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

This made sense within the context of my class, but it's nothing something I would have ever picked up of my own accord.

A very useful introduction and notes for someone who knows nothing about this (me). But I can't help but be bored by some bucolic. Zzzzz

I recommend reading each poem twice, one for comprehension, the second to appreciate the imagery it evokes

Come for the famous pastorals, stay for the poem of a girl performing witchcraft to gain back the affections of her lover.

Poetry is really not for me, but I'm glad a sampled Ancient Greek poetry anyway ;) I liked how different themes were touched throughout the 30 'idylls' in this book.

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

Theocritus’ Idylls--summaries of individual poems

1-A goatherd asks Thyrsis to sing him a song; in return, the former promises to give the latter an elaborately decorated drinking vessel (ekphrastically descibed). Thyrsis sings a tearful tale of Daphnis the cowheard’s unrequited “bitter love.” Venus mocks Daphnis; Daphnis tells Venus to take a hike and then drowns, possibly of his own volition.

2-The first “mime.” Simaetha, a city-dwelling spurned-lover-turned-sorceress, tells the story of how she fell in love with Delphis, a gorgeous wrestler who spends most of his time at the gymnasium: how she saw him walking by one day at a parade and nearly fainted with lust; how she ordered her slave-girl, Thestylis, to invite him to her house; made love to him on their first meeting; and was later deserted by him for another woman. Determined to avenge herself on his alleged treachery, she mixes a magic potion that will “draw her lover home to [her]” again.

3-a drunken goatherd serenades his lover from outside her “cave.” He seems to be trying to coax her into forgiving him for some fault he’d previously commited.

4-idle shepherd’s conversation.

5-A goatherd (Comatas) and a shepherd (the younger Lacon) battle it out in a kind of insult match, seeing who can come up with the sharpest insults. They recruit Morson the woodsman as a judge and referee, and after bandying back-and-forth the Ancient-Greek equivalent of increasingly belligerent yo’-mamma jokes, Morson awards Comatas the prize: a fat lamb.

6-Daphnis and Aratus sing contrasting versions of Polyphemus’ love for the nereid Galatea. Daphnis depicts him as a lovelorn moaner; Aratus, as as a mischievous tease.

7-Simichidas meets a celebrated singer, Lycidas, on his way to a festival and invites him to compete with him. They each sing a song, and then Simichidas heads over to the festival.

10-Stricken with unrequited love and unable to focus on his work, Bucaeus can’t stop thinking of the “Beautiful Bombyca.” Milon, the chief shepherd asks Bucaeus to take a break and sing him a song about his love, which Bucaeus then proceeds to do.

11-Here we have another unrequited lover: Polyphemous, who’s extremely distraught about Galatea’s indifference to him. He begs her to join him on land and grieves over the fact that he can’t swim down to her in the sea.

12-A pederastic love song from an older shepherd to a younger one.

13-The story of how Hercules lost his beloved squire.

14-The second mime. Here we have yet another unrequited lover (a major theme, apparently, of the Theocritean Idyll). Aeschinas has recently discovered that his beloved, Cynisca, is seeing another man, Wolf, and he’s pissed. He slaps her at a gathering, after she confesses in front of him. Now he’s trying to get over her but having a very hard time.

15-The third and mime in the collection. Gorgo and Praxinoa meet up and head to the palace for a festival being held in honor of Adonis.

16-An encomium to Hieron II.

17-Encomium to Ptolemy.

18-A model example of the ancient Greek epithalamion; this one’s dedicated to Helen of Sparta on the night of her wedding to Menelaus.

22-The “Dioscuri” relates two stories of the twin brothers, Castor and Polydeuces’, valiant character and legendary strength. In the first song, the poet sings of how Castor defeated a rude giant on a remote island; in the second story, the poet sings of how Polydeuces fended off two men who unlawfully stole the fiancées of two other men.

24-This idyll relates the story of Hercules’ childhood: how he clenched two malevolent god-sent snakes in his fists and grew up to be the strongest man in town. Tiresias offers a prophesy of his future: how he will complete the labours, etc.

26-A wonderful supplement to Euripides’ The Bacchae. This poem relates the murder of Pentheus by the Dionysian revelers; he’s murdered for spying on the rights from a treetop.

29-An old man sings of his love for a young boy, although he’s saddened that the boy is beginning to neglect him.

30-Another pederastic poem... this one more morbid. The boy’s elderly lover counsels him not to grow too arrogant and grieves over the fact that he’s nowhere near as important to his beloved than as his beloved is to him. Another poem about unrequited love.

A great selection of poems.

I particularly enjoyed Idyll's: 5, 11, 13, 14, 16, 24, 28 and 29.

The reason I sought Theocritus' Idylls was that I wanted to find that mythical verdant grove which grows within the imagination of many, where meadows bloom profusely, fields bow beneath the heft of golden corn and rivers & rills babble around myrtled fanes of Pan. I had previously been looking for this Arcadia from Virgil, and it worked to a certain extent, even though the poet's goal was far from this. I am still looking, for Theocritus entered this realm only on occasion.

The Idylls differ from my phantasmic destination in that they are both ripe with humour and blowing in biodiversity (especially since all of them are not written by the same author). The descriptions of the surroundings can be very refreshing in their controlled simplicity, and the materialistic bragging of shepherds does evoke pictures of rustic bliss. However, the characters are not serene guardians of the forest, but they are juvenile, sex-hungry and even cantankerous at times—and this adds to the risibility of the work. It does come as a surprise that, in the sun-mottled greensward, beneath the cooling shades of acacias and cypresses, two sons of the soil trade barbs over how goat-like the other screamed upon being done from behind.

And by Jove there is diversity herein. We have bucolic readings of poetry, magical incantations, unassuming serenades, shepherdic braggadocio, homoerotic scenery pieces, festive speeches, cyclopic monologues, minimyths and -epics, idle chatter, blatant attempts at worming into the palaces of the mighty, crystal epithalamia, seductive to-and-fro, Dionysian madness and whatnot. As a collection, the work may stand a bit ill at ease due to the great variety, but the individual poems do proffer plenty of aesthetic joy from the ancient world. And occasionally from my Arcadia.

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.

I read the translation by Daryl Hine, though I cannot speak to the accuracy of the translation from the ancient Greek. Hine is somewhat chippy about other translators however.
This work is much more bawdy and erotic than I expected. Very homoerotic 'pastoral' poems that make me look at Richard Rodriguez's use "the pastoral" in a different light. I'm also reminded of Ginsburg on occasion and even hip hop, because often there is a contest of sorts between two shepherd/poets. The language is not ornamental, but rather plain like the work of Hesiod. I don't see much of the bucolic trope of later pastoral poets like Virgil or Milton. Nevertheless there is a strong undercurrent of desire in these poems.