Harvard University Press - POETRY

Songs of Ourselves

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Joan Shelley Rubin
In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.
Paperback October 2009

Recapturing a Homeric Legacy

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Casey Due
Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [= 822], known to Homeric scholars as the Venetus A, is the oldest complete text of the Iliad in existence, meticulously crafted during the tenth century ce. Two thousand years later, technology offers a new opportunity to rediscover this scholarship and better understand the epic that is the foundation of Western literature.
Hardcover August 2009

Hippota Nestor

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Douglas G. Frame
This book is about the Homeric figure Nestor. This study is important because it reveals a level of deliberate irony in the Homeric poems that has hitherto not been suspected, and because Nestor’s role in the poems, which is built on this irony, is a key to the circumstances of the poems’ composition. Interpreted in the context of the Indo-European twin myth, Nestor’s role clearly points beyond itself to the key question in Homeric studies: the circumstances of the poems’ composition.
Paperback August 2009

The New Sappho on Old Age

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Ellen Greene
Edited by Marilyn Skinner
The world has long wished for more of Sappho’s poetry, which exists mostly in tantalizing fragments. This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of a newly recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. Using different approaches, the contributions demonstrate how the “New Sappho” can be appreciated as a complete, gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging.
Paperback August 2009

Latin Poetry

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Jacopo Sannazaro
Translated by Michael C. J. Putnam
Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530) is most famous for having written, in Italian, the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this early work, Sannazaro devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Vergil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), which earned him the title of “the Christian Vergil,” he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an innovative adaption of the eclogue form. This volume contains the first complete English translation of all of Sannazaro’s poetry in Latin, accompanied by extensive notes.
Hardcover May 2009

The Songs and Sonets of John Donne

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT

John Donne
Edited by Theodore Redpath
There is perhaps no superior edition of Donne’s Songs and Sonets than Theodore Redpath’s wonderful annotated volume. Out of print for a decade, the book is reprinted here in its second, revised edition. The book’s twofold origin is evident on every page of Redpath’s limpid commentary: it arises partly out of a life of scholarship and partly from Redpath’s experiences and concerns as a teacher.
Paperback April 2009

The Late Tang

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Stephen Owen
In this continuation of the literary history of the Tang, Stephen Owen analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of styles, genres, and the voices of past poets--a repertoire that would endure.
Paperback March 2009

Argonautica

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Apollonius Rhodius
Edited and translated by William H. Race
Argonautica, composed in the 3rd century BCE, is the epic retelling of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece. It greatly influenced Roman authors such as Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid, and was imitated by Valerius Flaccus. This new edition of the first volume in the Loeb Classical Library offers a fresh translation and improved text.
Hardcover January 2009

Baldo, Volume 2, Books XIII-XXV

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Teofilo Folengo
Translated by Ann E. Mullaney
Folengo (1491–1544) was born in Mantua and joined the Benedictine order, but became a runaway monk and a satirist of monasticism. In 1517 he published, under the pseudonym Merlin Cocaio, the first version of his macaronic narrative poem Baldo. This edition provides the first English translation of this hilarious send-up of ancient epic and Renaissance chivalric romance.
Hardcover December 2008

Poems

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Cristoforo Landino
Edited and translated by Mary P. Chatfield
Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance. His most substantial work of poetry was his Three Books on Xandra. Also included in this volume is the Carmina Varia, a collection whose centerpiece is a group of elegies directed to the Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo.
Hardcover December 2008

Zeus in the Odyssey

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

J. Marks
This book makes the case that the plot of the Odyssey is represented within the narrative as a plan of Zeus, Dios boulê, that serves as a guide for the performing poet and as a hermeneutic for the audience. The “Zeus-centric” reading proposed here offers fresh perspectives on the tenor of interactions among the Odyssey’s characters.
Paperback November 2008