Anacreon Brief Love Poetry

Anacreon/Anakreon Brief Love Poems

Brief Poems by Anakreon

TRANSLATIONS BY WILLIS BARNSTONE AND GUY DAVENPORT

DICE - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

The dice of love are
shouting and madness.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

Toss knucklebones with Eros;
Madness and confusion every throw.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

KNOCKOUT - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

Eros, the blacksmith of love,
smashed me with a giant hammer
and doused me in the cold river.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

Eros the blacksmith
Hammers me again,
Striking while I’m hot,
And thrusts me sizzling
In the ice-cold stream.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

THE PLUNGE - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

Lord! I clamber up the white cliff
and dive into the steaming wave,
O dead drunk with love.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

I climb the white cliff again
To throw myself into the grey sea,
Drunk with love again.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

ON A CONSERVATIVE LOVER - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

I love and yet do not love.
I am mad yet not quite mad.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

I am perhaps in love
Again, perhaps not,
And crazy to boot.
No, not crazy.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

ON STREETWALKERS - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

Although we call these women loose,
they tighten their thighs around thighs.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

Twining thigh with thigh.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

A WAY TO THE HEART - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

Come swiftly
and rub aromatic myrrh on her breasts;
the hollow cave around her heart.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

Can myrrh rubbed on a chest
Sweeten the great round heart inside.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

DECEMBER - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

We go through Poseidon’s month.
Ponderous clouds sag with water
and furious storms break out
collapsing the rain earthward.
TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

In the month of Posideion,
When the clouds are fat with rain,
Wild storms bring us Zeus.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

VACILLATION - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

The bird flashes back and forth
between the black leaves of laurel trees
and the greenness of the olive grove.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

(Spring wind) shakes
The darkleaved laurel and green olive tree.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

ENCOUNTER - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

I looked at her and took off
like a frightened cuckoo bird.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

Like the cuckoo,
I made myself scarce
When she was about.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

PREPARATION - A Brief Poem by Anakreon

Let us hang garlands of celery
across our foreheads
and call a festival to Dionysos.

TRANSLATION BY WILLIS BARNSTONE

Garlands of celery around our brows,
We’re off to celebrate the Dionysia.

TRANSLATION BY GUY DAVENPORT

TRANSLATIONS OF THE EPITAPH ON TIMOCRATUS

TIMOCRATUS adorns this humble grave --
Mars spares the coward, but destroys the brave.
The tomb of great Timocritus behold!
Mars spares the base, but slays the brave and bold.
Both are attributed to Francis Fawkes (1720-1777)
___
This Tomb the brave Timocritus contains;
Mars’ Envy only spares
The trembling Coward whom his Sword disdains,
Not him who nobly dares

Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
___
Here sleeps the valiant Timocritus free from life’s sorrows and cares;
Ares spares not the brave, only the coward he spares.

Judson France Davidson
___
This is the tomb of Timocritus, a stanch man in the wars; for it is the craven, not the brave, that are spared by Ares.

J. M. Edmonds
___
Of brave Timocritus this is the grave:
The War-God spares the coward, not the brave.

C. M. Bowra
__
Good soldier was Timokritos, whose grave
This is. War spares the coward, not the brave.

Andrew Robert Burn

Epitaph on Timokritos

A valiant warrior moulders in this grave,
Ares spares the cowards, not the brave.

Raymond Oliver
____
ON A HOPLITE

Here, the tomb of Timokrotos, a hero in the wars.
It is the coward whom Ares spares – not the brave.

Willis Barnstone
___
He was a soldier in the wars
Timokritos. This is his grave.
Sometimes unkind Ares kills
Not the cowards but the brave.

Guy Davenport

SOME TRANSLATIONS BY GUY DAVENPORT

Sweetly singing
Swiftly serving
Swallow.

***
The talents that tantalised
Talented Tantalos (tantalize me)
***
Show me the way to go home.
I’m drunk and I need to go to bed.
***
Lovely, too lovely,
And too many love you.

Brief poems by Anakreon

Anakreon, sometimes written Anacreon, (/əˈnækriən/; Greek: Ἀνακρέων ὁ Τήϊος; c. 582 – c. 485 BC) was a Greek lyric poet, born at Teos in Ionia, now Sighalik in Turkey, around 582 B. C. After the capture of Sardis by the Persians in 541 B.C., he fled to Abdera in Thrace. Later the Tyrant of Samos, Polykrates, invited him to teach his son music and poetry and he became a poetic luminary of the court of Samos. In return for his patronage and protection, Anakreon wrote many complimentary odes about the tyrant. According to John Addison, writing in 1735, Anakreon once received a treasure of five gold talents from Polykrates, and couldn’t sleep for two nights in a row. He then returned it to his patron, saying: “However considerable the sum might be, it’s not an equal price for the trouble of keeping it“.

After the murder of Polykrates in 522 B.C., Anakreon was invited to Athens by Hipparchus, brother of the reigning Athenian tyrant Hippias, who sent a fifty oared galley to convey him over the Ægean. There he became acquainted with the poet Simonides, and other members of the brilliant circle which had gathered around Hipparchus. After the assassination of Hipparchus in 514 B.C. he moved to Thessaly for a short period, but soon he returned to Athens (by that stage a democracy) where he was apparently forgiven his earlier friendships with the tyrants. He finally settled in Abdera, and died in the eighty-fifth year of his age, choked (according to an anecdote of Pliny the Elder) by a grape-stone which he swallowed in a draught of new wine.

For many years , Anakreon was popular in Athens, where his statue was to be seen on the Acropolis, alongside that of his friend Xanthippus, the father of Pericles. According to Pausanias, that statue depicts him as drunk. On several coins from Teos he is represented holding a lyre in his hand, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing. A marble statue found in 1835 in the Sabine district, and now in the Galleria Borghese, is said to represent Anakreon.

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