The American poet Alicia Stallings has breathed new life into Hesiod’s Work and Days. Believed to be a contemporary of Homer, Hesiod has been described as the first self-styled poet in western literature and was revered by the ancient Greeks.
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.
Stallings said she approached the work believing Hesiod was a crusty, boring man but revised her views during the translation and now seems him as a man of his era, but one with a finely tuned sense of humor and sense of irony.
She said although the poem was ostensibly about rural life it was not a reliable guide to farming but rather offers down to earth advice about life. Stallings said the poem is still relevant to a modern audience and deals with timeless themes that cannot be pigeon-holed to one particular time in history.
If you missed this you might like to go to Event 350 The V&A Lecture 2: The Future Starts Here at 8.30pm on Friday 1 June