Praise for Peter Green

 

For Zigzag through the Bitter-Orange Trees

The fifth novel by distinguished Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulos… has been brilliantly translated by a distinguished American professor emeritus of classics. Modern Greek is quite different from its antecedent, but clearly Peter Green has an affinity for the contemporary language. The translation pulsates with vigor and is full of nuance.

 

An excellent translation.

 

A compellingly rich and readable story… thanks to the flawless translation of Peter Green.

 

For Alexander of Macedon

As one reads through Peter Green’s enthralling life of Alexander… one feels every strand of the mythical story coming apart. … Green takes a very bold revisionist stand against the imperial vainglory of antiquity.

 

[A] vibrant, immensely readable biography. … History leaps off the page in this passionate narrative. … Green strips away romantic legends to lay bare an Orwellian tyrant whose unbroken ascent to absolute power led to his estrangement from reality.

 

For The Poems of Catullus

Green compares Catullus to Byron—both were well-connected, wrote poetry full of allusions to contemporary affairs, and were no strangers to scandal—and accepts the traditional identification of the faithless lover in the poem “Lesbia” as Clodia Metelli, an aristocrat of great infamy who was also the object of a character assassination by Cicero. Green captures the wised-up, bitchy world of the poems with suitably modern slang—“jerk,” “hotshots,” “slut”—but at the same time attempts to scrupulously reproduce Catullus” complex original meters: “perky” hendecasyllables, “oddly graceless” choliambics, and so on. These are notoriously difficult to render in English; Green says that he took on the galliambics of Poem 63 as the result of a bet.

 

A splendid new translation.

 

With typical zestful belligerence [Peter Green] assesses almost every aspect of Catullan scholarship. His translations… catch the Catullan tone, jazzily pitched between the schoolboyish and the erudite.

 

Green is a celebrated classicist and his boyish enthusiasm is a perfect match for the bawdy ferocity of Catullus… He perfectly captures Catullus' voice-whose outrageousness may shock even the most jaded sophisticate. You don't have to be a regular reader of poetry to like these poems.

 

[A] superb piece of work… Green’s translation should encourage readers of all kinds to read or re-read Catullus, one of the greatest and most influential of all classical poets… Like Catullus himself, Green combines vast ambitions with a likeable boyish insoucience. His energetic and bracingly intelligent translation will bring new readers to Catullus and will bring a new Catullus to readers who thought they knew him. It deserves, as Catullus said of his own book, to “outlast at least one generation!”

 

For almost half a century Peter Green has been one of the finest of all modern translators of classical verse. His Catullus is well up to his usual form—recapturing for a contemporary audience the wit, malice, erudition and erotic charm of the Latin original.

 

For The Argonautika

Peter Green turns his formidable classical learning and his finely nuanced sense of English verse to bear on the challenge of restoring Apollonios to his true place—on a par with the best modern poetic versions of Homer and Virgil.

 

 

 

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