When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)--critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other...

"The first female translator of the epic into English in over sixty years, Stephanie McCarter addresses accuracy in translation and its representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in Ovid's classic. Ovid's Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war,...

Written more than two thousand years ago and one of Western literature's indisputable masterpieces, the Aeneid is the Roman “answer” to Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The latter celebrate Greek civilization through the stories of Greek victory in the Trojan War and the exploits of Odysseus. Vergil's Aeneid sings the triumph of Roman culture, transforming Troy's tragedy into a step on the path toward the founding of Rome by the descendants...

The Metamorphoses of Ovid (8 AD) is an epic poem by Ovid. Published the same year, the poet was, sent into exile for the rest of his life, the Metamorphoses are the crowning achievement of the first major poet of the Roman empire. Written in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and of Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's work is an epic poem of transformations, of shape-shifting matter and beings bound to the power of love. Taking as its...

Plato hailed her as "the Tenth Muse," and 2,500 years later her voice remains dazzling as well as direct and honest. Sappho, a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, wrote verse that sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. Praised for their simplicity and sincerity, her poems nevertheless evoke powerful and memorable images as well as a sense of unreserved eroticism. Her focus on emotion and individualism sets her work apart from...

First published in English by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 from its original Farsi, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" is a collection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam, a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in the later part of the 11th century. Omar Khayyam's poetry, which received very little international notoriety in its own day, achieved classic status when it was discovered and rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald over seven...

A bold new translation of Euripides's shocking ancient Greek tragedy follows the story of Medea, a scorned woman abandoned by the man for whom she has sacrificed everything, who devises the most horrific revenge possible on Jason and their children.

National Book Award Finalist: The most widely read and enduring interpretation of this ancient Babylonian epic. One of the oldest and most universal stories known in literature, the epic of Gilgamesh presents the grand, timeless themes of love and death, loss and reparations, within the stirring tale of a hero-king and his doomed friend. A National Book Award finalist, Herbert Mason's retelling is at once a triumph of scholarship, a masterpiece of...

Considered the greatest Roman poet, Vergil spent over a decade working on this monumental epic poem, which has been a source of literary inspiration and poetic grandeur for more than 2,000 years. Its twelve books tell the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found a new city in the west. This city, Lavinium, was the parent city of Rome. Drawn by divine destiny after the fall of Troy, Aeneas sailed westward toward...

Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...