History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)

Book Description

Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.

Customer Reviews:

Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03

Yes, we can all agree that mainstream history is nearly 100% BS due to politics, economics, ego, problems with dating techniques, and various conspiracies. Agreed. But, I've been researching the distinct possibility that human history (in terms of civilizations) are much more ancient than we've been told, so coming across this book was very interesting to me. I wondered how Fomenko could be wrong (if at all) because he is very persuasive in his presentations. Then it dawned on me. If at previous times in prehistory, due to the various catastrophies that are well documented (comets, asteroids, planetary disruptions, plasma discharge, pole reversals, etc) the Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun, different tilt on its axis, different orbit, different rotation (in terms of velocity and DIRECTION), and the continents were in different positions, then would this not cause the ancients to see the sky (constellations) differently? In other words, is Fomenko making erronious assumptions about the physics of the Earth in pre-history, which then corrupt his data with regards to dating the relevant astrology? The last event to seriously disrupt our planet occured roughly 3500 years ago, according to other good researchers, so is it possible Fomenko has been confused by this? The vastly different physics of our planet in the not so distant past may explain this confusion, which is not to say the "mainstream" version of history is correct; on the contrary. I am not an expert in these fields, but wanted to see if this idea could spark discussion.

Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19

Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.

Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09

There is no doubt that history as most know it is a sham, & institution's version of History both University & Church is fradulent & inaccurate. Everything was established with an agenda, The real "Dark Ages" are now when we have access to incredible amounts of information past authorities & more important 'common folk' didn't have but our institutions & educators are slow to evolve because of what has ignorantly & arrogantly been taught for too long. This is on many subjects not just Chronology.

For anyone to question "Why would a Mathematician have anything credible to say of History?" The answer is from Dr. Fomenko's preface in the book: "It would be worthwhile to remind the reader that in the XVI-XVII century Chronology was considered to be a subdivision of Mathematics." These volumes could possibly be some of the most important works to date & should be read by everyone with an interest in History, especially professors & educators who have a duty to the public. I have read both books & must say that 'Chronology 1' has some very eye opening & revolutionary information. Even if these volumes are part true the implications are profound & opens the doors to further investigations & questions which must be done. I speak several different lanquages & must say the logic Dr. Fomenko uses with "inflection" of words & words being read from left to right in one region & right to left in another then written backwards, the removal of vowels & get down to basics of words, or different cities & locations having the same name etc. is correct. Vowel usage has always been optional & varied, actually complicating linquistics & study. The first thing one has to understand is that words never had a fixed spelling in history like we do now, the spelling of words was mutable & regional, as well as names & titles of people were vast, varied & changed, NOTHING WAS FIXED or understood linear. Matters of Life & Death as well as financial profiteering yesterday & today were & are made with ignorant, illogical & conspiratorial views of history & reality, it's time people get closer to the Truth & society collectively grow up.

Very Interesting.......2007-03-07

It is a good proposal and I believe it will mature into something even better in the future. I think it deserves to be read.

History as Science Fiction.......2007-01-10

Anatoly Fomenko has written a very intriguing book, full of pictures, charts, and computer 'proof' of his thesis: backwards of AD900 we don't really know what happened or when. Between AD900 and AD1600 there is more certainty, but there is still a lot of fuzzy ground, and things don't get reliable until we get past the 1600's where the printing press made it very difficult for the perpetrators of this timeline manipulation to change anything that had been committed to print. The Dark Ages did not happen. Books were burned for a reason. One organization has doubled the actual length of its existence by expanding the real chronology. Read why.

I had always wondered why Christ died about AD33 and yet men waited until the 11th century to form the Knights Templar, the Cathars, etc and go after the Holy Land by force. Why the 1000 year gap? Turns out there wasn't more than a 10-12 year gap and he proves it using astronomy. This also implies that the planet is not as old as we have been told, and current Christian and other creationist scientists are already championing that idea without being aware of Fomenko's book. The two groups, creationist scientists and the Russian mathematical analysts corroborate each other. Fascinating.

Of course, all this flies in the face of what we have been told traditionally is the 'proper' chronology of western civilization, and most readers will experience 'cognitive dissonance' in reading this book. It means that our history going backwards from AD1600 becomes progressively more incorrect and unreliable until it cannot be trusted at all... in the space of 700-800 years.

Naturally, the curious, open-minded reader will want to know WHO did this, WHY, and did any of the events we think of as really ancient ever happen?
Dr. Fomenko is a respected scientist/mathematician at Moscow State University who has already answered these questions to the satisfaction of his initially skeptical colleagues. Most of them are now believers, a few still refuse to believe (the usual diehards), and of course the western press has ignored Fomenko's work -- for obvious reasons when you read the book. The ones who perpetrated this chronology ruse have a lot to answer for. They are still with us. That's why this book is a well-kept secret.

I gave the book a 4-star rating because I was unable to check out some of his claims; those I checked were as he said. But if even 1/3 of his claims are true, this punches a big hole in what we think is our history, the meaning of western civilization, our educational process (for repeating the ruse as gospel), and the trustworthiness of the organization that perpetrated this ruse, well-intentioned or not.

This book relates to current research into a Young Earth paradigm, to John Keel's discoveries about our planet, and Fr Malachi Martin's insights (in his now out-of-print books). We are indeed sheep who are manipulated and kept ignorant -- for a reason. While knowing what these men have to say may be the "booby prize" (as in: 'what can you do with this knowledge?'), it will provide interesting reading. Didn't someone say: "...and the Truth will set you free."?? For you to judge if this book contains the truth.

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

Average customer rating:

Hidden treasures of a great artist
Gems from among the leavings
Please publish Collected Poems in hardcover
The Making Of A Poet

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
Elizabeth Bishop
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All Deals | Blowout Books | Stores | Books

Literature & Fiction | Blowout Books | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0374146454
Release Date: 2006-03-07

Book Description

From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some eighty poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form and some embodied in extensive drafts. Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-Box presents, alongside facsimiles of many notebook pages from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique; love poems and dream fragments from the 1940s; poems about her Canadian childhood; and many other works that heretofore have been quoted almost exclusively in biographical and critical studies.

This revelatory and moving selection brings us into the poet's laboratory, showing us the initial provocative images that moved her to begin a poem, illustrating terrain unexplored in the work published during her lifetime. Editor Alice Quinn has also mined the Bishop archives for rich tangential material that illuminates the poet's sources and intentions.

Customer Reviews:

Hidden treasures of a great artist.......2006-08-21

The question regarding whether to publish the unpublished work of great authors is indeed a vexing one, especially in this case since the poet evidently chose not to release these.
However, just as in the case of the notebooks of great philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche, one often gleans riches from their fragments. Elizabeth Bishop is a great poet, and there are treasures of all kinds here--images, rhythms, narratives.

Gems from among the leavings.......2006-06-10

This rather strangely titled book is a tribute to the demand for Elizabeth Bishop's work. It is a set of pieces gleaned from some 3,500 pages in the Vassar College library collection. Not exactly random (but almost) here are 108 poems, some prose, notes she took, some sketches, some facimilies of her papers, some sketches she made, and other pieces harder to describe.

Obviously this is a book that will appeal most to people who are already Elizabeth Bishop fans. This is more of a work in process. It tells more about her as a person, it illustrates the great effort she went to get her poems just right before sending them off for publication. It shows something of the way her mind worked.

The work here is not Ms. Bishop's best. It's unfinished. Some of the shorter pieces, fragments really, make you wonder where she might have taken it.

Please publish Collected Poems in hardcover.......2006-04-15

This book's availability in hardcover makes the unavailability of Bishop's "Collected Poems 1927-1979" in hardcover hard to fathom. FS&G, please reprint EB's collected poems in hardcover as well as paperback. Thanks.

The Making Of A Poet.......2006-04-02

Elizabeth Bishop published less than 100 poems prior to her death in 1979. This new collection is similiar to a box CD set of studio out-takes of a rock musician : not essential for the causal reader but a must for a true believer of the artist. It is the definitive edition of her unpublished work with extensive notes and annotations. Some of her private poetry is considerably more erotic and emotional than her previously published work and the new poems (over 100+) are the reason to buy this edition. Having said this, the reader is referred to "The Complete Poems, 1927-1979" (1983) of Elizabeth Bishop.

Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics)

Average customer rating:

Fair collection
A nice selection, but go for the complete edition
better to stand alone in a monolingual edition
excellent translations

Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics)
Friedrich Holderlin
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

German | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

German | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

German | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All German Books | German | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0140424164

Customer Reviews:

Fair collection.......2006-07-05

I don't have much to say about Holderlin's poetry, which I find a bit stodgy and ungraceful, but I have to say I cannot read it in German, which I believe is a necessary prerequisite to any true read of poetry. I would merely like to share a poem that I found beautiful:

Sunset

Where are you? Dazzled, drunken my soul grows faint
And dark with so much gladness; for even now
I listened while, too rich in golden
Sounds, the enrapturing youth, the sun-god

Intoned his evening hymn on a heavenly lyre;
All round the hills and forests re-echoed it,
Though far from here-to pious nations
Who still revere him-by now he's journeyed.

Wo bist du? Trunken dammert die Seele mir
Von aller deiner Wonne; denn eben ist's,
Dass ich gelauscht, wie, goldner Tone
Voll der entzukende Sonnenjungling

Sein Abendlied af himmlischer Leyer speilt';
Es tonten rings die Walder und Hugel nach.
Doch fern ist er zu frommen Volkern,
Die ihn noch ehren, hinweggegangen. (pp 16).

Enjoy the archaic read.

A nice selection, but go for the complete edition.......2004-10-11

This Penguin selection of Michael Hamburger's outstanding Holderlin translations is drawn from his 800+ page bilingual edition of Holderlin called "Poems and Fragments," published by Anvil Press (search for ISBN 0856463604).

If you love Holderlin, the complete 4th edition of "Poems and Fragments" is well worth the modest extra cost--it's a very hefty, very handsomely produced book, and of course it's the definitive Holderlin in English.

better to stand alone in a monolingual edition.......2004-05-02

The translations produced by Mr. Hamburger, himself a poet, reads very well indeed. But should they be used in such bilingual edition as this one, being not very literal?

In 'Dichterberuf'('The Poet's Vocation'), the 12th stanza reads:'Zu lang ist Gottliche dienstbar schon/ Und alle Himmelskrafte verscherzt, verbracht/ Die Gutigen, zur Lust, danklos, ein/ Schlaues Geschlecht und zu kennen wahnt es,' and the translation:'Too long now things divine have been cheaply used/ And all the powers of heaven, the kindly, spent/ In trifling waste by cold and cunning/ Men without thanks, who when he, the Hightest,'. We can see that the translator use the alliteration of 'cold' and 'cunning'(only 'Schlaues' in the original) to compensate that of 'verscherzt' and 'verbracht' (only 'spent' in the translation). We can understand why the previous reviewer says the translations are often surprising(and why I says they are not very literal).

excellent translations.......1999-04-12

As a german reader I must say that the author had made excellent translations. You have the feeling that he translated with heart - very rich in his speech and sometimes surprising. Some verses of Hoelderlin, which are strange and not easy to understand are in his translations clearer and simpler to understand. " But it is the sea / That takes and gives remembrance, / And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed, / But what is lasting the poets provide" (Remembrance).

Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments (Iowa Poetry Prize)

Average customer rating:

From Dusk to Dawn

Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments (Iowa Poetry Prize)
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Manufacturer: University Of Iowa Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0877459819

Book Description

Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl as well as from the photography of Allison Maletz, Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book-length poem written in small fragments. Comprised of seven sections, the poem is formed as much by the poet's travels through Turkey, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe as it is by the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Bill Morrison. The painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here alongside whispers of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book of cinematic images and fragments, of small stories overheard and quickly abandoned, of hidden letters and phone booths, and of ghosts who return with questions.

Customer Reviews:

From Dusk to Dawn.......2006-04-04

I think "Lug" must stand for "lugubrious," but Joshua Wilkinson's new book is at any rate some sort of soul-changing experience, particularly for those with a fondness for the works of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The scary monsters they disclose, the secrets from which their slightly later US contemporaries Susan Rothenberg and Eric Fischl drew 1980s neo-figuration, fascinate this young, upcoming poet, even though, as the old saying goes, "You can't go home again." Again and again, Mr. Wilkinson shows us the 2006 version of serial poems that zone in on one subject, or topic, and then flit off at the first sign of closure, too anguished to find even the momentary rest of a rhyme.

As FE Smith once wrote, "The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords." Wilkinson's blade is sharp and his heart is not only stout but wide in compass. His fragmented poem drips with feeling, gathering up glimpses of the absurd and the understated in many countries round the globe. Not for nothing has he travelled to many places, and how refreshing it is to come upon a poet so concerned with European matters, not only those of an aesthetic nature, but of a geopolitical bent as well. In "The Bowling Alley's Most Beautiful Thief" we revisit not only his eroticized penchant for thievery (his totem animal should be the magpie) but we see troubling instances of the sort of institutionalized torture Amnesty International reports on but, of course, poets knew about it all along: "Triangulated position of girl thieves/ in the crossbeams, in the horizontal rafters./ Pulleys & ropes across, clicked into their bellies."

There are real bodies everywhere in the book, as the title points out. "Until you unstick the kite from the oak's branches./ /Until your name finds you in another body." And yet at the same time there's a drive away from the body and into a lyric mist, a confusion between realms ("Christmas or Boxing Day," wonders the bicoastal narrator, as though unable to distinguish the date.) "A duck perched on my oar, proof of my/ absence."

At the end of the book there's a list of previous winners of the Iowa Poetry Prize. That list is more chilling than a visit to the Winchester Mystery House. Read it and shiver for the vanity of earthly delights. These poets, who must have thought that their names and works would now live forever, form a gallery of has beens and never made its, with a few notable exceptions who are indeed among my closest friends

Average customer rating:

Hamburger's translations of Holderlin are essential

Poems And Fragments
Friedrich Holderlin
Manufacturer: Anvil Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

German | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All German Books | German | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0856463604

Book Description

"Many have tried their hand at rendering Holderlin in English . . . But no one has done the job better than Michael Hamburger: either with deeper involvement with the scholarship or with clearer ability to bring Holderlin to life."-Emery E. George, University of Michigan

This fourth bilingual edition, incorporating revisions, new translations and other supplementary material, is the classic English edition of Holderlin's poetry for our age.

Customer Reviews:

Hamburger's translations of Holderlin are essential.......2004-10-11

Many might be familiar with Michael Hamburger's translations of Holderlin from the volume in the Penguin Classics series. Well, those poems were selected from this edition, which is truly and rightfully the mother lode of Holderlin verse in English. If you've also read selections of Holderlin translated by Richard Sieburth (in Princeton's Lockert Library series [ISBN 0691014124]), David Constantine [ISBN 1852243783], or Christopher Middleton (in a volume published by Chicago UP [ISBN 0226349349], later excerpted in the Holderlin volume in the German Library [ISBN 0826403344]), you'll want to supplement your reading with this mammoth, 800+ page, bilingual edition. This newest fourth edition will be Hamburger's last, as he himself states in the Preface, making this volume all the more important and essential as the final version of Holderlin by his one indispensable English translator.

In addition to this volume, I would recommend at least three other volumes of German verse translated by Michael Hamburger, who for the past half-century has been our pre-eminent translator of high German poetry:

Celan (ISBN 089255276X)
Rilke (ISBN 0856463531)
Goethe (ISBN 0856462748)

The Goethe volume in particular, titled "Roman Elegies and Other Poems," published by Anvil Press like this Holderlin volume, is a treasurable piece of work and makes the ideal introduction to Goethe's poetry--better even than the volume of Goethe's poetry in Princeton's 12-volume set of his collected works (to which, by the way, Michael Hamburger has contributed many outstanding translations--that set is life-enhancing, to say the least).

So if you care about Holderlin, or German poetry in translation, or major European poetry, Holderlin has come to be recognized as one of the great poets that the West has produced, and you must own this fourth edition of "Poems and Fragments." My own reading of it marked an epoch in my literary life--the poetry ***found*** me and spoke to me directly, on the deepest level. Much of the poetry describing Holderlin's youth has impressed me as deeply as Wordsworth's 1799, two-part version of "The Prelude"--a text that in my personal canon I consider sacred.

"To be alone
and without gods is death."

--Holderlin, "Poems and Fragments," p. 381

Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments (Modern Library Classics)

Average customer rating:

Misses the Magic
Nice collection of Greek fragments
The sad, spiritual poetry of Ancient Greece
WHAT BECOMES A CLASSIC MOST?
As meaningful and entertaining today as 2000 years ago.

Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments (Modern Library Classics)

Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Ancient, Classical & Medieval | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Greek | Classics | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0812969626
Release Date: 2005-10-11

Book Description

“For there is indeed something we can call the spirit of ancient Greece–a carefully tuned voice that speaks out of the grave with astonishing clarity and grace , a distinctive voice that, taken as a whole, is like no other voice that has ever sung on this earth.”
–BURTON RAFFEL, from his Preface

For centuries, the poetry of Homer, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Sappho, and Archilochus has served as one of our primary means of connecting with the wholly vanished world of ancient Greece. But the works of numerous other great and prolific poets–Alkaios, Meleager, and Simonides, to name a few–are rarely translated into English , and are largely unknown to modern readers. In Pure Pagan, award-winning translator Burton Raffel brings these and many other wise and witty ancient Greek writers to an English-speaking audience for the first time, in full poetic flower. Their humorous and philosophical ruminations create a vivid portrait of everyday life in ancient Greece –and they are phenomenally lovely as well.

In short, sharp bursts of song, these two-thousand-year-old poems speak about the timeless matters of everyday life:
Wine (Wine is the medicine / To call for, the best medicine / To drink deep, deep)
History (Not us: no. / It began with our fathers, / I’ve heard).
Movers and shakers (If a man shakes loose stones / To make a wall with / Stones may fall on his head / Instead)
Old age (Old age is a debt we like to be owed / Not one we like to collect)
Frankness (Speak / As you please / And hear what can never / Please).
There are also wonderful epigrams (Take what you have while you have it: you’ll lose it soon enough. / A single summer turns a kid into a shaggy goat) and epitaphs (Here I lie, beneath this stone, the famous woman who untied her belt for only one man).

The entrancing beauty, humor, and piercing clarity of these poems will draw readers into the Greeks’ journeys to foreign lands, their bacchanalian parties and ferocious battles, as well as into the more intimate settings of their kitchens and bedrooms. The poetry of Pure Pagan reveals the ancient Greeks’ dreams, their sense of humor, sorrows, triumphs, and their most deeply held values, fleshing out our understanding of and appreciation for this fascinating civilization and its artistic legacy.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

Misses the Magic.......2007-03-27

'Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments.' Selected and Translated by Burton Raffel. Introduction by Guy Davenport. New York: The Modern Library, 2004. Hardcover. 81 pp.

Although this book certainly has some fine things in it, and although it comes with an extremely interesting Introduction by Guy Davenport, for me it seems somehow to miss the magic. There is a freshness and clarity of sensibility to these early poems, a feeling that they are coming to us from the dawn of the race, that Raffel just doesn't seem to have captured. He also seems to have missed a lot of the joy.

Vastly superior, in my opinion, are the renderings given by Kenneth Rexroth in his 'Poems from the Greek Anthology,' and there are some who feel that in this book Rexroth gave us the best poetry he ever wrote. My own copy is the Ann Arbor Paperback first edition of 1962, a superbly produced book, sewn and on high quality paper, that includes a series of powerful woodcut illustrations by Geraldine Sakall which greatly add to the impact of the poems. A new edition appeared in 1999 as 'Poems from the Greek Anthology: Expanded Edition.' Introduction by David Mulroy. Translated by Kenneth Rexroth (ISBN 0472086081), though whether it includes the original illustrations I don't know.

Three other editions that are well worth looking at by anyone interested in this early poetry are 'Greek Lyrics' by Richmond Lattimore (ISBN 0226469441) 1960; 'Greek Lyric - An Anthology in Translation' by Andrew M. Miller (ISBN 0872202917) 1996; and 'The Greek Anthology' by Peter Jay (ISBN 0140442855) 1981. This last is a huge Penguin anthology of 440 pages and contains work of varying quality by a large number of translators including Rexroth and other notables.

Fuller information about these books can be found by simply typing in the relevant ISBN number in the Amazon search box, but I think that anyone who reads them will have to agree that, despite their various excellences, Rexroth remains The King.

Nice collection of Greek fragments.......2007-01-17

This volume of Greek poetry is a great find. If you have even the slightest interest in ancient Greece, this book is indispensible. Essentially a collection of short poems--mostly epitaphs, inscriptions, and fragments of otherwise long-lost authors--Pure Pagan is moving, hilarious, and always enjoyable.

My only complaint is a very small one. In the introduction, Guy Davenport makes note of the hundreds of fragments left over from the Hellenic world--so why is this collection so short? What's here is so enjoyable I was left wanting much, much more.

Highly recommended.

The sad, spiritual poetry of Ancient Greece .......2006-06-20

"I hate poems that go on & on", writes Callimachus, an ancient Greek whose poetry has been translated and compiled in this anthology, along with the work of other bards both familiar and obscure, and his is a credo which the Greeks seem to have lived up to admirably: the poems here represented possess an extraordinary power and descriptive beauty despite their extreme, often jarring brevity. Take the poetry of Alkaios:

Boy:

Boy:
Wine

and

Truth

Or Alkman:

The thread runs thin

The need runs hard

Hard.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Greek's lyrics are their timelessness and universality. The Greeks were a people evidently much preoccupied with death, and the transitory nature of all things: thus a large number of their poems and fragments are comprised of poignant elegies and "epitaphs".

Plato:

I am a drowned man's tomb/there is a farmer's.
Death waits for us all/ whether at sea or on land.

Anonymous:

"I'm dead, but waiting for you/and you'll wait for someone/the darkness waits for everyone, it makes no distinctions"

Yet the writing of the Greeks could also be marvelously comic and erotic:

A boy bent to drape flowers on his stepmothers grave/thinking that death had changed her/but the stone toppled and killed him/Stepsons! Be wary even when they're dead!

"We'll be four, each with his woman/eight's too many for one keg of wine/Go tell Aristus the keg I bought/is only half-full, a gallon short, maybe two...hurry!
They're coming at five.

Many of the Greek's poems are also heartbreakingly human.

Alkaios:

Friend's? My friends are nothing/And I weep for them, and for me.

Philodemus:

I came through the rain, soaked/dodging my husband/and now we sit and do nothing,neither talk/nor sleep as lovers ought to sleep/

As the title attests, many of these poems are "fragments": consequently their language and style is at times rough and awkward.

Again, again/pigs whip up/ muck, mud, slop, again

Yet ultimately this anthology, despite a few crude temple scrawls, is littered throughout with magnificent gems of literature, providing, without the use of annotations or footnotes of any sort, but through their own words, an incredibly fresh and fascinating glimpse into the lives of an artistic and philosophical people who, though physically vanished, will endure forever in the treasures they left behind.

WHAT BECOMES A CLASSIC MOST?.......2005-08-22

Simplicity can go a long way and a few well-chosen words can carry great weight. This seems to have been the idea behind Greek lyric poetry. In some cases, an entire poem is hardly more than a sentence, and that suffices. The poems are less anchored in image than idea. If the reader is looking a progenitor of modern Imagism, it isn't here. What the reader will find are philosophic musings on life, death, love and other always timely topics.

As meaningful and entertaining today as 2000 years ago........2005-08-02

This book of epigrams and fragments of poems did more towards helping me to understand and appreciate the ancient Mediterranean peoples than anything I've ever read. I constantly found myself empathizing with the poets. Many of the poems are about drinking, sex, war and women. All of them are entertaining. All well chosen for this collection. The introduction by Guy Davenport is interesting and a must read. If studying ancient peoples is your cup of tea you need this book in your library.

Average customer rating:

Sappho: Poems and Fragments

Manufacturer: Meadowland Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Greek | Classics | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Medieval | Classics | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Sappho: A New Translation

ASIN: 0821620002

Average customer rating:

Shimmering, iridiscent, deathless Aphrodite.

Poems and Fragments
Sappho
Manufacturer: Hackett Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Ancient, Classical & Medieval | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0872205916

Book Description

Little remains today of the writings of the archaic Greek poet Sappho (fl. late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry--among them, poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance--that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse.

Stanley Lombardo's translations give us a virtuoso embodiment of Sappho's voice, whose telltale charm, authority, immediacy, directness, intensity, and sudden changes of tone are among the hallmarks of his masterly translation.

Pamela Gordon introduces us to the world of Sappho, discusses questions surrounding the transmission of her manuscripts, offers advice on reading these texts, and concludes with an enlightening discussion of same-sex desire in Sappho.

Customer Reviews:

Shimmering, iridiscent, deathless Aphrodite........2005-04-12

In Antiquity decent women were supposed to work in the kitchen and to raise their children, nothing more, but there were exceptions. More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is Turkey today.. (She went in exile for a short period due to political upheavel).
Sappho was already famous in Antiquity. Plato called her the tenth Muse and someone said her poetry was "as refreshing as a morning breeze".
Very small fragments - only three or four words - are not included.
Some of the best poems of Sappho are those that describe her loneliness.
(#62)
"But if you are my friend,
Go to a younger woman's bed,
For I will not endure an affair
In which I am older than the man."
(#73)
"The moon has set,
And the Pleiades
Midnight
The hour has gone by
I sleep alone."

Steam Dummy & Fragments from the Fire: The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of March 25, 1911 : Poems (Midwest Writers)

Average customer rating:

Steam Dummy & Fragments from the Fire: The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of March 25, 1911 : Poems (Midwest Writers)
Chris Llewellyn
Manufacturer: Bottom Dog Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Voyage That Never Ends: Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters

Average customer rating:

Over The Volcano . . . We Go?

The Voyage That Never Ends: Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters
Malcolm Lowry
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 1590172353
Release Date: 2007-08-21

Book Description

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

Notorious for a misspent life full of binges, blackouts, and unimaginable bad luck, Malcolm Lowry managed, against every odd, to complete and publish two novels, one of them, Under the Volcano, an indisputable masterpiece. At the time of his death in 1957, Lowry also left behind a great deal of uncollected and unpublished writing: stories, novellas, drafts of novels and revisions of drafts of novels (Lowry was a tireless revisiter and reviser—and interrupter—of his work), long, impassioned, haunting, beautiful letters overflowing with wordplay and lament, fraught short poems that display a sozzled off-the-cuff inspiration all Lowry’s own. Over the years these writings have appeared in various volumes, all long out of print. Here, in The Voyage That Never Ends, the poet, translator, and critic Michael Hofmann has drawn on all this scattered and inaccessible material to assemble the first book that reflects the full range of Lowry’s extraordinary and singular achievement.

The result is a revelation. In the letters—acknowledged to be among modern literature’s greatest—we encounter a character who was, as contemporaries attested, as spellbinding and lovable as he was self-destructive and infuriating. In the late fiction—the long story “Through the Panama,” sections of unfinished novels such as Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, and the little-known La Mordida—we discover a writer who is blazing a path into the unknown and, as he goes, improvising a whole new kind of writing. Lowry had set out to produce a great novel, something to top Under the Volcano, a multivolume epic and intimate tale of purgatorial suffering and ultimate redemption (called, among other things, “The Voyage That Never Ends”). That book was never to be. What he produced instead was an unprecedented and prophetic blend of fact and fiction, confession and confusion, essay and free play, that looks forward to the work of writers as different as Norman Mailer and William Gass, but is like nothing else. Almost in spite of himself, Lowry succeeded in transforming his disastrous life into an exhilarating art of disaster. The Voyage That Never Ends is a new and indispensable entry into the world of one of the masters of modern literature.

Customer Reviews:

Over The Volcano . . . We Go?.......2007-09-28

I'm glad this is out there. I already owned 'Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place' so I'd already read the two crowns in this collection, 'Through The Panama' and "Path To The Forest Spring'. I was hoping for longer excerpts from the novels, and was more than a little annoyed there was nothing at all from 'Lunar Caustic'. But what really irritated me was the editor's all-too brief introduction, lack of any individual introduction for each of the novels relating what they are about, and finally lack of any footnotes. Reading an excerpt without any idea of what larger work it was picked out of makes it much harder to enter. You are left with a lot of nice prose but no sense of story. What were Lowry's aims with this book? Where was he writing it? How far did he get towards completion? And there are references in the letters where some footnotes would have been greatly appreciated. So while I would have given the content four stars I'm giving the book three because of the editor. I can't see anyone who isn't a fan of 'Under The Volcano' being drawn into this collection.

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books