Love and death: Greek and Roman poetry

Readers and translators have for millennia returned to these poems over and over again. In this course we will read them as modern readers but will also use others’ translations so that we can read not in but through translation.

Each class will situate some poems in the poet’s work and in the translations he or she has inspired, agreeing with Horace that these form a body of work that is ‘more enduring than bronze’ but one that is mobile, shimmeringly various and challenging. Each poem demands and rewards translation by us, now.

There are many classic and contemporary versions of our texts and comparing them will be a central activity, so do browse widely and bring to class any that you have found engaging. There will be time in each class for proposals of what other works by the poet we should read together.