Odes of Pindar. With several other Pieces in Prose and Verse, Translated from the Greek. To which is added a Dissertation on the Olympick Games. By Gilbert West, Esq. LL. D.
London: Printed for R. Dodsley, 1753.
Second Edition of West's Translation
WEST, Gilbert, [translator]. PINDAR. Odes of Pindar. With several other Pieces in Prose and Verse, Translated from the Greek. To which is added a Dissertation on the Olympick Games. By Gilbert West, Esq. LL. D. London: Printed for R. Dodsley, 1753.
Second edition of West's translation. Two small octavo volumes (6 11/16 x 4 1/16 inches; 169 x 104 mm). [4], xxiii, [1, contents], [1]-284; [4], 320 pp. With engraved frontispiece portrait in volume one.
In addition to Pindar's “A Dissertation on the Olympick Games”and the “Odes of Pindar” this work includes translations of Horace, Euripides, Lucian, and other classical poets. Including The Fourth Odes of the Fourth Book of Horace, Iphigenia in Tauris. A Tragedy. Translated from the Greek of Euripides, The Triumphs of the Gout. Translated from the Greek of Lucian, Translations from the Argonauticks of Apollonius Rhodius, The Hymn of Cleanthes, and Menexenus. A Dialogue of Plate.
19th century (?) full polished tan calf. Boards decoratively ruled in a gilt floral pattern. Spines with red and green morocco labels. Labels lettered in gilt, spines decoratively stamped in gilt. Marbled endpapers. Previous owner Solomon R. Guggenheim's bookplate on front pastedown of both volumes. Edges lightly rubbed. Top of spine on volume one slightly bumped. Some minor soiling to boards. A very good set.
Though Gilbert West's Odes of Pindar is only the third version of these poems to have been translated into English (the first by Sternhold and Hopkinsin 1713), his translation was arguably the most popular version in the eighteenth century. Just several months after West's publication, poet Joseph Warton wrote "An ode, Occasioned by reading Mr. West's Translation of Pindar"; and some scholars have suggested that Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes, written at the beginning of the 1750s, are to some extent in conversation with West's translation. In Lives of the English Poets (1779), Dr. Johnson bestowed rare praise on West, and specifically on West's Pindar: " Of his translations I have only compared the first Olympick ode with the original, and found my expectation surpassed, both by its elegance and its exactness. ... A work of this kind must, in a minute examination, discover many imperfections; but West's version, so far as I have considered it, appears to be the product of great labour and great abilities."
ESTC T134725
HBS 64618.
$950.
Price: $950.00
Item #64618