230 Quotes About Willis-barnstone

My lord Apollo, single out the guilty ones,and in your customary way, destroy them all.

Is it true we Greeks are really deadand only seem alive—in our fallen statewhere we imagine that a dream is life?Or are we truly alive and is life dead?

On easy wings I glide to Olympos whereI seek my master Eros,but he no longer lets me run down warm womenas in my doghood days:he sees my graying beard and passes me by,while I stand transfixedin the wind made by his wings of quivering gold.

Love is really a highway robber:1) He waits in ambush through the night,2) He is a desperado,3) and in the end he strips us naked.

My fingers on her breasts, our mouths joined;I graze with deep fury on her silver neck;yet though I labor over Aphrogeneiathis virgin lets me go so far—and deniesme her bed. Her upper body she allowsto Aphrodite, but her under parts she commits to chaste Athena. I waste away between.

O Artemis and your virgin girls,come to us. Run swiftly to escape the hunter Alpheus.

O Muse, sing to me of that sea-monster, Eurymedon's son,whose stomach, like a knife, fattens on all it finds.Tell of his dreadful end, and how by public orderthe town will stone him to death beside the sterile sea.

Ideally, poetry in translation should one day lead a reader to a reading of the poem in the original tongue. The poem in its native phonemes, we often forget, was primarily a poem, and a good one, presumably, if chosen for translation. A poem in translation should be faithful, if to anything, to this primary quality of the original—that of its being an effective poem.

There is a story that while Sokrates was in prison, awaiting his death, he heard a man sing skillfully a song by the lyric poet Stesichoros, and begged him to teach it to him before it was too late, and when the musician asked why, Sokrates replied, 'I want to die knowing one thing more.