David R. Slavitt – författare

As he enters his sixth decade of publishing poetry, David R. Slavitt remains a determined wildcatter who ranges as far as he thinks necessary to drill for meaning, wherever and however he can get it. In his new collection, Slavitt traverses Africa, India, Israel, and the America in which he finds himself, complete with visits to zoos, casinos, baseball fields, and cemeteries, as he searches for clues from which he might learn at least a little. He translates verse from Yiddish and Provençal and offers commentaries on received wisdom, everyday events, and the vagaries of existence.With Opus Posthumous and Other Poems—the title is a joke, as he remains very much alive—Slavitt presents an august work possessed of a richness toward which he has worked throughout his long life. By turns wry, erudite, and dyspeptic, this new volume offers ample rewards of his maturity.

Virgil is Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC - 19 BC), classical Roman poet, author of Aeneid, Eclogues, and Georgics. Biographical and historical study includes analyses of his works and his profound influence on Medieval writers, including Dante.Slavitt provides new translations of Georgics and Eclogues. Hermes series on classical authors.

The plays translated in this volume represent everything one would not expect either from the third-century B.C. playwright Plautus or from Roman comedy in general. A common theme in all three comedies is the triumph of women over men. In Truculentus, prostitutes snare all of the men in the play; in Bacchides, the victims include fathers and sons. In Casina, Plautus creates a fantasy that turns traditional social and sexual roles upside down. The plays' mordant, cynical treatment of the normal plots and casts of Roman comedy, their dark humor rooted in homosexuality, oedipal encounters, cruelty, larceny, and prostitution, and their pervasive lack of romance or sentimentality have alternately puzzled and offended the few audiences that have seen them since the Renaissance. Now these unusual plays have been rescued from obscurity in the best possible way-through performance. James Tatum's translations, revised from actual productions, demonstrate that these are among the most entertaining and theatrically effective of Plautus's comedies.The speakable, performable scripts, along with Tatum's introduction, notes, and critical essays summarizing his own experiences in producing them, make this a gold mine for troupes wishing to produce these classics on the contemporary stage as well as for students of classical drama.

Are there no limits to human cruelty? Is there any divine justice? Do the gods even matter if they do not occupy themselves with rewarding virtue and punishing wickedness? Seneca's plays might be dismissed as bombastic and extravagant answers to such questions-if so much of human history were not "Senecan" in its absurdity, melodrama, and terror. Here is an honest artist confronting the irrationality and cruelty of his world-the Rome of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero-and his art reflects the stress of the encounter. The surprise, perhaps, is that Seneca's world is so like our own.

"The works of Plautus," writes Palmer Bovie, "mark the real beginning of Roman literature." In these lively new translations, which effectively communicate the vitality and verve of the originals, the plays of Plautus are accessible to a new generation. Plays and translators: Volume 1: Amphitryon, Constance Carrier. Miles Gloriosus, Erich Segal. Captivi, Richard Moore. Casina, Richard Beacham. Curculio, Henry Taylor Volume 2: Rudens, Constance Carrier. Aulularia, Palmer Bovie. Bacchides, James Tatum. Mercator, George Garrett. Truculentus, James Tatum

"The works of Plautus," writes Palmer Bovie, "mark the real beginning of Roman literature." Now Bovie and David Slavitt have brought together a distinguished group of translators for the final two volumes of a four-volume set containing all twenty-one surviving comedies of one of Western literature's greatest dramatists. Born in Sarsina, Umbria, in 254 B.C., Plautus is said to have worked in Rome as a stage carpenter and later as a miller's helper. Whether authentic or not, these few details about the playwright's life are consistent with the image of him one might infer from his plays. Plautus was not "literary" but rather an energetic and resourceful man of the world who spoke the language of the people. His dramatic works were his way of describing and portraying that world in a language the people understood. Since Plautus's career unfolded against the background of the Second Punic War, it is not surprising that his prologues often end with a wish for the audience's "good luck against your enemies" or that the plays have their share of arrogant generals, boastful military captains, and mercenary adventurers.But other unforgettable characters are here as well-among them Euclio, in the Aulularia, the model for Moliere's miser. In these lively new translations, which effectively communicate the vitality and verve of the originals, the plays of Plautus are accessible to a new generation. Plays and translators: Volume 3: Poenulus, Janet Burroway. Asinaria, Fred Chappell. Trinummus, Daniel Mark Epstein. Epidicus, Constance Carrier. Mostellaria, Palmer Bovie.

"The works of Plautus," writes Palmer Bovie, "mark the real beginning of Roman literature." In these lively new translations, which effectively communicate the vitality and verve of the originals, the plays of Plautus are accessible to a new generation. Plays and translators: Volume 1: Amphitryon, Constance Carrier. Miles Gloriosus, Erich Segal. Captivi, Richard Moore. Casina, Richard Beacham. Curculio, Henry Taylor Volume 2: Rudens, Constance Carrier. Aulularia, Palmer Bovie. Bacchides, James Tatum. Mercator, George Garrett. Truculentus, James Tatum

"The works of Plautus," writes Palmer Bovie, "mark the real beginning of Roman literature." Now Bovie and David Slavitt have brought together a distinguished group of translators for the final two volumes of a four-volume set containing all twenty-one surviving comedies of one of Western literature's greatest dramatists. Born in Sarsina, Umbria, in 254 B.C., Plautus is said to have worked in Rome as a stage carpenter and later as a miller's helper. Whether authentic or not, these few details about the playwright's life are consistent with the image of him one might infer from his plays. Plautus was not "literary" but rather an energetic and resourceful man of the world who spoke the language of the people. His dramatic works were his way of describing and portraying that world in a language the people understood. Since Plautus's career unfolded against the background of the Second Punic War, it is not surprising that his prologues often end with a wish for the audience's "good luck against your enemies" or that the plays have their share of arrogant generals, boastful military captains, and mercenary adventurers.But other unforgettable characters are here as well-among them Euclio, in the Aulularia, the model for Moliere's miser. In these lively new translations, which effectively communicate the vitality and verve of the originals, the plays of Plautus are accessible to a new generation. Plays and translators: Volume 4: Persa, Palmer Bovie. Menaechmi, Palmer Bovie. Cistellaria, R. H. W. Dillard. Pseudolus, Richard Beacham. Stichus, Carol Poster. Vidularia, John Wright.

Distinguished poet and translator David R. Slavitt here provides a translation of and meditation upon the Book of Lamentations, the biblical account of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 587 B.C.,on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av-Tish'a b'Av. (Six centuries later the Romans destroyed the second Temple on the same day.) Most of the Jewish population was deported to Babylon, and the ensuing period came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity. According to tradition, the Book of Lamentations was written in response to this political, social, and religious crisis. The five poems composing the book express Israel's sorrow, brokenness, and bewilderment before God. Tish'a b'Av is the day on which observant Jews fast and pray. And mourn. As Slavitt observes in his meditation:" It is forbidden on Tish'a b'Av even to study the Torah, except for the Book of Job and the Book of Lamentations. This is the day on which we grieve for every terrible thing that happens in this world. It is the worst day of the year."Slavitt's meditation provides a context for reading the scriptural text.Cast in the same style as the Hebrew poetry, his meditation recounts how sorrow and catastrophe have characterized so much of the history of the Jewish people, from their enslavement in Egypt to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany. Few translations of this remarkable book of the Bible attempt to reproduce in English, as Slavitt does here, the Hebrew acrostics. In the original, each verse begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet in sequential order; Slavitt elegantly reproduces this effect using the first 22 letters of the English alphabet. More than a structural or mnemonic device, Slavitt argues, the acrostics are "a serious assertion that the language itself is speaking, that the speech is inspired, and that there is, beyond all the disaster and pain the book recounts, an intricacy and an orderly coherence."

PS3569.L3, David R. Slavitt's sixtieth book, is a collection of poems, translations, imitations, parodies, jeux de mots, and jeux d'esprit, work that ranges from grief-stricken brooding to exuberant clowning around. The odd title, for instance, is nothing more or less than the author's Library of Congress identification, which he adopts now that it has adopted him. Few contemporary poets display his range of sensibility and response to the various occasions of chaotic existence in our time, and Slavitt offers us his reactions to those stresses and cultural shocks that have not so much engaged his attention as ambushed it. He writes poetry that ascends to Pindar and Meleager, or descends some traditional prosodic scale even to the point where it risks gibberish, or basks in it, and he makes no apology for this.

In these fourteen beautifully crafted stories David R. Slavitt shows his mastery of the form. Elegant, spare, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac- this collection reflects a writer in admirable control of his craft.The title story (complete with footnotes á la The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction) braids together the tidy conventions of fiction and the brutal reality of New York as a writing teacher ponders s student's sexually explicit story that may- or may not- be autobiographical. In The Impostor a writer's brother exploits the legerdemain of fiction in a series of ever-bolder impersonations.Several of the stories are presented by emotionally wounded narrators, disillusioned men looking for a hint of grace in a world where expectations are frequently doomed to disappointment. In such a world only one thing is certain we will hurt- and be hurt by- the ones we love. And in the vacuum left when traditions that might have been redemptive have lost their meaning, ""punishment gets to be a habit, a way of life, or at least something to hold onto."" The stories pivot on nuance, on the half-realized insight, on ""some perfectly innocent and insignificant insight, on ""some perfectly innocent and insignificant gesture that turns round and grows into a medium-to-large awkwardness.""We find what the divorced father futilely awaiting his daughter's visit in Hurricane Charlie calls ""dabblers in distress"": lonely, decent people trying to discover where love- and life- went. In Simple Justice a man striving for some definitive family memory compares the process to archaeology: ""The shards that remain are pathetically small and almost grudging."" Thus through the faltering memory of an elderly cousin in ""conflations"" a man becomes a kind of incarnation of his own father and for a moment finds himself at the ""vanishing point"" where a lost past meets an unknowable future; in The long Island Train a simple anecdote becomes a metaphor for the opacity of the most apparently transparent human intentions. Yet it is often these shard of tradition and memory that seem to hold our only promise of transcendence. The protagonist of Grandfather, for example, through his reluctant participation in his grandson's bris, finds a moment of reconciliation with a past that has broken loose of its moorings.Even the most experimental of these pieces- Instructions, a list of admonitions ranging from the quotidian to the cosmic- shows a deep humanity and a maturity of vision that steers adeptly between humor and despair. These stories will linger in the reader's memory long after the book is closed.

A selection of recent work as well as the best from thirteen volumes of poetry published across four decades, Change of Address highlights the magnitude and scope of David Slavitt's poetic achievement. Meditating on both the quotidian and the sublime and ranging from brilliant satire to tender elegy, this retrospective collection brings into sharp relief Slavitt's intelligence, strength of voice, and ease in varied poetic forms. From the beginning of his career, Slavitt has displayed a rare technical virtuosity, and his verse has long confronted -- with urbanity and poise -- questions of love, grief, loss, and death. Though he is an exuberantly playful poet, his gamesmanship is earnest, toying wisely and bravely with the largest experiences of joy and heartbreak. And his gestures, while seemingly effortless, are carefully considered. The result is a body of poetry that haunts us as only the best literature can.A splendid capstone to Slavitt's copious output, Change of Address grants readers access to the extraordinary spectrum of his poetry in a single volume. ""body betrays, and even a mind can rebel,// but against what? What remains? Slowly but surely,// we are forced to suppose a soul, which serves us well,// while we serve it unfaithfully and impurely.// Infinitely regressive? Or merely shy?// Call it what watches, suffers, and remains// our subject/object, despite whatever pains// we may impose upon it, an inner I. Or is it a mere fiction that one may admit// as useful or even necessary? Its truth// is theoretical, a series, a trend,// almost algebraic: and one conjures it// from the motes that fly in the thin air of his youth// to create the granite block that marks his end.""- Soul

The prodigiously imaginative mind and penetrating wit of David R. Slavitt are on full display in his newest collection of poetry that is perhaps his most engaging to date. The title poem begins by fooling around- ""With three names like that, it sounds as though his mother is calling him and she's really angry""- but then builds into a shrewd, thoughtful account of the life of the ninth U.S. president. A second long poem offers a fresh and very amusing appraisal of the practice of buying, writing, and sending souvenir postcards. In between this pair, there are shorter pieces impressive in their range and tone and theme (be sure to read ""Poem without Even One Word"") that dazzle in an already glittering body of work.Slavitt's poems can be playful, even silly, and then astonishingly convert levity into earnest urgency. Dark lines glint with the light of intelligence and mirth, even as artful puns and jokes reveal a rueful aspect. The poet gets older but his work is as graceful as ever, the lovable little boy signaling from inside the sometimes-cranky septuagenarian.

Praise for David R. Slavitt""Slavitt's touch is light, and he writes beautifully.... His satire is sharp, and he can be wildly funny.""- New York Times Book Review""One of America's most lucid and classical poets.... Slavitt's attitude is, as one would expect of a Hebrew as well as Greco-Latin classicist, sharply questioning as well as tragic. He is a poet one reads to know more.""- Booklist ""Slavitt is both smart and wise; he's as well known for his translations of the writers of antiquity as he is for his original work, both poetry and prose.... With a rich sense of humor, a bit of attitude, and a fascination with details, even minutiae, Slavitt tries his hand at new and curious measures and forms as well as seemingly free-range meditations- or, one might say, meanderings.""- Library JournalThe bravura of David R. Slavitt's first book of poems, published more than fifty years ago, continues to reverberate through his newest collection in a voice matured and roughened by age. Civil Wars conjures the mutterings of old men: meditations- despondent yet playfully witty and bold- on the meaning of life and death, the reasoning for human action or inaction, and misremembered memories. Nothing proves too lofty or too trifling for the poet's scrutiny. Slavitt's attention roves from the carnage inflicted by the Achaeans at Troy, to the performances of Borrah Minevich and the Harmonica Rascals, from meditations on Spinoza to the baseball of the New York Yankees. He considers with deliberation all of these subjects and deems them necessary to help create a spiritual connection in our lives. Slavitt encourages contemplation of the world and writing rather than acceptance of the thoughts of the critic, who ""comes, austere, a man of authority, / and offers to help"" but only dilutes the power of a poem. In this collection, Slavitt also includes translations of Greek, Hebrew, Provençal, French, and Old English poems, including a little-known piece by the mathematician Pierre de Fermat and the Old English epic poem ""The Battle of Maldon.

An accomplished poet and a keen observer of the human condition, David Slavitt deploys both skills to create the whimsical, insightful, and witty poems of The Octaves. In these graceful but often blunt, slyly humorous eight-line poems, Slavitt notes the passing of decades and the loss that entails, the questions that arise when studying works from ancient Greece, and the paradoxes found in philosophy, art, and even the common cold.

Death Benefits deepens and extends David R. Slavitt's sublime, lyric confrontation with mortality and does so in a plainspoken and marvelously entertaining, conversational way. His poetry encourages us to recognize our own predicaments, as we see ourselves reflected as fellow sufferers entrapped by daily circumstance. In his new collection, Slavitt presents a sequence of one hundred sonnets, each one loaded with life, observation, and quicksilver wit. Readers will delight in looking on with wonder, at every turn of the page, to see how the poet will pull it off this time and what kind of linguistic magic he will use to fend off the mortal pain of getting through each day. His voice plays over the grid of the meter in utterly natural intonations. His music squarely faces the dark, but its enduring note is faith in common sense and the pleasure that poetry provides, rather than cynicism or despair.

This volume of poetry illustrates a new side of the author of The Carnivore and Suits for the Dead. The wit, the toughness, the shining lyric clarity of the earlier books are still here, but they have been joined by a quiet understanding, a joyfulness, and an acceptance of things as they are that indicates the poet has moved into a new and most exciting period.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Directly or obliquely, while reading Gibbon or shopping for toys at F. A. O. Schwarz, Slavitt addresses, invokes, or simply enjoys the civilization that has been the poet's true subject from the time of the wandering bards. Upon the foundation of technical mastery, he has begun to build an oeuvre, to assert himself, and, with insouciance and gaiety, to grow into his majority.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.This volume includes translations by Eleanor Wilner with InÉs Azar (Medea), Marilyn Nelson (Hecuba), Donald Junkins (Andromache), and Daniel Mark Epstein (The Bacchae).

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.This volume includes translations by Richard Moore (Hippolytus), John Frederick Nims (Suppliant Women), Rachel Hadas (Helen), Elizabeth Seydel Morgan (Electra), and Palmer Bovie (Cyclops).

There is more to classical literature than just the classics. Here David Slavitt expands the canon by presenting vivid, graceful, and amusing translations of two neglected fragmentary works of Latin literature. The first is Publius Papinius Statius's first-century epic Achilleid, an extraordinary fusion of epic and New Comedy sentiments and humor that may represent the earliest literary imagining of the charm of adolescence. It relates the story of the education of Achilles under the centaur Chiron, his adopting the disguise of a girl during his sojourn at the court of Lycomedes in Scyros, his love affair with Deidamia, his detection by Ulysses and Diomedes, and his departure for Troy. The second work is Claudius Claudianus's unfinished fourth-century epic version of the rape of Proserpine. The two works together make a delightful pair. The afterword by David Konstan explores the traditions in which-and against which-Statius and Claudian composed their versions of these well-known stories.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.This volume includes translations by Fred Chappell (Alcestis), Mark Rudman and Katharine Washburn (Daughters of Troy), Richard Elman (The Phoenician Women), Elaine Terranova (Iphigenia at Aulis), and George Economou (Rhesus).

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.The translations in this volume are by Sheila D'Atri, Palmer Bovie, and Richard Elman.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.Aristophanes wrote most of his comedic masterpieces during the Peloponnesian War, parodying the tumultuous politics and society of that time with trademark innuendoes and bawdy stagings and dialogue. In these plays, Aristophanes brings every rhetorical strategem into play to treat the reader to stories of one man's attempt to create a "war-free zone," the rescue of the imprisoned Peace on the back of a giant dung beetle, a satire of Euripides's sympathies for women, and the hustling and healing of a blind and destitute Wealth in order to redistribute the world's riches.Translations are by Jack Flavin (Acharnians), Fred Beake (Peace), David Slavitt (Celebrating Ladies), and Palmer Bovie (Wealth). The volume includes an introduction by Ralph Rosen, Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.This volume presents fresh versions of Sophocles's Theban plays, which include the most famous of the ancient Greek tragedies, King Oedipus. Sophocles reveals the history of Oedipus from the fulfillment of the oracle that foretold he would kill his father, outwit the Sphinx, marry his mother, and have a family, through his banishment and tortured death as a blind man and the attempted redemption of the family by his daughter, Antigone.Translations are by Jascha Kessler (King Oedipus), George Garrett (Oedipus at Colonus), and Kelly Cherry (Antigone).

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.This final volume of the tragedies of Aeschylus relates the historic defeat and dissolution of the Persian Empire on the heels of Xerxes disastrous campaign to subdue Greece, the struggle between the two sons of Oedipus for the throne of Thebes, the story of fifty daughters who seek asylum from their uncle, the king of Egypt, because of his demand that they marry his sons, and the well-known tale of the proud and unrepentant Prometheus, who is chained to a massive rock for revealing fire and hope to humankind.Translations are by David Slavitt (Persians), Stephen Sandy (Seven Against Thebes), Gail Holst-Warhaft (The Suppliants), and William Matthews (Prometheus Bound).

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.