Josephine Balmer (born 1959) is a British poet, translator of classics and literary critic. [1] [2] She sets the daily Word Watch and weekly Literary Quiz for The Times . [2]
She was born in 1959 in Hampshire and now lives in East Sussex. [3] She studied classics at University College, London and was awarded a PhD degree by publication by the University of East Anglia. [3]
She was Chair of the British Translators' Association from 2002–2005, and reviews editor of the journal Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004–2009. She was a judge of poetry translation for the Stephen Spender Prize in 2006–2009 and 2015. [4]
In 1989 her translation Sappho: Poems and Fragments was shortlisted for the inaugural US Lambda Literary Awards. [5] In 2017 her collection The Paths of Survival was shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize. [6]
Gaius Valerius Catullus, known as Catullus, was a Latin neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic. His surviving works remain widely read due to their popularity as teaching tools and because of their personal or sexually explicit themes.
Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams formerly attributed to Sappho are extant, but these are actually Hellenistic imitations of Sappho's style.
Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.
Anyte of Tegea was a Hellenistic poet from Tegea in Arcadia. Little is known of her life, but twenty-four epigrams attributed to her are preserved in the Greek Anthology, and one is quoted by Julius Pollux; nineteen of these are generally accepted as authentic. She introduced rural themes to the genre, which became a standard theme in Hellenistic epigrams. She is one of the nine outstanding ancient women poets listed by Antipater of Thessalonica in the Palatine Anthology. Her pastoral poetry may have influenced Theocritus, and her works were adapted by several later poets, including Ovid.
Telesilla was an ancient Greek lyric poet from Argos, active in the fifth century BC. She is known for her supposed role in the defence of Argos in 494 BC, which is doubted by modern scholars. Only a few fragments of her poetry survive, several of which reference the gods Apollo and Artemis. The longest surviving fragment, only two lines, is quoted by the grammarian Hephaestion to illustrate the Telesillan metre, named after her. She was apparently famous in antiquity, included by Antipater of Thessalonica in his canon of women poets; in the twentieth century she inspired a poem by the imagist poet H.D.
Praxilla, was a Greek lyric poet of the 5th century BC from Sicyon on the Gulf of Corinth. Five quotations attributed to Praxilla and three paraphrases from her poems survive. The surviving fragments attributed to her come from both religious choral lyric and drinking songs (skolia); the three paraphrases are all versions of myths. Various social contexts have been suggested for Praxilla based on this range of surviving works. These include that her poetry was in fact composed by two different authors, that Praxilla was a hetaira (courtesan), that she was a professional musician, or that the drinking songs derive from a non-elite literary tradition rather than being authored by a single writer.
Catullus 51 is a poem by Roman love poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BC). It is an adaptation of one of Sappho's fragmentary lyric poems, Sappho 31. Catullus replaces Sappho's beloved with his own beloved Lesbia. Unlike the majority of Catullus' poems, the meter of this poem is the sapphic meter. This meter is more musical, seeing as Sappho mainly sang her poetry.
Adélia Luzia Prado Freitas is a Brazilian writer and poet.
Hedyle was an ancient Greek poet. She is known only through a mention in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae. According to Athenaeus, Hedyle was the daughter of an Attic poet, Moschine, who is otherwise unknown, and the mother of Hedylus, another poet. Hedyle was probably Athenian, like her mother.
Sappho 31 is an archaic Greek lyric poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho of the island of Lesbos. The poem is also known as phainetai moi after the opening words of its first line. It is one of Sappho's most famous poems, describing her love for a young woman.
Clare Pollard FRSL is a British writer, literary translator and critic. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Melinno was a Greek lyric poet. She is known from a single surviving poem, known as the "Ode to Rome". The poem survives in a quotation by the fifth century AD author Stobaeus, who included it in a compilation of poems on manliness. It was apparently included in this collection by mistake, as Stobaeus misinterpreted the word ρώμα in the first line as meaning "strength", rather than being the Greek name for the city of Rome.
Miriam Gamble is a poet who won the Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. She works as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
Tracey Herd is a Scottish poet based in Dundee.
Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian poet, novelist and essayist. Considered one of the most significant Bulgarian authors of the 21st century.
Jane Clarke is an Irish poet. She is the author of three poetry collections and an illustrated poetry booklet. The Irish novelist Anne Enright has praised her poems for their "clean, hard-earned simplicity and a lovely sense of line."
Diana Anphimiadi is a Georgian poet, journalist, publicist, linguist and teacher.
Sappho: A New Translation is a 1958 book by Mary Barnard with a foreword by Dudley Fitts. Inspired by Salvatore Quasimodo's Lirici Greci and encouraged by Ezra Pound, with whom Barnard had corresponded since 1933, she translated 100 poems of the archaic Greek poet Sappho into English free verse. Though some early reviewers criticised Barnard's choice not to use a more structured meter, her translation was both commercially and critically successful, and her work has inspired subsequent translators of Sappho's poetry.