So much gay poetry! Sappho and Theocritus are the ultimate power duo.

This is a collection of ancient Greek pastoral poetry. I enjoyed most of the poems but idyll 11 was my favorite.

hadu ti to psithurisma, kai ha pitus, aipole, tena....

Some authors in Greek hold up incredibly well in translation. Homer and the tragedians come to mind. You lose a lot of what the poetry is about, of course, but the powerful essence of the content usually manages to survive in the more skillful translation. Not so, I think, with Theocritus.

Theocritus in English is like going for a swim -- with a three piece suit and expensive shoes. He is one of those poets whose exquisite sound patterns and syntactical structures defy translation. Just about everything that he is doing in Greek is lost in an attempt to convey it in English. Oh yes, you will get the idea of what he wrote about when you read a translation, rather in the way that you can get an idea of what a Ferrari looks like from a picture of it. But that is not the same as sitting in the driver's seat and driving one very fast.

Theocritus is fascinating in the way that his poetry is one thing at first appearance -- shepherds piping under the shade of a pine tree, as a cool brook flows past and bees murmur nearby -- and yet another thing altogether when you look below the surface. Urban v. rural; rich v. poor; rustic v. sophisticated; simple v. complex; artificial v. real: all of these polarities are explored in often subtle and mysterious ways throughout his corpus. He wrote after the Greek city states had lost their political vitality; his poetry thus reflects wholly different concerns from the works of the great tragedians or Pindar, the choral poet. His poetry is strikingly modern in that it was written in an age where poetry had ceased altogether to have the fundamentally public function it once enjoyed.

From a language point of view, again, translations cannot convey what he is doing in redefining the established contours of the Homeric hexameter or employing the Doric dialect. Much of his complex artistry derives from the manner in which he has come up with something seemingly new while drawing at the same time on ancient language and poetic expressions that go all the way back through Attic tragedy to Homeric epic.

All this having been said, this translation is as good as it gets.

fine idylls overall

Not amazing, but worth a read. Some poems were GREAT--others, not so much. Of course, I guess this is to be expected. I've just been reading up on Sappho recently, so it was fun to see all of these allusions pop up.

Interesting mix of pastoral slices of life, retelling of myths and tributes told with a light touch and an amusing style.

Read in the older penguin classic translated by Robert Wells

Still, Arab and Persian poetry kicks more ass

4.5 stars

I really enjoyed this. I could have lived without the encomia dedicated to Ptolemy and the Dioscuri, perhaps, but the early singing contests and the Cyclops’ serenade and the chatty exchange of the women at the festival and the idyll of the sorceress and the last two passionate poems addressed to anonymous young lovers by the poet in old age were beyond wonderful. Especially the delicacy of the details, the scent of rennet, the type of gauzy garments the little distaff makes possible, the names of places and plants particularly. I kind of liked the Idylls better than Virgil’s Eclogues, in fact. I need to go back and compare.

theocritus is such a fun read. love and eros in the open air.

To read the Idylls of Theocritus on a blue-skied cumulus-cloudy mid-summer day is to enjoy a brief sojourn inside a default Windows lock screen. Minor bliss.

3.5/5
highlights: idylls 1, 7, 13 and 16, and epigram 4