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This chapter looks at the here and now and the unselfconscious use of Greek and Latin writers by contemporary British and Irish poets. In 1973 an enterprising garland-maker collected together some 850 translations from The Greek Anthology. Most of the versions by the fifty or so contributors were specially commissioned, and they included some excellent epigrams, some by poets already quite well known, including Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Peter Levi, Edwin Morgan and Peter Porter. This discussion states that this volume marks a transition, from an age when a project like this had been primarily the preserve of scholars, and when classical poetry was predominantly the preserve of the few, to the present age when it has been opened up to a wide range of creative artists.

This chapter is devoted to intertextuality, focusing on a characteristically late antique form of allusion. These allusions approximate quotations, for they set a fragment—typically of classical poetry—off against its new context within the late antique poem. The chapter begins by discussing the ways in which allusion was employed by classical poets. It then treats allusions from late antiquity that are progressively more exposed to the presence of their reader. Because late antique allusions do not need to be read as referential, the referentiality (or not) of allusion will serve as a pivot between classical and late antique poetics. Instead of asserting their control over the tradition, late antique poets present their work as a fragmented and open text: they juxtapose independent fragments of classical poetry, they set these units in apposition to their own words, and they avoid emulation. In so doing, they reveal themselves as readers and allow their audience to engage in the continuing play of interpretation.

The chapter examines the complex temporal structures in works from the 1980s to the early 1990s inspired by the late Tang poet Li Shangyin. It details the reception of Li Shangyin’s poetry and its influence, and then analyses its place in the works of contemporary novelists Wang Meng and Ge Fei. Ge Fei’s “Brocade Zither” (1993) is characterized by a recursive structure that recalls the figure of the “strange loop” discussed in Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979; Chinese translation, 1984). The chapter focuses on fictional depictions of scenes of reading and writing, arguing that their mode of anticipation reflects an anxiety of loss of cultural identity and of life itself. Ge Fei has been appreciated for his modernist preoccupation with the elusive nature of memory. However, his writing is equally concerned with the states of apprehension that shape how characters act.

This chapter assesses the implications of artificial ambiguity for the early modern study of classical poetry. The early modern encounter with ambiguity in poetry took its cue from rhetoric. This is important because it helps to explain why the role of ambiguity in poetry was so heavily circumscribed, as it had to be in rhetoric—both were held to involve the persuasive communication of ideas. The chapter then considers a word that connects readings of deliberate ambiguity in witticisms and in poetry: elegantia, ‘elegance’. It is difficult to get the measure of this apparently simple term. Silke Diederich has argued that, whereas it meant for Cicero the quality of the Attic genus subtile, ‘precise, neat, tasteful, well-chosen, with discreet adornments’, it came to denote for later Roman critics a refined, aristocratic mode of expression. The word elegentia itself exhibits an ambiguity, or an unresolved contradiction. The term precisely describes the notion of perspicuous ambiguity, or ambiguity without obscurity, the double sense of a witticism. The chapter then argues that without a sense of how some critics defended ambiguity in poetry, one will struggle to understand how contemporary poets might have conceptualised their own ambiguities.

The only language in which genuine classical poetry is created is the language of the working people. When folk poets such as Homer walked around reciting their poetry to the people, their language was the language of the people. However, in the course of generations, the language of the people became raw material also in the hands of those whose situation in society had changed and allowed them to live a more intuitive life. As an expression of their life, they created the second language for themselves: the language of literature. Thus, a certain distance was created between literature and the people; and the real life of the people, the life of the worker, remained without a poetic or expression of artistry. Thus the seed of jealousy and class hatred, that chronic social illness, was born. A cure for these ills can only come if the working people will also be the creating people.

This chapter begins with an overview of translations of classical poetry by women translators through the ages, examining, in particular, their prefaces and author statements, including those by Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anna Swanwick, and H.D., through to Mary Barnard, Diane Rayor, and Sarah Ruden. It concludes with Josephine Balmer’s own personal statement, exploring the paths that led her to classical poetry translation.

This chapter presents an overview of the difficulties of translating fragmented classical poetry, in particular Greek lyric poetry, examining the main differences between classical and contemporary poetry translation. It discusses the mythology of Sappho and considers current perceptions of ancient culture.

This chapter considers how, as the role of the translator as writer moves increasingly to the fore, the personal statements of translators are beginning to be viewed as an integral part of literary history. It examines the history of such statements, beginning with Catullus, Cicero, Quintilian, Pliny, and Jerome in the Roman world, before moving on to prefaces and introductions to classical poetry translation in Anglo-Saxon and medieval English and Scots, from King Alfred through Gavin Douglas to William Caxton and Arthur Golding.

This chapter examines further the importance of scholarship and research in classical poetry translation, with particular reference to the translation of fragmented works by Greek and Roman women poets. Through discussions of poets such as Corinna, Telesilla, Praxilla, Hedyle, and Erinna, and translations from Josephine Balmer’s Classical Women Poets (1996), as well as versions by Diane Rayor and Michael Longley, it explores the creative leaps that working on such incomplete, tattered sources might require.

This chapter describes the contemporary kinetic concrete poetry and its distinction from classical concrete poetry. It identifies the connection between software art, mannerism, postmodernism, Generation Flash, and the aesthetics of the spectacle. It also compares the culture of the depthless image in the digital age to the pure painting of the avant-garde art of the previous century.

While modern Arabs have changed their attitude to the language in some respects, few have given serious attention to popular literature. This chapter discusses popular literature with emphasis on Mustafa Ibrahim Ajaj. Mustaf Ibrahim Ajaj was a literate who wrote in a language that the public understood. While he composed in classical Arabic and in accordance with the conventions of Arabic poetry, he used colloquial language and employed a variety of postclassical metrical forms. Most of them are in a hemistich in classical poetry which forms a complete unit, called here ‘a line’.

This chapter examines the impact of translated literature on the development of particular literary genres. These include the dialogue and the epistle; modern fiction; and classical poetic genres. It also discusses how the sonnet, beginning in the fifteenth century, puts down roots in every major Western European language and was in most cases almost instantly naturalized.

Herder turned to the imaginary Scottish bard, Ossian, again at the end of his life, this time comparing him directly to Homer. In Chapter 5 Herder admits clearly that he recognizes that Ossian was the invention of James Macpherson, but he moves beyond the Ossian controversy to reflect on the nature of epic as a genre of national narrative formed from the bridge between oral and written traditions. An aesthetic of national character in folk song emerges more fully formed at the end of his life as Herder draws attention to the ways in which Scottish, Irish, and Welsh attributes are evident in the Ossian epics in ways quite unlike the attributes of the ancient Greeks in Homer.

This chapter examines, in a millennium-deep cultural perspective, the way in which persisting patterns of political language in the Middle East and beyond have been shattered by nonviolence. In a first part, it describes the dominance of the concept of terrorism and the way it was undermined by the Middle East nonviolent revolution. It examines then the ambiguity of the Middle East central political concepts of fitna, bid‘a, and jihad, including the historical divide between Sunnism and Shi‘ism. It rediscovers legal, poetical, historical, and philosophical nonviolent testimonies of Middle Eastern culture prefiguring ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi and the nonviolent advocates of the contemporary Middle East.