Karina Williamson – författare

A scholarly edition of poetical works by Christopher Smart. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of poetical works by Christopher Smart. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This volume contains miscellaneous verse, arranged in chronological order, showing the pattern of Smart`s evolution from both academic and popular roles into a poet dedicated to Christian service.

Published here for the first time since 1767, Christopher Smart's verse translation of Horace was made in the prodigiously creative years between his release from the madhouse and his death. The translation strengthens the impression made by all Smart's later verse of a poet of remarkable lyrical virtuosity and boldness of expression.The translation now emerges as testimony to Smart's tireless creativity and poetic energy, and as a significant contribution to the present reappraisal of Horace's influence on English literature. Smart's contemporaries, however, either ignored the project, or treated it with contempt, and it was never reprinted. This edition includes Smart's own critical preface, which is important for its declaration of the writer's principles as translator, and for its unorthodox ideas about poetic language. Karina Williamson's informative introduction discusses Smart's principles and methods in the context of eighteenth century attitudes to the translation of clasical works. Full scholarly apparatus is provided, together with a detailed and clarifying commentary which explains Smart's more obscure passages.

This is the first literary critical edition of Christopher Smart's translation of Phaedrus' fables, and the first literary commentary on these fables in English.Many of the best known Aesopian fables are in fact the work of the Roman poet Phaedrus, a freed slave of the first century. In the eighteenth century, Phaedrus was in the pantheon of great classical authors, while Christopher Smart was considered the outstanding fabulist of his time. Yet today, while Aesop's fables are a household name, and other works by Smart enjoy critical acclaim, Phaedrus' fables and Smart's translation of them are both largely disregarded or unknown. The fables themselves are familiar yet fresh; their social and political implications often have a startlingly contemporary flavour, and Smart's versions successfully catch the spirit and humour of the Latin originals. This edition provides a full introduction, commentary, and scholarly apparatus, and constitutes a history of the reception of the text. Also presented is the case for a possible new attribution to Smart - the Phaedrus by a Gentleman of the University of Cambridge.