Winner of the 2005 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the
Academy of American Poets.
In Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, highly acclaimed poet and
translator Daryl Hine brings to life the words of Hesiod and the world
of Archaic Greece. While most available versions of these early Greek
writings are rendered in prose, Hine's illuminating translations
represent these early classics as they originally appeared, in verse.
Since prose was not invented as a literary medium until well after
Hesiod's time, presenting these works as poems more closely approximates
not only the mechanics but also the melody of the originals.
This volume includes Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony, two of
the oldest non-Homeric poems to survive from antiquity. Works and Days
is in part a farmer's almanac--filled with cautionary tales and advice
for managing harvests and maintaining a good work ethic--and Theogony
is the earliest comprehensive account of classical mythology--including
the names and genealogies of the gods (and giants and monsters) of
Olympus, the sea, and the underworld. Hine brings out Hesiod's
unmistakable personality; Hesiod's tales of his escapades and his gritty
and persuasive voice not only give us a sense of the author's own
character but also offer up a rare glimpse of the everyday life of
ordinary people in the eighth century BCE.
In contrast, the Homeric Hymns are more distant in that they depict
aristocratic life in a polished tone that reveals nothing of the
narrators' personalities. These hymns (so named because they address the
deities in short invocations at the beginning and end of each) are some
of the earliest examples of epyllia, or short stories in the epic
manner in Greek.
This volume unites Hine's skillful translations of the Works of Hesiod
and the Homeric Hymns--along with Hine's rendering of the mock-Homeric
epic The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice--in a stunning pairing of
these masterful classics.
