The Sixteen Satires (Classics)

Customer Reviews

h'mm - By: Dr. F. M. A. Jones, 26 Feb 2008
The translator plays Juvenal for laughs, & there is more to him than that. So much doesn't get through from the original in this version, & what does seems to me to misrepresent the style fairly severely.

The introduction is rather dated.

Reallly, there are other options.

---

Green's revision hits the mark - By: A. Harden, 25 Sep 2003
I studied this book for Classical Civilisation last year & found it an extremely refreshing rendering of an author whose medium (the satire) has been mauled & abused by even the best of English translators. I picked up a second much inferior translation of this book to reinforce my learning & instantly appreciated the quality of Peter Green's method: he avoids sucking the life out of Juvenal's poetry through prose translation but doesn't go so far as to force the advanced & passionate sentiments into dry showy Dryden-esque iambics or rhyming couplets. The result is an unrhyming semi-poetic rendering; beautifully & entirely naturallly rhythmic. He also meets an audience mid-way between scholar & 'layman' by removing references to unknown people referred to in the text, thus avoiding clumsy English (which may also be seen as a trifle patronising on the translator's part), & providing an thorough endnotes & a bibliography for each satire. The introduction & preface are also hugely informative. However I find his (to me) unique method of applying endnotes a little irritating: he often places the endnotes twenty lines apart & then explains alll of the different points in the preceeding twenty lines, rather than the more orthodox way of applying one note per reference. However this is, I assume, an attempt at making the experience of reading the work a more fluid one & only jarred on me as I was studying it in conjunction with other texts which use the more traditional method.
In any case this is a wonderful book, finallly hitting that hard to reach mark between poetry & prose.

Below are some of the current bestsellers - click them for a price comparison and find the cheapest place to buy!

DVDs

Books

Music

Games

 

Harry Potter Agatha Christie PHP Law Jamie Oliver Economics Sebastian Faulks Marketing Photography BBC Networking Programming Windows PC Garden Health Audio Delia Doctor Who Computer Music History Psychology unix Dummies Engineering Genealogy Internet encycleopedia Business Atlas Photoshop Diet Architecture Finance Sales Management