Selected poems of Shmuel HaNagid

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[compiled and translated by] Helen Waddell

"Writing excitedly to her sister Meg in 1929, Helen Waddell quotes an early review of Mediaeval Latin Lyrics: 'Miss Waddell has kept her promise well: she promised a volume of translations from those fascinating "vagantes". Some indeed are among the loveliest in any literature; and Miss Waddell has not dulled their brightness. She has come to them not merely with scholarship and literary tact, but with a soul attuned to the thought and feeling and the very idiom of another day. She has the most important of the translator's qualifications - a perfect empathy with her material.'" "Through the marvellous empathy this reviewer unerringly describes, she unlocked some of the secrets and literary achievements of the Middle Ages for the scholar and the general reader alike. The vagantes, to whom the reviewer refers, are also the subject of her earlier book, The Wandering Scholars (1927) which similarly won golden opinions. These two books and her novel Peter Abelard (1933) made her the most famous medievalist of her generation." "And this was no passion fashion. Helen Waddell's books, particularly this one, have informed and inspired generations of medievalists. Mediaeval Latin Lyrics is an authoritative and delightful guide to a period of European civilization and literature, when Latin was still a vibrant means of communication throughout the western world."--Jacket.

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Jean de Sponde

"This bilingual edition of Sonnets of Love & Death introduces today's readers to the intriguing world of Jean de Sponde, a neglected sixteenth-century poet who has at last taken his proper place in the pantheon of French poets. David R. Slavitt's finely crafted translation respects both the content and form of Sponde's original while deftly employing contemporary English poetics that appeal to modern sensibilities.". "Considered one of the most important poets of the Renaissance period and a precursor to John Donne, in his poetry Sponde reflects the tensions - both stylistic and philosophical - of his time. This collection of sonnets, abounding in metaphor, paradox, antithesis, and hyperbole, is a restless personal exploration of the body and the spirit, of the concrete and the abstract, of passion and anguish"--BOOK JACKET.

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Andrea Hopkins

"Read again, in the voices of the original medieval authors, those tales of Arthur and Merlin, Queen Guinevere and Isolde, the Knighta of the Round Table, the Quest for the Holy Grail, codes of chivalry, troubadours, medieval tournaments, and much more."--Jacket.

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Juvenal

In the Satires, Juvenal mocks in verse the venal behaviors common to the powerful in the Rome of his time. The Satires became a standard Latin reader for students learning that language. It has been consequently been translated into many modern language editions, both in literal and verse translations.