Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation

Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus the most important of the pre-Socratic philosophers, were at the same time among the greatest poets of the ancient world. But their work is rarely treated and still more rarely translated in its original form—as poetry. The complete extant fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles are collected here for the first time in a translation responsive to the original verse texts.Parmenides' philosophical fragments are here given as the poetic remains of the thinker from Elea in Southern Italy whom Socrates wondered at and Plato held in awe. What emerges from the poetry is at once an uncompromising vision of absolute Being and a compassionate understanding of the human cosmos.The poetry of Empedocles—reincarnationist, naturalist, cosmologist, religious leader, physiologist, and metaphysician—is presented here in the personal idiom of the fifth-century Sicilian who has been called the last of the Greek shamans.Guy Davenport writes: "Lombardo's translations of hard Greek into sound and lucid English is an enviable example of the translator's art. He translates well because he writes well; he writes well because he knows the tone, texture, and weight of words, how to keep English idiomatic and natural, how to build a phrase and sentence. Everyone interested in the Greek spirit will welcome this confident rendering of two difficult masterpieces."