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´Stallings´s new translation of Hesiod´s Works and Days - witty, gritty, and unsettlingly relevant - is not to be missed´ TLS, Books of the Year

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 RUNICMAN AWARD

A new verse translation of one of the foundational ancient Greek works by the award-winning poet A. E. Stallings.

Hesiod was the first self-styled ´poet´ in western literature, revered by the ancient Greeks. Ostensibly written to chide and educate his lazy brother, Works and Days tells the story of Pandora´s jar and humanity´s place in a fallen world. Blending the cosmic and the earthy, and mixing myth, lyrical description, personal asides, astronomy, proverbs and down-to-earth advice on rural tasks and rituals, it is also a hymn to honest toil as man´s salvation. This vibrant new verse translation by award-winning poet A. E. Stallings conveys the clarity and unexpected humour of a founding work of classical literature.

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"Stallings´s new translation of Hesiod´s Works and Days - witty, gritty, and unsettlingly relevant - is not to be missed. Toil; corruption in high places; injustice; the prevailing sense that things are getting worse - none of these prevents the Muses´ chosen poets from doing their indispensable and soul-refreshing work."
-Rachel Hadas, Times Literary Supplement

"Hesiod was the first self-declared poet of Ancient Greece, who boasted of having won a three-legged cauldron for his verses. A. E. Stallings brings him back to life in her rhyming translation of Works and Days, which mingles farming tips, myths and evocation of the seasons: ´when first the cuckoo cuckoos in the oak.´ Stallings´s lively and learned notes make it a treat."
-The Times

"A. E. Stallings new verse translation of Works and Days for Penguin is a splendid development upon a recent flurry of Hesiod translation and poetic response ... Brilliantly sensitive ... Stallings´s translation triumphs."
-The Oxonian Review

"Mixing rhyme and assonance, this is a Works and Days for the age of rap. By translating Hesiod as poetry, Stallings encourages us to realize that the poem should not just be the object of scholarly study, but can be read aloud for fun."
-Armand D´Angour, Times Literary Supplement

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Hesiod
Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, probably lived in the eighth century BC in the backwater of Askra, a hamlet in Boeotia, on the Greek mainland. As the probable author of both the Theogony and Works and Days, he is the first self-styled poet in Western literature, the first to tell us his own name and the first to advertise himself as a prize-winning poet.

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