I feel i'm forced into it. It's all over footnotes

>>9461424
The Arthur Golding. (You) won't regret it.

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I've just read the start of it, but Rolfe Humphries' is pretty good.

Now I'm curious about Golding

>>9461645
no, no no. That's for Shakespeare. Get a truer one first.

How is Horace Gregory?
Was about to start that one.

Humphries

The Golden Age was first, a time that cherished
Of its own will, justice and right; no law,
No punishment, was called for; fearfulness
Was quite unknown, and the bronze tablets held
No legal threatening; no suppliant throng
Studied a judge’s face; there were no judges,
There did not need to be. Trees had not yet
Been cut and hollowed, to visit other shores.
Men were content at home, and had no towns
With moats and walls around them; and no trumpets
Blared out alarums; things like swords and helmets
Had not been heard of. No one needed soldiers.
People were unaggressive, and unanxious;
The years went by in peace. And Earth, untroubled,
Unharried by hoe or plowshare, brought forth all
That men had need for, and those men were happy,
Gathering berries from the mountainsides,
Cherries, or blackcaps, and the edible acorns.
Spring was forever, with a west wind blowing
Softly across the flowers no man had planted,
And Earth, unplowed, brought forth rich grain; the field,
Unfallowed, whitened with wheat, and there were rivers
Of milk, and rivers of honey, and golden nectar
Dripped from the dark-green oak-trees.

Golding

Then sprang up first the golden age, which of itself maintained
The truth and right of everything unforced and unconstrained.
There was no fear of punishment, there was no threatening law
In brazen tables nailed up, to keep the folk in awe.
There was no man would crouch or creep to judge with cap in hand,
They lived safe without a judge, in every realm and land.
The lofty pinetree was not hewn from mountains where it stood,
In seeking strange and foreign lands, to rove upon the food.
Men knew none other countries yet than where themselves did keep;
There was no town enclosed yet, with walls and ditches deep.
No horn nor trumpet was in use, no sword nor helmet worn;
The world was such that soldiers' help might easily be forborn.
The fertile earth as yet was free, untouched of spade or plow,
And yet it yielded of itself of every things enow.
And men themselves contented well with plain and simple food
That on the earth of nature's gift without their travail stood,
Did live by raspes, hips, and haws, by cornels, plums, and cherries,
By sloes and apples, nuts and pears, and loathsome bramble berries,
And by the acorns dropped on ground from Jove's broad tree in field.
The springtime lasted all the year, and Zephyr with his mild
And gentle blast did cherish things that grew of own accord;
The ground untilled all kinds of fruits did plenteously afford.
No muck nor tillage was bestowed on lean and barren land,
To make the corn of better head and ranker for to spread.
Then streams ran milk, then streams ran wine, and yellow honey flowed
From each green tree whereon the rays of fiery Phoebus glowed.

>>9461424
It doesn't matter all that much if you don't know Latin.
>>9461645
I know that Ezra Pound memed this book hard, but I wouldn't go with it. Golding's translation is inaccurate and wordy, and it's written in fourteeners, an outdated meter that simply doesn't scan well to the modern ear.

>>9461929
To add to this, as a Calvinist in 16th century England, Golding also heavily moralized Ovid. His translations change some important parts to make it fit a Christian worldview, and his prefaces try to convince the reader that the pagan Metamorphoses was actually a Christian moral allegory.

G O L D I N G
O
L
D
I
N
G

Then reread it in latin

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>>9462905
Why the fuck would you read a translation if you were able to read the original language?

>>9462917
Because Golding's translation is amazing.
>being stuck in a prejudice of original text being inherently superior

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Charles Martin's is USUALLY quite good but he makes a few baffling decisions, I mean stunningly awful, he turns the contest between the magpies and the muses into a fucking rap battle, I mean, they literally use the word "homie" and the contraction "cuz'" in their AABB couplets

>>9461926
>>9461928
This is pretty good confirmation that, as usual, most of the people here are just memeing the only translation they read. Golding a shittu.

anyone read the Melville translation?

Mandelbaum's is good. There's a literal verse translation that's pretty good if you like that sort of thing, but I forget the translator's name.

>>9463708
I've been reading him, it seems pretty good, except for the occasional rhyme he keeps from traditional translations seems really out of place.

>>9463552
>the contraction "cuz'"
To be fair Shakespeare used that too

I fucked myself when I bought the Penguin edition with E.V. Rieu's translation. Absolutely steer clear of that shit

>>9464440
Sorry I meant Raeburn's, I'm an idiot

>>9461926
>>9461928
tripfag doing good, i'm amazed.

Yeah. Humphries all the way.

>>9464404
But Shakespeare meant coz to mean cousin, not cuz to mean because.

>>9461424
>>9462905
What's the best edition of the latin text?

>>9464555
Loeb if you want Latin with a facing English translation.
University of Oklahoma press if you don't need a translation, but want better annotations.

I'll guess I'll just use this thread. I just leafed through it, and it appears to be just stories loosely connected through some timeline narative.

So may I go and peruse only the ones that interest me first (chink in the wall one), returning to the rest whenever I want? Or would I do some sacrilege that way and ruin my experience and doom of my descendants for ages to go?

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>>9464581

Go big or go home.

In all seriousness I wish there were more editions of the classics with old scholia/glosses from the middle ages in the margins. Huygens has a great project on that with Martianus Capella, very fun to read through if you even a little Latin. The things they came up with trying to understand this thing... http://martianus.huygens.knaw.nl/path

>>9464857
I compared that edition to the university of Oklahoma press and preferred the Oklahoma

>>9464930

Yeah I was semi-joking. Obviously most people can't read Latin poetry at sight without at least some commentary. The Romans themselves had commentaries and notes, just like we have notes in our Shakespeare. Even if you're a genius at Latin you would need notes for some of the allusions etc.

Oxfords are beautiful books though, great paper, great binding, durable, decidedly patrician covers, etc.

I'll have to check out Oklahoma as a publisher. I've used Cambridge in the past and like their editions too. But I'm a total dilettante, not in a position to compare much really.

Nulla translatio tale mangum opus aequare potest! Librum ipsum simpliciter debes legere. Linguam claram Latinam disce, puer. Non te poenitebit umquam. Et alius ut dicit hoc filo, Antiquitatis Oxoniensis Editio est praestans.

get a translation that explains the dirty bits. a lot of them are puns, look for footnotes re:fetishes like tree hugging

>>9463996
Z. Philip Ambrose, found it.

>>9461424
ROLFE HUMPHRIES

>>9464986
>puer
Ego sum vir

>>9464951
>Oxfords are beautiful books though, great paper, great binding, durable, decidedly patrician covers, etc.

But be careful with OUP print-on-demand titles. Not the same quality as in-print Oxford Classical Texts at all.

>>9464986
Illud intellexi.

Some days I feel like I'm actually making progress.