Tag: Poetry

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Up at a Villa, Down in the City? Four Epigrams of Martial

It did not seem to us that rendition into the rhyming couplets of, say, an Alexander Pope from an earlier age or a James Michie from our own, or into the more contemporary free-verse style of a Palmer Bovie, would offer any more faithful a guide to Martial than the sort of fidelity we were aiming for. Especially for a readership coming from a background in modern English poetry, it seemed to us that a translation which attempts to simulate the discipline and constraints of the elegiac couplets, the hendecasyllabics, the limping iambic trimeters, and so on, of Martial’s original poems might have real value.