Christopher Childers
Photo by Songmuang Greer
Bio
Christopher Childers's poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
The most important guidance I ever received: “The best thing about good advice is it’s so rarely followed”—tenting his fingers, desk chair rocking back—“but if you take my advice, and you really want to learn to write”—voice like good bourbon, slow and silky and southern—“you should study Latin or Greek.” The advisor was Robert Kirkpatrick, a beloved mentor to generations at my university, and to me more than most. Thanks to his good advice, I fell in love with dead languages.
What did I fall in love with? Probably the same thing as anyone: intoxicating sonorities, and the promise of illumination at the far edge of sense. Add the explanatory power of history, the cultural significance, and that the poetry is so damn good. To understand more of a language than makes it into a translation, any translation, is a great privilege I’m grateful for, to Robert first of all.
Eight years ago Peter Carson, an editor at Penguin I never met, proposed this translation project, which the NEA is now helping support. I love doing it, but let’s just say it doesn’t quite pay a living wage. This grant will help me finish, and, you know, keep eating.
Robert Kirkpatrick has been dead for 14, Peter Carson for five, and I’m still plugging away. One of Robert’s favorite lines came from T.S. Eliot: “The communication of the dead / is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” I translate out of love and gratitude for the dead, and in hopes the living may feel some sliver of that fire. The NEA’s support means more than I can say.
Anthology Examples
[translated from the Greek]
"Mimnermus 1"
What life, what pleasure, without golden Love?
Let me drop dead when I have had enough
of secret trysts, love-gifts, and of the bed,
those blooms where youth’s seductive glow is spread
for men and women. But when the pain sets in
of age, deforming even handsome men,
cruel worries always wear us down for spite;
we get no pleasure looking on the light;
women lose all respect, and boys are cold.
That’s how bitter the god made getting old.
"Anacreon 357"
O Lord, whom Love, that tames and dazes,
and Aphrodite, fresh as roses,
and Nymphs with wine-dark gazes
surround in play through every clearing
on the high mountains where you stray,
I’m begging, come to me today
with friendly heart; hear what I pray
and may it please your hearing:
be Cleobulus’ counselor,
Dionysus; make him purr
Yes to my overture.
(first published in Smartish Pace)
About the anthology of Latin and Greek lyric poetry from the 7th century B.C.E. to the 1st century C.E.
Featuring between 25 and 50 poets from Archilochus to Martial—including well-known classical poets such as Sappho, Ovid, and Horace—this 448-page anthology of lyric poetry will offer a multiplicity of voices and personalities from the ancient Mediterranean, translated using the full resources of traditional English prosody. While there are many other English versions of classical Latin and Greek lyric poetry, there are few that combine both languages, and fewer still of comparable poetic ambition and scope. This project aims to add significant historical, cultural, and literary context to provide a fuller picture of the art and people who made it. The book will be separated into three parts: Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic, and Roman Lyric.