Greek Anthology - Translations and Imitations

Translations and Imitations

Latin renderings of select epigrams by Hugo Grotius were published in Bosch and Lennep's edition of the Planudean Anthology, in the Didot edition, and in Henry Wellesley's Anthologia Polyglotta. Imitations in modern languages have been copious, actual translations less common. F. D. Dehèque's 1863 translation was in French prose. The German language admits of the preservation of the original metre, a circumstance exploited by Johann Gottfried Herder and Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs.

Robert Bland, John Herman Merivale, and their associates (1806–1813), produced efforts that are often diffuse. Francis Wrangham's (1769–1842) versions are more spirited; and John Sterling translated the inscriptions of Simonides. John Wilson in Blackwood's Magazine 1833–1835, collected and commented on the labours of these and other translators, including indifferent attempts of William Hay.

In 1849 Henry Wellesley, principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford, published his Anthologia Polyglotta, a collection of the translations and imitations in all languages, with the original text. In this appeared versions by Goldwin Smith and Merivale, which, with the other English renderings extant at the time, accompany the literal prose translation of the Public School Selections, executed by the Rev. George Burges for Bohn's Classical Library (1854).

In 1864 Major R. G. Macgregor published an almost complete but mediocre translation of the Anthology. Idylls and Epigrams, by Richard Garnett (1869, reprinted 1892 in the Cameo series), includes about 140 translations or imitations, with some original compositions in the same style.

Further translations (selections) are:

• Graham R. Tomson, Richard Garnett, Andrew Lang, Selections from the Greek Anthology (London, 1889)
• J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (with text, introduction, notes, and prose translation; London 1890, revised 1906)
• W. H. D. Rouse, An Echo of Greek Song (London, 1899)
• L. C. Perry, From the Garden of Hellas (New York, 1891)
• W. R. Paton, Anthologiae Graecae Erotica: The Love Epigrams or Book V of the Palatine Anthology (edited, and partly rendered into English verse, London, 1898)
• Earl of Cromer, Translations and Paraphrases from the Greek Anthology (1903)
• F. L. Lucas, A Greek Garland: A Selection from the Palatine Anthology (text of 149 poems, introduction, notes, and verse translations; Oxford, 1939)
• Dudley Fitts, Poems from the Greek Anthology (New York, 1956)
• Andrew Sinclair, Selections from the Greek Anthology: The Wit and Wisdom of the Sons of Hellas (selection and translation; New York, 1967)
• Peter Jay, ed., The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams (Allen Lane, 1973; reprinted in Penguin Classics, 1981)
• Daryl Hine, Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology (Princeton UP, 2001)
• Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, and Karen Van Dyck, eds., The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (New York; W. W. Norton, 2009)

A small volume on the Anthology, by Lord Neaves, is one of Collins's series of Ancient Classics for Modern Readers.

Two critical contributions to the subject are the Rev. James Davies's essay on Epigrams in the Quarterly Review (vol. cxvii.), illustrating the distinction between Greek and Latin epigram; and the disquisition in J. A. Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets (1873; 3rd ed., 1893).