|
 |
|||||||
 |
|||||||
|
Josephine BalmerThe Word for Sorrow |
||||||
|
Biographical note: Josephine Balmer is a poet and translator whose books include Chasing Catullus (2004), Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1992), Classical Women Poets (1996) and Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (2004). Her journalism has appeared in the Observer, the Independent on Sunday, the Times, the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, amongst others. She studied Classics at University College, London and has a Ph.D in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She lives in Sussex and Cornwall.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844715107
|
|  HARDBACK
| |
Short
description/annotation: From Ovid’s Rome to the blood-soaked trenches of Gallipoli, The
Word for Sorrow, brings new resonance to ancient grief. Its powerful and spellbinding poems give voice to the universal suffering of exile, war or grief, celebrating the enduring common humanity that binds us across countries and over all the centuries.
Main description: Working on Ovid’s extraordinary but often much-neglected exile poetry with an old second-hand Latin dictionary one stormy spring morning, Josephine Balmer noticed a school-boy’s faded name inked on its fly-leaf and a date, January 1st 1900. The Word for Sorrow explores the story of this dictionary and its owner, who, as a subsequent Google search uncovered, later fought with the British yeomanry in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of World War I, near Ovid’s own Black Sea exile. Alongside versions and interpretations of Ovid’s Tristia — the text the dictionary translates — soldiers’ original diaries and letters from Gallipoli provide another rich vein of source material for the original poems of the volume, which also follows Balmer’s own journey as she excavates these entwined narratives, underscoring how the emotional charge of the past still resonates down through the centuries. Like Chasing Catullus, Balmer’s acclaimed first collection, The Word for Sorrow explores an interplay between translation and original, text and translator, past and present, giving new resonance to ancient grief. An engaging detective story in verse, the work traces the invisible lines that connect us to often surprising points in history, finding common ground in unexpected places, forging often unexpected links between past and present. From Ovid’s Rome to the blood-soaked trenches of Gallipoli, its powerful and engaging poems give voice to the universal suffering of exile, war and grief, celebrating the enduring common humanity that binds us across countries and over centuries, whether we live at the beginning of the first, the twentieth or the twenty-first century.
Table of contents:
View excerpt as PDF:
Excerpt from book: The Horses
Unpublished endorsement: Josephine Balmer’s poetry moves beautifully, wittily and indeed bravely. George Szirtes
Unpublished endorsement: These poems are proof of how the myths and ancient languages and texts still live and work… local, personal (in the best way) and connected: and general also, commonly human, reaching far back. David Constantine
Review quote: The Word for Sorrow crosses boundaries between poetry and translation as versions from Ovid’s Tristia converse with new poems that reflect on experiences behind and beyond them, such as the doomed Allied campaign at Gallipoli during World War I, focusing on weavings of life and text across history towards resonating constants of humanity … Balmer poignantly reflects T.S. Eliot’s explanations of the ‘mind of the poet’, the sensibility that connects disparities, locating and effecting meaningful wholes.’ Paschalis Nikolaou
|
|
|
|
|||||||
Contact
us
