Reviews for Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments

The average rating for Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-19 00:00:00 Gihong Jang Wow! This is a great collection. Reading these Odes from some of Sophocles' best known tragedies, accompanied by various fragmentary pieces is a very intersting and refreshing take on his work. I would consider most of the poems in here like little islands to themselves, but the fragments are so thoughtfully arranged that one gets a sense for the poets voice in pointillism.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-19 00:00:00 Venancio Davila I picked this up as part of a personal research project I'm working on, and found it interesting. It's always fascinating to look at translations of what little we have from the ancients, because, no matter how hard we try, we honestly don't have a clue what was really going on with them. We can speculate and guess, but we'll never fully understand their world. It's kind of fascinating, these attempts to speak with the dead. Reginald Gibbons, the translator, has included a long introduction explaining / justifying his choices, which for me was the most interesting part of the book. I've always been a sucker for the why behind the what. That being said, the first poem in the collection is my favorite: Aphrodite of Kypros, fragment 941. It captures the full complexity of Aphrodite, who was, for the Greeks, not JUST a love goddess, but a ruler of all the strong passions, including anger. Of all the fragments included, it's this one that makes me feel like I have a ghost of a chance of understanding Sophocles. Only somebody who has love, lost, struggled, wept, raged can understand Aphrodite fully, and Gibbons's translation nails it. As for the rest, they did not spark me personally, but that does not mean they won't be of interest to the armchair scholar. And it's definitely a must for the few, proud classics scholars left among us.