19381

Pindar and Pindarics: Translation, Imitation, Transformation

Pindar’s epinician odes are often discounted as too complex or obscure for all but the devoted specialist. Attitudes toward Pindaric experiments have long been ambivalent even among literary critics. Samuel Johnson said of a passage in Abraham Cowley’s translation of the second Olympian ode: “It is hard to conceive that a man of the first rank in learning and wit, when he was dealing out such minute morality in such feeble diction, could imagine, either waking or dreaming, that he imitated Pindar.” Nevertheless, Pindar’s odes have been integral to the development of vernacular poetry since the Renaissance in the work of such esteemed poets as Ronsard, Boileau, Chiabrera, Cowley, and Dryden. Perhaps the complication of translating Pindar that sparked Johnson’s critique is answered by Hilary Mackie, who, in his book Graceful Errors: Pindar and the Performance of Praise, reminds us of the poet’s challenge to “remember the heroic past . . . but not allow it to eclipse the glorious present it is his task to celebrate” (3). This panel seeks papers that consider translations, imitations, and transformations of Pindar’s victory ode in early modern and eighteenth-century vernacular poetry. As poets look back to Pindar, his Olympic victors, and the rich genealogies he weaves through his song, how do they also honor “the[ir] glorious present”?

Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:

• Poetic or critical expression of Pindar’s legacy
• Adaptations of Pindar’s victory ode
• Subjects of praise in the translations or adaptations of Pindar
• Readers’ responses to Pindaric poems in the period
• Answer poems
• Paratexts or dedications for Pindaric odes
• Occasions that prompted the composition of Pindaric poems in the early modern period and eighteenth century
• Examples of the Pindaric combined with other classical forms in the vernacular traditions
• Imitations, extensions, and parodies of Pindar

This panel seeks papers that consider translations, imitations, and transformations of Pindar’s victory ode in early modern and 18th-century vernacular poetry.

Please consider submitting an abstract for this panel at the 2022 Northeast Modern Language Association Conference to be held from Thursday, March 10 to Sunday, March 13, 2022, in Baltimore, MD.

We welcome abstracts of 250-300 words by Friday, October 15, 2021

Submit abstracts at the NeMLA portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP.  

For more information, please visit the NEMLA website: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers.html