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The Poems: Tr.fr.Latin G.Lee (Oxford World's Classics)

The Poems: Tr.fr.Latin G.Lee (Oxford World's Classics)
By Propertius

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Product Description

Of all the great classical love poets, Propertius (c. 50-10 BC) is surely one of those with most immediate appeal for readers today. His helpless infatuation for the sinister figure of his mistress Cynthia forms the main subject of his poetry and is analysed with a tormented but witty grandeur in all its changing moods, from ecstasy to suicidal despair.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #368368 in Books
  • Published on: 1999-11-04
  • Original language: Latin
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 240 pages

Editorial Reviews

New Statesman & Society
"Sensual, bitchy, soppy, satirical, this great sequence of love-hate poems lives again in Lee's vivid versions. Not just a scintillating survey of erotic agony and ecstacy, but a witty glimpse of the smart set in Rome."

Review
Sensual, bitchy, soppy, satirical, this great sequence of love-hate poems lives again in Lee's vivid versions. Not just a scintillating survey of erotic agony and ecstacy, but a witty glimpse of the smart set in Rome. (New Statesman & Society )

About the Author
Guy Lee is a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is the translator of The Poems of Catullus in World's Classics. R. O. A. M. Lyne is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of Further Voices in Virgil's Aeneid (Clarendon Press).

Customer Reviews

First of the Latin erotic elegists4
Following Catullus' Lesbia poems, Propertius is the first of the Latin erotic elegists proper and has a deep influence on Ovid. Guy Lee's translation is fluent and flowing but doesn't really convey the texture of the Latin originals.

The Cynthia poems which sit at the heart of the Propertian texts go on to have a profound impact on the dynamics of erotic love as represented in western literature so it is definitely worth reading this first to see how literary erotic love develops under Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney etc.

In lots of ways Propertius gets squeezed out between the rawness of Catullus and the mocking self-knowingness of Ovid but he plays an important role in the erotic love tradition. And the poems themselves are vibrant and often very wittily clever.

If you have even a little Latin then the Loeb is probably a better buy, but if you don't then this is a fine alternative.