The Argonautika, the only surviving epic of the Hellenistic era, is a retelling of the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece, probably the oldest extant Greek myth. Peter Green's lively, readable verse translation captures the swift narrative movement of Apollonios's epic Greek. This expanded paperback edition contains Green's incisive commentary, introduction, and glossary. Alternate spelling: Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius ...
In the year A.D. 8, Emperor Augustus sentenced the elegant, brilliant, and sophisticated Roman poet Ovid to exile—permanently, as it turned out—at Tomis, modern Constantza, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. The real reason for the emperor's action has never come to light, and all of Ovid's subsequent efforts to secure either a reprieve or, at the very least, a transfer to a less dangerous place of exile failed. Two millennia late ...
Mark Twain's humorous account of his six years in Nevada, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the «vigorous new vernacular» of the West. Selling seventy five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, <I>Roughing It </I>was greeted as a work of «wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration» whose satiric humor made «pretension a ...
A Connecticut Yankee is Mark Twain’s most ambitious work, a tour de force with a science-fiction plot told in the racy slang of a Hartford workingman, sparkling with literary hijinks as well as social and political satire. Mark Twain characterized his novel as «one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the servilities of our poor human race.» The Yankee, suddenly transported from his native nineteenth-century America to the sleepy sixth-cen ...
"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. «And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography.» Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his «Final (and Right) Plan» for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to «talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment»—meant that h ...
After Sappho but before the great Latin poets, the most important short poems in the ancient world were Greek epigrams. Beginning with simple expressions engraved on stone, these poems eventually encompassed nearly every theme we now associate with lyric poetry in English. Many of the finest are on love and would later exert a profound influence on Latin love poets and, through them, on all the poetry of Europe and the West. This volume offers a ...
What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of <i>Macbeth</i> in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863—with Abraham Lincoln in attendance—to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov’s inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem «Anecdote of the Jar,» in ...
