Complete Poems [Bernard Knox’s Copy].

BACCHYLIDES; TRANS. ROBERT FAGLES; INTRO & NOTES BY ADAM M. PARRY; FOREWORD BY C. M. BOWRA; [BERNARD KNOX],.

Item Number: 121397

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.

First edition of this collection of poems, from the library of classicist Bernard Knox, with his signature to the front free endpaper, Octavo, original cloth. Bernard Knox is known for his efforts to make classics more accessible to the public. In 1959 his translations of Oedipus Rex were used to produce a series of television films for Encyclopædia Britannica and the Massachusetts Council for the Humanities, featuring the cast of the Canadian Stratford Shakespeare Festival. He taught the poet Robert Fagles at Yale, and became Fagles’s lifelong friend and the author of the introductions and notes for Fagles’s translations of Sophocles’s three Theban plays, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. Reviewing the Fagles Iliad in The New York Times, classicist Oliver Taplin described Knox’s 60-page introduction as “His Master’s Voice, taking the best of contemporary scholarship and giving it special point and vividness, as only Mr. Knox can.” His combat experiences in World War II subtly inform these introductions. Knox was the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and also wrote extensively for The New York Review of Books. Knox received the 1977 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for one of his New York Review pieces, a review of Andrei Şerban’s controversial Lincoln Center production of Agamemnon; the award committee described Knox’s work as “a brilliant review of a major theatrical event” in which Knox “recognized that the director was attempting to solve the central problem of this play by finding a new way to express long passages of lyric language that have lost their immediacy for modern audiences.” Complimentary copy with Yale slip attached to front endpaper, in near fine condition. No dust jacket was issued for this title.