Daryl Hine's "Puerilities"
Read this on the Chinatown bus traveling back to NYC. The heat of these erotic epigrams from the Greek Anthology was preferable to the stuffy warmth of the bus. One seduces, while the other reduces. I thought Hine's prose introduction says the obvious in unnecessarily complicated language. The very first sentence is a labyrinth: The twelfth book of The Greek Anthology compiled at the court of Hadrian in the second century A.D. by a poetaster Straon, who like most anthologists included an immodest number of his own poems, is itself a part of a large collection of short poems dating from the dawn of Greek lyric poetry (Alcaeus) down to its last florescence, which survived two Byzantine recensions to end up in a single manuscript in the library of the Count Palatine in Heidelberg--hence its alternative title, The Palatine Anthology , usually abbreviated to Anth. Pal. What is the focus of this sentence? What is the antecedent of "which"? Why the bombast in "florescenc...