PRAISE FOR THE SHIPWRECK SEA
"There are few scholars who possess the innate ability to translate ancient Greek poetry into fittingly refined English. Jeffrey Duban, in The Shipwreck Sea, masterfully encapsulates all that is Greek poetry—language, inflection, ethos, and drama.
– Constantinos Yiannoudes, Founder and Director, Kyrenia Opera
"Jeffrey Duban wears his profound knowledge of the ancient world and its languages less as erudition, more as immediate breathing presence of deeply rooted instinct and resonant cultural descent. Whether as translator of Sappho, Horace, and others, or as poet in his own right, his work lyrically and evocatively fulfills the urgent need of our souls for affirmation of whence we come."
– Christopher Lyndon-Gee, Composer, Conductor, and Author, New York and Vilnius
PRAISE FOR THE LESBIAN LYRE
"A humanities degree between two covers. Brilliant."
– David Dubal, The Juilliard School, Author,The Essential Canon of Classical Music
"The Lesbian Lyre offers a bracing and very welcome challenge to the twentieth century dominance of 'personal voice’ translations of Greek lyric, Sappho in particular, by translators with scant or no Greek but great self-confidence in their own intuition of what the Greek should say. The trend for ‘poet-translators' to work from cribs and paraphrases has undoubtedly been deplorable, both in conception and results. The polemics of Jeffrey Duban’s argument are very clear, with Ezra Pound the chief villain in the piece. The book promises both to resurrect some forgotten but remarkably effective translations of Greek lyric and to offer new renderings of Sappho in translations reflecting the simple and formal beauties of her lyrics while calling upon the full resources of the English poetic tradition."
– Niall W. Slater, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek, Emory University, Atlanta
"Jeffrey Duban is one of the relatively few scholars and artists standing athwart the flood of modernism and yelling stop—if it is possible to characterize extraordinary erudition and the devoted advocacy of truth and beauty as ‘yelling.’"
– Mark Helprin, Author, A Kingdom Far and Clear:
The Complete Swan Lake Trilogy
"The Lesbian Lyre is scholarly in its overall plan, and well-informed and insightful. Interested readers will be accurately informed about the matters of Greek and Latin literature on which it touches; and in considering the themes of this literature from a modern viewpoint, they are also likely to be enlightened by some original judgments. Imperialism is not a cause which finds much enlightened support in the modern era, even within dominant powers such as the UK and the USA which consider themselves (and their quasi-imperial activities) to have been a net force for good in the world. But imperialism is an intrinsic theme of Classical Latin literature. It is a merit of this book that it considers these conflicts of value head-on. Taken as a whole, this book will certainly contain a feast of sound scholarship and challenging critical judgment."
– Nicholas Ostler, Chairman, Foundation for Endangered Languages, Author, Empires of the Word; Ad Infinitum; The Last Lingua Franca
"A half-century ago Duban's views on the translation of Greek and Latin poetry would have been non-controversial. Now they may be as incendiary as they are desperately needed.”
– Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Coauthor,Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
“Jeffrey Duban's The Lesbian Lyre is unique. It brings together the story of poetry (and also of the visual arts, and, in important ways, of music) from our first texts in ancient Greece up to the contemporary criticism of the Classics. It deserves comparison with Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition (1949) for its wide-ranging scholarship. The author is generous to the newcomer to the classical world: geography, cultures, the gods and their myths, the Greek language and its dialects, Greek poetic rhythms, are set as background. The writing is clear, and the essentials in all of this are reviewed quickly. The work is magisterial in its root sense: we enjoy good teaching.
Duban shows that the search for shock, or jagged impact—for energy— in English, often distorts the Greek model; similarly, that Marxist or feminist interpreters have made the Greek poets poster figures for their philosophical programs. I heartily applaud the patient and rational exposure of the way in which such ideologies wage war against the very excellent art already present in the Greek. Central to this book are the author’s translations of Sappho and the Greek lyric poets, and of Catullus, who radically recast himself, a Roman lover, as Sappho. The translations and their comparison with other English versions are a strength of this book.
Every part of the work's huge trajectory helps build meaning for the reader. The Lesbian Lyre is a masterful synthesis of all the best arguments in classical scholarship for the past sixty or seventy years, illuminated by the changing cultural contexts of the past twenty-five centuries.”
– William R. Nethercut, Professor, Department of Classics, University of Texas, Austin
"Jeffrey Duban tries valiantly to revive the tradition in his ambitious, pugnacious, eccentric, sprawling new book The Lesbian Lyre. This is not all Duban tries to do; he also provides a learned introduction to ancient Greek lyric poetry, offers translations of his favorite love poems, surveys Latin and Greek literature more generally, explains the formal aspects of classical verse, discusses translation, surveys and criticizes various translations, and explains how literature, art, Classics and everything else went wrong after World War One, with the advent of Modernism, and the inexplicable rise of the half-educated poet, critic and charlatan Ezra Pound (1885–1972), who is ultimately to blame for the decay in modern poetry, and the death of the classical tradition....
Duban has a great deal to say; much of it is immensely valuable. The Lesbian Lyre appears old-fashioned not because Duban is a reactionary, but only because literary criticism and classical scholarship have turned so sharply leftwards that even a moderately liberal intellectual stance seems a quaint novelty....
Jeffrey Duban seems to have been provoked into writing The Lesbian Lyre because of the recent proliferation of bad 'poetic' versions of verses by Sappho of Lesbos (ca. 630-570 BC), where the translators have little or no ability to read ancient Greek, no ability to organize words into recognizable poetic form, and no knowledge of or respect for English literature. Many of these translators claim special insight into Sappho s surviving verses by virtue of being women, even where they cannot read Sappho's own words. Such politicized hocus-pocus goes unchallenged by classicists, who either agree with it or decline to express their dissent."
– Sandra Kotta, Quillette
Nonfiction: Sappho/the Lyric Poets, etc.
Xpress Reviews
Duban, Jeffrey M. The Lesbian Lyre: Reclaiming Sappho for the 21st Century. Clairview. Jun. 2016. 832p. maps. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781905570799. $37.50. LIT
BY LJ REVIEWS ON AUGUST 4, 2016
This is essentially two books: the first includes translations of Sappho and other Greek lyric poets—including Alcman, Anacreon, Archilochus, and Ibycus—presented with encyclopedic discussions of their cultural and formal contexts. The second is an extended critique of Greekless “poet- translators,” for instance, a long polemic against many modern versions of Homer. Unifying them is the problem of capturing the “tenor” of the original, the flavor of its “structural and dictional formality.” Duban, a practicing lawyer, holds a PhD in classics (Johns Hopkins) and was a poetry editor for the journal Classical Outlook. Underlying his thesis is what he takes to be the negative influence of the modernists, exemplified by Ezra Pound and others. For Duban, an inadequate command of classical languages and philology, coupled with an imperative to be relevant to modern sensibilities, has distorted if not lost the purpose of the original poets.
Verdict Rich and gracefully written, this work is by turns insightful, provocative, and grumpy, good in its parts but diffuse as a whole. Accessible to the general reader, though most interesting to those concerned with questions of translation.—Thomas L. Cooksey, formerly with Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah
Also seen in San Francisco Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and Midwest Book Review.
