Josephine, Balmer – författare

Fragmented and forgotten, the women poets of ancient Greece and Rome have long been overlooked by translators and scholars. Yet to Antipater of Thessalonica, writing in the first century AD, these were the 'earthly Muses' whose poetic skills rivalled those of their heavenly namesakes. Today only a fraction of their work survives - lyrical, witty, often innovative, and always moving - offering surprising insights into the closed world of women in antiquity, from childhood friendships through love affairs and marriage to motherhood and bereavement.Josephine Balmer's translations breathe new life into long-lost works by over a dozen poets from early Greece to the late Roman empire, including Sappho, Corinna, Erinna and Sulpicia, as well as inscriptions, folk-songs and even graffiti. Each poet is introduced by a brief bibliographical note, and where necessary her poems are annotated to guide readers through unfamiliar mythological or historical references. In an illuminating introduction, Josephine Balmer examines the nature of women's poetry in antiquity, as well as the problems (and pleasures) of translating such fragmentary works. Classical Women Poets is a complete collection for anyone interested in women's literature, the ancient world, and - above all - poetry. It is a companion volume to Josephine Balmer's edition Sappho: Poems and Fragments, also published by Bloodaxe.

In Piecing Together the Fragments, translator and poet Josephine Balmer examines the art of classical translation from the perspective of the practitioner. Positioning her study within the long tradition of translator prefaces and introductions, Balmer argues that such statements should be considered as much a part of creative writing as literary theory. From translating Sappho and other classical women poets, as well as Catullus and Ovid, to her poetry collections inspired by classical literature, Balmer discusses her relationship with her source texts and uncovers the various strategies and approaches she has employed in their transformations into English. In particular, she reveals how the need for radical translation strategies in any rendition of classical texts into English can inspire the poet/translator to new poetic forms and approaches. Above all, she considers how, through the masks or personae of ancient voices, such works offer writers a means of expressing dangerous or difficult subject matter they might not otherwise have been able to broach. A unique study of the challenges and rewards of translating classical poetry, this volume explores radical new ways in which creativity and scholarship might overlap - and interact.

The Things We Leave Behind gathers poems from all five of Josephine Balmer's acclaimed volumes, excavating a common ground between the distant past and our contemporary world. From the universal grief that echoes down through the centuries in both her ground-breaking first collection, Chasing Catullus (2004), and later Letting Go (2017), to the mirroring of ancient exile and modern warfare in The Word for Sorrow (2009), her poetry finds urgent new ways to voice 'the sound of words you can't say'. The Paths of Survival (2017), shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize and a Poetry Book of the Year in The Times, explores the fragility of the written word; Ghost Passage (2022) mines the debris of everyday lives from the 'dark earth' of Roman London, rendering them fresh and familiar. Edited and introduced by Paschalis Nikolaou, this Selected Poems also includes new verse from Balmer's work-in-progress, Archaeology of Home, unearthing the devastating effect of dementia on families past and present. The Things We Leave Behind offers new insights into Balmer's poignant and compelling work, celebrating her 'necromancer's task of easing breath / into moss-flecked lungs of our long, long dead'.

Working on Ovid’s extraordinary but often much-neglected exile poetry with an old second-hand Latin dictionary one stormy spring morning, Josephine Balmer noticed a school-boy’s faded name inked on its fly-leaf and a date, January 1st 1900. The Word for Sorrow explores the story of this dictionary and its owner, who, as a subsequent Google search uncovered, later fought with the British yeomanry in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of World War I, near Ovid’s own Black Sea exile. Alongside versions and interpretations of Ovid’s Tristia – the text the dictionary translates – soldiers’ original diaries and letters from Gallipoli provide another rich vein of source material for the original poems of the volume, which also follows Balmer’s own journey as she excavates these entwined narratives, underscoring how the emotional charge of the past still resonates down through the centuries.Like Chasing Catullus, Balmer’s acclaimed first collection, The Word for Sorrow explores an interplay between translation and original, text and translator, past and present, giving new resonance to ancient grief. An engaging detective story in verse, the work traces the invisible lines that connect us to often surprising points in history, finding common ground in unexpected places, forging often unexpected links between past and present.From Ovid’s Rome to the blood-soaked trenches of Gallipoli, its powerful and engaging poems give voice to the universal suffering of exile, war and grief, celebrating the enduring common humanity that binds us across countries and over centuries, whether we live at the beginning of the first, the twentieth or the twenty-first century.

The Paths of Survival explores the fragility of the written word; the ways in which it is destroyed and the ways in which, by each fresh miracle, it endures against all the odds. Tracing the few surviving fragments of Aeschylus's lost tragedy, Myrmidons, which notoriously depicted the doomed love of the Greek hero Achilles for his fellow warrior Patroclus, the volume moves backwards in time across two and a half millennia; from a tiny scrap of papyrus in a present-day Oxford library to the dying Aeschylus revising his masterpiece in 5th-century BCE Sicily. Along the way, the poems' dramatic monologues introduce clerks and conquerors, pagans and popes, tyrants and tricksters, as well as translators, anthologists, editors, librarians - and, of course, readers - as each one responds to the text, transforming and perverting it, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unwittingly, for better, for worse, but always with passion.

Ghost Passage explores the ways in which we write ourselves in to the landscape, leaving our own trace, making our mark. From inscribed ancient artefacts and recently excavated writing tablets of Roman London - the earliest known written texts in the city - to tombstones in a remote Kent churchyard, the collection deciphers the hidden texts that weave through our past, articulating lost and often overlooked voices. Outside the usual boundaries of literature, here are graffitied tiles and household jugs, spells written on pewter amulets, stamped beer barrels and medical potions, as well as the everyday accounts and letters, even alphabet practice, of the writing tablets. Ghost Passage offers poetry - and history - from the ground up as it blossoms in unexpected places, resonating down through the centuries, providing the same power to protect and comfort even in the darkest times. These are the untold stories not of a literate upper class but of the diverse, ordinary inhabitants of a great city and beyond; the words we leave behind to 'score these shuddering, ghosted streets/back into form and place'.