The Sixteen Satires (Penguin 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.

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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.

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