Versions and Variations
VOICES FROM THE PAST: A CLASSICAL ANTHOLOGY FOR THE MODERN READER. By James and Janet Maclean Todd.
(Phoenix House, 30s.)
SELECTED FABLES OF LA FONTAINE. By Marianne Moore. (Faber and Faber, 10s. 6d.)
WITH the death of avant-garde literature—an unlamented victim of the war years—it is the more necessary for readers to be acquainted with the great works of the past. But since the teaching of Greek and Latin has so catastrophically declined, these must be met in the first place in translations. Mr. and Mrs. Todd have made a grand effort to present the classics in choice selections, and to show us their great age as a whole. From Homer to Boethius, from the eighth century ac to the opening of the sixth AD, is a vast span; and the differences in presentation between Dryden's Virgil and Day Lewis's—both of which are represented —between Pope's Homer, the brocaded prose version of Lang, Leaf and Myers, and the muscular directness of E. V. Rieu's, seem almost as wide. Nevertheless this book is both a worthy introduction and an appetiser, giving us Plato at his most pro- found, with the Death of Socrates and the Myth of Er, and Cicero preoccupied with the arrangements for a wild-beast show, Euripides in the Gilbert Murray version, and Horace translated alternately by Conington, Sir Edward Marsh and Mr. G. S. Fraser.
It is here that the reader without Latin will be puzzled. Was
Horace, he may wonder, closest in feeling to. Dryden or to the Tennyson of the classical experiments. Fraser's 'Ode to Pyrrha' (Odes I, v) and 'The Fountain' (III, viii)—two of the anthologists' happiest inclusions—suggest the latter. Sir Edward Marsh presents him inconclusively in a kind of careless mufti, and Dryden him- self dresses his Roman ancestor in Augustan robes in Odes III, xxix, to Maecenas. Perhaps his doubts will send the modernist back to renew his little Latin : a recourse that will no doubt
delight Mr. and Mrs. Todd.
It would he difficult to single out all their book's pleasures and
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