The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius

(Paperback)

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The Roman poet Propertius is best known as the writer who perfected the Latin love elegy, a technical as much as a psychological and cultural feat. Propertius has been admired for both his metrical genius and the modernity of his narrative flow. Many of the poems here pay tribute to Cynthia, Propertius's romantic obsession, but the scope of these 107 elegies is broad. Propertius's poetry offers a fascinating look into life in the Augustan age, addressing social, political, and historical subjects. A contemporary of Virgil and Horace, Propertius has influenced scores of poets - from Ovid to Housman to Pound. His poetry appears here for the first time in a dual-language edition, with the translations facing the original Latin. Rendered into English by a poet who is also one of the nation's pre-eminent Propertius experts, the volume brings Propertius's difficult mix of vernacular and high literary allusion into contemporary language

Reviews

Winner of the 2005 National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association "One very particular modern American poet was famously taken with the Umbrian's lively, pompous, eloquent, pedantic, subtle and comic qualities--what Katz calls his "willful strangeness" and "rough beauty"--namely Ezra Pound. It is a fascinating exercise to compare Katz's sturdily faithful version [to Pound's]."--Paul Cartledge, Sunday Telegraph

Author Bio

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, art critic, and curator. He is the author of "Charm", translations from the Latin of book I of the elegies of Sextus Propertius, as well as eight books of original poetry.