The Paths of Survival
Published on 7. April 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
86 pages
978-1-84861-529-8 (ISBN)
Description
The Paths of Survival explores the fragility of the written word; the ways in which it is destroyed and the ways in which, by each fresh miracle, it endures against all the odds. Tracing the few surviving fragments of Aeschylus's lost tragedy, Myrmidons, which notoriously depicted the doomed love of the Greek hero Achilles for his fellow warrior Patroclus, the volume moves backwards in time across two and a half millennia; from a tiny scrap of papyrus in a present-day Oxford library to the dying Aeschylus revising his masterpiece in 5th-century BCE Sicily. Along the way, the poems' dramatic monologues introduce clerks and conquerors, pagans and popes, tyrants and tricksters, as well as translators, anthologists, editors, librarians - and, of course, readers - as each one responds to the text, transforming and perverting it, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unwittingly, for better, for worse, but always with passion.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
150 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-529-8 (9781848615298)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Josephine Balmer's collections include The Word for Sorrow (Salt, 2009 & 2013) and Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations & Transgressions (Bloodaxe, 2004). Her classical translations include Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (2004), Classical Women Poets (1996) and Sappho: Poems & Fragments (1984 & 1992), all published by Bloodaxe. Her study of classical translation and poetic versioning, Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry, was publishedby Oxford University Press in 2013. Letting Go: Mourning Sonnets is forthcoming from Agenda Editions. She has written widely on poetry and translation for publications such as The Observer, the Independent on Sunday, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, and The Times, for which she compiles the daily Word Watch and weekly Literary Quiz. A former Chair of the Translators' Association, she was reviews editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004-2009, and is a judge for The Guardian / Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation, and an advisor to the journal, Agenda. She studied Classics and Ancient Historyat University College, London, and was awarded a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing by the University of East Anglia.