'The Greek Anthology is a collection of some 4500 epitaphs and short poems from the ancient world, written over 1500 years by about 300 authors.  Of these, the best known is Sappho, but there are also semi-familiar names, like Meleager or the prolific Leonidas of Tarentum.  David Constantine has translated and arranged a few hundred for the benefit of those who know the Greek myths, but not the Greek language. [...] It is wonderful to discover so many ancient poets (when so many others have been lost) and this is a book to treasure.' – Merryn Williams, The High Window

'... I recommend it above all for the brilliance with which its translations bring those worlds and their poetry to life. I believe people with little or no existing interest in ancient Greek writing will be won over by these versions’ beauty and force.' – Edmund Prestwich, London Grip, on A Bird Called Elaeus

'The book’s first virtue is a candour that predecessors typically avoided: structurally the selection’s ‘general direction of travel is towards the state we are in now’ as our species pursues ‘our accelerating drift towards the Sixth Extinction’. The agenda is ecological and ecofeminist, consciously foregrounding the Anthology’s few and poorly represented women poets, so we get a lot of Anyte as well as, unavoidably, the pastoral specialist Leonidas of Tarentum.' – Gideon Nisbet, Translation and Literature

David Constantine lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000. He was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He was named winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2020, and presented with the award by HM the Queen in 2021. He has published eleven books of poetry, six translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Collected Poems (2004), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); Elder (2014); and Belongings (2020). His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Hölderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, and his version of Hölderlin’s Sophocles, combined in his new expanded Hölderlin edition, Selected Poetry (2018); and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation, A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology, is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Other books include his translation of Goethe’s Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009) and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018). He has published six collections of short stories, and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press). Four other short story collections are published by Comma Press. His story 'In Another Country' was adapted into 45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling.

7 The Greek Anthology [translator's preface]
12 Acknowledgements
13 I
31 II
47 III
65 IV
83 V
99 Coda
101 Some quatrains for a primer of our times
111 Note