'Unreading Bias in Transation'
Josephine Balmer
Josephine Balmer’s most recent collection, The Paths of Survival (Shearsman), was short-listed for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize and was a Poetry Book of the Year in The Times. Other collections include The Word for Sorrow (Salt, 2009), Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe, 2004) and the chapbook Letting Go: mourning sonnets (2017). She has also published the translations Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate and Classical Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2004 & 1996). Her acclaimed volume, Sappho: Poems and Fragments, was short-listed in 1989 for the inaugural US Lambda Literary Award for Poetry and has recently been reissued in an expanded edition to include newly-discovered fragments (Bloodaxe, 2018). Her study Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013.
Diane Arnson Svarlien
Diane Arnson Svarlien earned a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin, and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky. She has published three volumes of verse translations of the plays of Euripides with Hackett Publishing: Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus (2007), Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women (2012), and Ion, Helen, Orestes (2016). Her Euripides translations are widely performed, and she has translated Aristophanes' Frogs, in collaboration with Mike Lippman and Amy R. Cohen, for the October 2016 Randolph College Greek Play. Her verse translations of Sappho, Semonides, Theocritus, Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid have appeared in various journals and anthologies. She is the Poetry Editor for translations and original Latin and Greek verse for the journal Classical Outlook.
Both are known for their prolific translations, as well as their important contributions to the community of classical translators.
