not a brilliant poet and technician in his own right. While his occasional, shamelessly square use of modern lingo or anachronistic phrases can make one wince, one is far more often charmed by the clarity, melodiousness, playfulness, and versatility of his language, which can modulate from Tennysonian dignity to Ginsbergian crassness as needed without breaking a sweat.
That being said, while Childers is a poet for all seasons and a meticulously faithful translator, his own personality cannot help but shine through in places, and one gets the delightful sense that to every ancient voice has been gifted an additional dose of the wry wit, mischievousness, and merriment which is his natural element. As one would expect, then, Childers’s finest translations are of poets who match his own sparkling, impish temperament, like Ovid and Anacreon. I refuse to believe anyone could improve on Childers’s romping rendition of Anacreon 417:
Why so cagey, Thracian filly,
………….glancing at me, all side-eyed?
Why do you insist on running?
………….You don’t think that I can ride?
I could slide the bridle on you
………….easy, take you for a spin,
maneuver you around the turnposts,
………….make you gallop, rein you in.
As it is, you munch the meadows,
………….free and frisky as you please,
lacking anyone to ride you
………….With a jockey’s expertise.
To produce a translation that sounds so good and conveys so well the spirit of the original is a kind of genius. I cannot help but grin ear to ear while reading it. Here is a perfect example of Childers’s technical mastery—the immaculate trochaic tetrameter (the extra beat on “maneuver” is a purposeful sonic joke), the effortless rhymes, the resonances between words like “cagey” and “filly,” “slide” and “bridle” “frisky” and “jockey,” the double alliteration in the third quatrain—it is all simply a delight for the ear.
Some might argue, however, that it is even more impressive when a translator is able to excel outside of his element. Of all the hundreds of poets in such a wide-spanning collection, there is one who would be the obvious white whale for anyone: Pindar (“Don’t even try it!” heckles Horace). No one is so grand, serious, difficult, or formally complex. No one is so thoroughly un-modern. Like Abraham Cowley, Childers delights in the familiar company of Anacreon and Horace; unlike Cowley, he is also, remarkably, able to hold pace with the mighty Olympian.
Indeed, Pindar has actually been Childers’s intended conquest since the beginning. What ended up turning into this monumental fourteen-year project originally started as an email from Childers to Penguin, asking if they might be interested in a new translation of Pindar. During his labors, Childers wrote a sharp essay for Literary Matters entitled “Translating Pindar,” in which he gives both a thorough explanation of the multifarious difficulties presented by Pindar’s work and a spirited defense of the poetry through a close reading of the seventh Nemean ode. He concludes the essay with the following words, which I believe perfectly articulate the key to both his own interest in this poet and the interest which we should take in him:
Is Pindar’s difficult and aristocratic cosmos, that orderly arrangement which he both buttresses and sings into being through the complicated structures of his odes, worth engaging with on its own terms, precisely because it is different from our own? Those glimpses of cosmic unanimity, as well as the vision of graciousness in which the wheels of necessity and the gears of economy are lubricated with a large-hearted generosity and an impulse toward praise—might this have something to offer our cynical, materialistic age? Even, no, especially, if we don’t believe in his vision and never will, we might still be able to believe it for the duration of an ode, and find in Pindar’s poems a temporary relief from alienation and pessimism. That this vision is so difficult to recover, for reader and translator alike, may ultimately be the best argument for its value to both.
When, as moderns, we begin to read Pindar, we must not falter by mistaking the forest for the trees. We must not feel overwhelmed by the endless parade of names, accomplishments, and mythological anecdotes, but Platonically look past them to the spirit of the thing, the underlying idea, and then work our way back to the concrete particulars once we have become invested. If we do this, we shall learn to see the blazing light which is at the core of all the poems, which illuminates and sanctifies them, and which elevates their mundane subject matter to cosmic significance. Pindar is valuable to us chiefly because of how he sees the world, which is so far superior to how most of us see it. He emanates infinite gratitude, infinite enthusiasm for human beauty and glory, yet also fiercely embraces sorrow, loss, and uncertainty as part of the mortal bargain, and stresses always both the reality and necessity of human limitation. He is, in the most literal and unpatronizing sense, wholesome—the most wholesome poet we have. Beside the brilliant Grecian sunlight of Pindar, beaming with his archaic smile, the boasting, bloviating Whitman is but a pale satellite. The concluding triad of Pythian 8 is Pindar’s most famous passage, as well as the passage which best illustrates his existential thesis. In Childers’s translation, it runs:
Strophe:
Onto four bodies from above
with violent thoughts you pounced, and strove.
For them, Pytho bestowed
no happy homecoming, no wreath;
no mother’s tears of joy, no welcome laughter flowed
at their return. They slink
down alleyways instead, and shrink
clear of their foes, clamped in disaster’s teeth.
Antistrophe:
But one who gains some new success
on wings of soaring manliness
and splendid hope takes flight
toward future deeds, for he has caught
a passion beyond wealth. In no time, man’s delight
bursts into bloom, but just
as fast collapses in the dust
shaken by a breeze, a shift in thought.
Epode:
One day we live. What is someone? What is no one? A dream
of a shadow, man; no more. But when the heavens shed their gleam,
our life grows sweet and light shines over us.
Dear Mother Aegina, safeguard this city’s
voyage of freedom, with Zeus and with King Aeacus,
and Peleus, and noble Telamon, and with Achilles.
In the strophe, we see that even in an ode commissioned to celebrate a wrestling triumph, Pindar does not neglect to remember the losers and grieve for them. He sings of their suffering not to guilt-trip his client, but to enable him to better appreciate his own victory—but for the grace of the gods, but for the beautiful strength and skill granted him by his illustrious ancestors, his fate could have been like theirs. Their despairing shadow is what gives his own light preciousness and brilliance.
In the antistrophe, Pindar insists that the feeling of victory, which begets hopes for future victories, is a “passion beyond wealth.” Indeed, as he says many times elsewhere, the joy and glory of great achievement is when human beings come closest to the gods. And yet, Pindar warns, this blooming delight may collapse into dust at the slightest provocation. The insight here is not simply that life is precarious and fortune fickle—it is that joy and glory are contingent upon this being the case.
In the epode, which Carne-Ross called “the greatest lines in Greek,” we begin with an utterance which sounds similar to immortal lines from Calderon and Shakespeare, but Pindar is the great original. A man is not so much as a shadow, as Plato might have later argued, he is merely a dream of a shadow—utterly unreal, utterly insignificant. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Pindar stared Nihilism in the face. And yet, he says, and yet: “when the heavens shed their gleam, our life grows sweet and light shines over us.”
Here we are to understand light, just as we are to understand the gods themselves, as being equally figurative and literal. When the gods see fit to illuminate our lives with beauty, glory, and victory, our meaningless existences become not only worth living, but godlike themselves. But also, simply the beauty and warmth of the sun itself shining down on us ought to be enough to convince us that life is worth living. This reminds me of one of my favorite lines of Pindar, the first line of the first Olympian ode: “Of all things, water is best.” The richness of that! You could not come up with a more austere yet life-affirming sentence.
Having himself just attained a great victory over the forces of darkness, Pindar does not drop the mic, but redirects momentum, and closes with a benediction for the victorious athlete’s city and a recitation of the great heroes of Aegina: Aeacus, Peleus, Telamon, Achilles. As in Milton, one has the suspicion that the sensuous thrill of reciting these proper nouns is their principal justification—the greatness we savor of the glorious dead can practically be tasted on the tongue. But Pindar is no mere aesthete. He pronounces the names of the dead not only to inspire the living, but to call up the shades of the underworld to bear witness to their descendant’s glory. Time, for Pindar, is cyclical (not, contra later classical humanism, linear and progressive) and great deeds in one generation beget great deeds in another. The living and the dead are one family, one divine garden in the process of seeding, sprouting, blossoming, dying, and fertilizing, fed by the light of the gods.
If we have now begun to get a sense of Pindar’s content, it remains to investigate his formal qualities. Looking at Childers’s translation above, we notice very little of the serpentine syntax and linguistic compression associated with this difficult poet. Part of that has to do with the passage in question, but largely it has to do with Childers’s conscious efforts to, in his own words, “domesticate” Pindar, sacrificing puzzling details and original stylistic choices in order to make the translation idiomatic and accessible while still maintaining fealty to the text. Given Pindar’s forbidding otherness and persistent unpopularity, this is a completely reasonable decision, but it provides a good case in point for why we must possess (and read) multiple translations of the same poet. If you are principally interested in Pindar’s verbal inventiveness and archaic bizarreness, you will find substantial hints of it in Childers’s renditions, but you will ultimately have to look elsewhere.
On the other hand, if you are interested in getting a sense of what a choral ode actually looks like, Childers is your man. Given the sad fact that Greek meters cannot be replicated in English (because our meters are stress-based rather than duration-based), and given the fact that Ancient Greek poetry does not rhyme, Childers nevertheless does an admirable job of approximating Pindar’s metrical and stanzaic complexity in English, which to my knowledge has never been done before.
Consider the choral triad quoted above. The strophe consists of a polymetrical stanza which runs, line by line: tetrameter, tetrameter, trimeter, tetrameter, hexameter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter. In other words, it has a metrical scheme of 4-4-3-4-6-3-4-5. Then, on top of that, Childers employs a rhyme scheme which runs: AABCBDDC. What is extraordinary about this is that, new rhymes aside, Childers is able to replicate this exact pattern in the next stanza, the antistrophe, just as Pindar would have done, before inventing a brand-new complex stanza for the concluding epode—again, as Pindar would have done. It would be hard enough to compose an original poem of such formal complexity. It would be harder still to maintain this complex triadic pattern five times in a row (a total of fifteen stanzas), which Childers does. The fact that Childers is doing all this while also being faithful to the notoriously difficult Pindaric Greek is nigh-flabbergasting. This is virtuosity played out over several degrees of magnitude.
If Childers had been satisfied to translate a few odes and call it a day, he would already have covered himself with glory and become emblazoned into the history of Pindaric translation. However, one of the very greatest gifts Childers offers the reader is that he also translates some of Pindar’s fragmentary deep cuts—i.e., poems which are not odes to athletic victories. In doing so, he performs a crucial service to Anglophone letters, not only because these fragments are so rarely translated, but because their revelation utterly shatters the distorted image of Pindar as a zealous sports fan, and reveals as never before the dizzying, genre-spanning range and all-encompassing genius of the greatest Greek lyricist. While woefully incomplete, these shards of hymns, dithyrambs, paeans, and dirges provide tantalizing glimpses of a gigantic talent whose equally gigantic oeuvre, like those of the Athenian tragedians, has been mostly lost to oblivion.
We learn from these fragments that Pindar himself anticipated the intimate, poignant charm of Horace, as in Scolia 124:
Dear Thrasybulus, here: I’m sending you this little craft
of lovely song for after you have eaten. May it sweeten
your spirited camaraderie and vivify each draft
of Bacchic grapes and Attic cups, and goad you to keep going.
for when the tedious weight of human pain begins to strain
out of the heart, the seas turn gold and all alike go rowing
easily through abundance to a beach of make believe….
He anticipated the sensuous, pastoral panoramas of Theocritus, as in Threnoi 129:
………….And while night overshadows
the upper world, the sun shines on the lower
………….with its full power,
and there, in red-rose-raddled meadows,
souls of the righteous have their residence
among the cool shade-canopies
of trees loaded with golden fruit, and trees
………….of frankincense;
and there they take their leisure,
some horseback-riding, some in training, some
absorbed in games or dice, while others strum
………….the lyre for their pleasure,
and flourishing takes root and blooms
………….amidst all this,
spreading an unadulterated bliss,
………….and sweet perfumes
suffuse the lovely landscape, for they never tire
………….Of sacrifice,
and mingle every kind of spice
at the gods’ altars while each beaconing fire
………….Kindles still higher.
He dabbles in mystical poetry, as in Threnoi 131b:
for over every mortal frame
indomitable Death has staked his claim;
still, there’s a likeness of our life which keeps
alive, and is the only thing the gods
have given of themselves. It sleeps
while we’re awake, but, when the body nods,
in dream on dream it renders clear
the judgment, harsh or sweet, that’s drawing near.
And he (perhaps unwittingly) perfects the epigram, as in his famous fragment:
What is god?
What isn’t?
A pithier statement of Pantheism has yet to be written. I hope that all of these examples demonstrate not only the value of Pindar, but the loveliness and finesse of Childers’s translations. If Childers had gotten his original wish, and produced a translation of Pindar’s odes, it would have been a must-have for all lovers of poetry. The fact that he has given us more of Pindar than his odes, and, oh yes, that’s right, a panoramic view of all Greco-Roman lyric, is something for which the history of civilization owes him a debt of gratitude. And if I, on an exponentially smaller scale, have accomplished anything here, I hope it is that I have encouraged you to not only purchase Childers’s book, but to look at Pindar specifically with fresh eyes. With any luck, future generations will find that this forgotten master’s poetry, like a draught of cold water in the blazing Theban sun, can nourish and strengthen as few others can—detoxifying us, at least temporarily, of our modern sicknesses, and enabling us to feel for a moment the ferocious beauty and dignity of being human in the world.