Translation styles come and go. In the nineteenth century and earlier, it was common – and apparently more profitable than it is today – to market verse translations of classical poetry, which could be read and hailed as poetic contributions in their own right. But rendering Greek or Latin verse into English is difficult and a range of compromises must be made: what rhythms to use (epic hexameters don't thrum very well in English), whether to rhyme, as English poems traditionally do, whether (or how) to preserve allusions that may be entirely opaque to the modern reader, how to handle poetic devices that rely on quirks of Greek or Latin, and so on. Moreover, although ‘accuracy’ is often given lip service, it is not always the primary desideratum of the publisher or the reader, for whom it will often be trumped by ‘readability’. Finally, the tastes and expectations of readers change over time, and what appealed to Victorians may not appeal to us.

Consider the great classicist and poet A.E. Housman's ‘Fragment of a Greek tragedy’ (1883), his magisterial parody of ancient poetry as it was then translated. It begins with the chorus addressing a stranger in what reads like a Shakespearean sonnet on steroids:

In response to the whole school of verse translations that Housman was sending up here, it gradually became common to render many classical poems into prose, and an argument was generally made about how much easier it was to capture meaning and things like philosophical nuance – particularly in didactic texts like those of Aratus or Lucretius – when the translator was not constantly fighting with metre.

In Aaron Poochigian's Aratus, we find the great Hellenistic astronomical poem rendered (one might say, ‘bravely rendered’) into rhyming pentameters. For the reasons I cited above, the two other in-print English translations of this poem both opted for prose, and for clear attempts to stick as closely to the meaning of the Greek as possible: A.W. Mair and G.R. Mair, trans., Callimachus: Hymns and Epigrams; Aratus (1921); D. Kidd, Aratus: Phaenomena (1997). What the present translation has achieved in relation to these, and what it has had to give up, may be clearer from a short comparison of Kidd's prose rendering with Poochigian's verse (more or less randomly selected). Here is Kidd (p. 83):

And now Poochigian (p. 6):

Here the ‘easily divined’ line seems to be Poochigian's own interpolation, perhaps to improve the flow, or perhaps to try and disambiguate what he meant by ‘need not go squinting for a further clue’. Contrast this to Kidd's ‘you do not need any other guide, such are the stars that in beauty and magnitude move’, where the implication is clearer: the shape of a bear is well mapped out, and the stars that make it up are beautiful and bright. Poochigian's ‘gleaming magnitudes’ does not seem to me to capture the kalos te megas te of the original, either. On the other hand, considering the restraints imposed by the form, Poochigian does a better job of capturing many features of the Greek than I would have thought possible. And his translation is certainly very readable, almost moreish at times. I am in no position to judge his work as poetry in its own right, but suffice to say it has been well reviewed in this regard elsewhere.

There are comprehensive notes to the translation, with good comments on how the author has handled various aspects of the Greek, as well as on various poetic features of the original that have been lost or altered in the translation, although even an alert reader could be forgiven for not knowing that these notes were there (I only found them after finishing the entire text and reading through two appendices – and how many readers will plough through all the appendices to everything they read?). After digging around some more, I did manage to find a one-sentence notice that I had missed on p. xxix of the introduction. A short indication, though, even in a footnote, at the beginning of the actual text would have been very helpful, and it is really too bad if other interested readers miss out on these notes as they add considerably to the experience of the poem.

One of the puzzling things that is sometimes difficult to explain to students is why Aratus was so wildly popular in antiquity – after all, his was easily the most widely read poem from the Hellenistic era. That fact can be a real head-scratcher for the modern reader. Poochigian's translation will perhaps help in this regard, and he manages to give the poem some real life, for which we should be thankful. Scholarly readers may prefer the more literal translation in Kidd (at five times the price – although for that money you get the Greek as well), but Poochigan won't be beat for readability.