Publisher's Synopsis
In his translations of three major works from the Roman world, collected in a single volume for the first time, Robert Graves brings the myths, legends and history of the classical world to life. His translations influenced a generation of readers and writers when they were first published in the 1950s. As Robert Cummings demonstrates in his introduction, Graves sometimes overrides the demands of accuracy; his interpretations of and responses to his material are at times idiosyncratic but, 'Whatever complaints are lodged against Graves's translations, he remains, after fifty years, eminently readable.' Graves himself recognised the translator's problem: 'how much is owedto the letter, and how much to the spirit'. It is the novelist's narrative virtuosity, his flair for catching a character's individual voice, and above all his endless curiosity about the world, that make these translations as compelling as they were to their original audience; they also mirror Graves's interest in myth in The White Goddess and his imaginative recreations of the classical world in I, Claudius and Claudius the God.
The Golden Ass is an essential work in European literature, a magical, sometimes bawdy adventure, to which Graves responds with exuberant delight. In contrast, Lucan's Pharsalia, an account of the civil war between Julius Casear and Pompey, raises for Graves issues of the writer's moral responsibility, the rejection of rhetoric, that in his own time, he writes, had sent poets 'marching through the Waste Land' after the Great War. The Twelve Caesars exemplifies the writer's responsibility to the truthful record in its vivid accounts of the corruptions of arbitrary power.
