Let the Games Begin: Five Roman Writers

Poetry. Interpretive Translation. Classics. Satire. In LET THE GAMES BEGIN, Peter Valente has borrowed, sampled, excised, and rearranged the canon of Greek and Latin letters to consolidate the extremes which that literature is famous for. Life was just as shitty in Ancient Rome as it is today and for many of the same reasons. Just ask Pliny the Younger. Taking a break from leisurely hunting all morning in the woods of his villa, he sits down to write prose. 'There is so much suffering in the world, ' he thinks, and then commences to write. Pliny's cash-rich stoic hygiene is countered by the anonymous cock-obsessed poems of the Priapeia, along with stunning re- visions of Ovid, Catullus, and Lucian. LET THE GAMES BEGIN is a rich, embodied reading of Roman life, which is to say our contemporary life. A life which, like ours, includes not only bloody spectacular violence but a poetry which refuses, beautifully, to 'just accept things as they come and make the best of your situation, whatever it is.'--Brandon Brown