In A Bird Called Elaeus, poet and translator David Constantine presents a selection of poems from The Greek Anthology, a collection of around 4500 poems composed over more than 1500 years by around 300 authors.
The Greek Anthology is a marvellous salvage from the vast shipwreck of the Ancient World, a colossal continuity and variety from pre-classical times through Roman into Byzantine. For A Bird Called Elaeus – his small anthology of the vast original – David Constantine has gone particularly not just to the renowned love poems but also to poems that treat man’s dealings with the earth, his work and trades there, the creatures other than himself who inhabit it and the divinities whose care it is. Through his translations, Constantine brings already urgent poems closer to home and our drift towards the Sixth Extinction. For the Ancient World was not populated by humans harmless to Mother Earth, not at all: often they, like us, did the worst their means enabled them to do. Still there were laws. These things you must not do. Doing them nevertheless was understood as transgression of laws beyond the human laws. You offended Demeter at your peril. Understand that how we like, it’s the same now. And the peril is infinitely greater, threatens to be final, consuming the innocent with the guilty.
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David Constantine lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000. He was co-editor ofModern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He was named winner of The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2020, and presented with the award by HM the Queen in 2021. He has published eleven books of poetry, six translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include
Collected Poems (2004), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation;
Nine Fathom Deep (2009); Elder (2014); and
Belongings (2020). His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his
Selected Poems of Hölderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, and his version of Hölderlin’s
Sophocles, combined in his new expanded Hölderlin edition,
Selected Poetry (2018); and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s
Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation,
A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology, is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Other books include his translation of Goethe’s
Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009) and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of
The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018). He has published six collections of short stories, and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection
Tea at the Midland (Comma Press). Four other short story collections are published by Comma Press. His story ‘In Another Country’ was adapted into
45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling.
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