The Roman poet Propertius is best known as the writer who perfected the Latin love elegy. A contemporary of Virgil and Horace, Propertius has influenced scores of poets - from Ovid to Housman to Pound. This work contains poems that pay tribute to Cynthia, Propertius's romantic obsession, but the scope of these 107 elegies is broad.
"It is good to have these supple, lucid renderings of Propertius which well capture the complexity of his brilliant elegies through another artist's virtuosity. Katz's translation should do much to preserve the reputation of one of Rome's most important and powerful poets for the present generation and beyond."--Michael C. J. Putnam, Brown University
"This work is a consummate labor of love, which has managed to translate the ageless sophistication of the Roman poet Propertius (50 to 16 BC) into the distracted dissonance of our own perilous times. Himself an accomplished poet, Vincent Katz has found both an idiom and a cadence specific to his master's art. The result is a wonderful, dense text of exceptional poetry, which brings Propertius back to us from the dusty shelves of history."--Robert Creeley
"Of all the great Roman poets, Propertius tends, as they say of wines, to travel least well. Where the others have frequently found themselves decently transcribed into English, Propertius--complex, insolent, heartbreaking, sardonic, brilliantly ambiguous, outrageously protean--has not. Until now. Vincent Katz has here devised for him a rich and subtle American style, one that evokes, with appropriate delicacy and power, his variety, his shifting tones and textures, his unique shimmers and shadows."--W. R. Johnson, University of Chicago
"Winner of the 2005 National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association"
