Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/132

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
POETRY: A Magazine of Verse

obscured by the wranglings of grammarians, who love it principally because it is so safe and dead."

But to poets "it is not dead, but more alive, more essential, than anything we can find in contemporary English literature." And the new translations "will be done by poets, whose interest in their authors will be neither conventional nor frigid, and who will take no concern with glosses, notes or any of the apparatus with which learning smothers beauty."

The first number has just reached us, Mr. Aldington's translation of the surviving poems—all from the Anthology— of Anyte of Tegea, whom Antipater of Thessalonika called "the woman-Homer." The translator's fitness for his labor of love can hardly be challenged, and the beauty of his texts is indicated by these two poems:

A SOLDIER

The earth of Lydia holds Amyntor, Philip's son; he gained many things in iron battle.
No sickness led him to the house of night; he died, holding his round shield before his friend.

THE HE-GOAT

Watch the horned he-goat of Bromios, how proud are the fierce eyes in his shaggy head!
He is proud because as they go together over the hills Nais holds in her hand a lock of hair on his cheek.

For the other numbers: Edward Storer has translated most of the fragments, old and new, of Sappho, H. D. choruses from the Rhesos of Euripides, Richard Aldington certain Latin poems of the Italian Renaissance, James Whitall the poems of Leonidas of Tarentum, and F. S. Flint the

[100]