The Homeric Hymns

The Homeric Hymns are a crucial work in the Western literary canon, and Peter McDonald's new verse translations offer the major modern account of this still under-appreciated body of ancient poetry. The thirty-three 'hymns' are poetic accounts of ancient Greek gods, including Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Zeus, and Poseidon. Some of the poems are micro-epics in their own right, recounting the lives and affairs of the divine; taken together, they form a meditation on the primal themes of love, war, betrayal, desire, and paternity, and contemplate the dangerous proximity of gods and men. The book includes a new translation of the 'Life of Homer', a narrative incorporating the shorter poems known as Homer's Epigrams, attributed to Pseudo-Herodotus. Two appendices provide verse translations of episodes from Homer's Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony, while McDonald gives fresh versions throughout of relevant passages from Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and other Greek poets. The accompanying notes and commentaries on the poems are the most generous and authoritative of any translation. This book revives an ancient classic for the twenty-first century.

Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962, and educated at Methodist College, Belfast and University College, Oxford. He has published four books of literary criticism, and six volumes of poetry, most recently Herne the Hunter (2016). His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He has lectured in English at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol, and since 1999 has been Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, University of Oxford, where he is also Professor of British and Irish Poetry. He has edited the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber, 2007), and is currently editing a multi-volume edition of the Complete Poems of W. B. Yeats for Longman.