James Michie
Broad St, Oxford OX1 3BH, United Kingdom
James Michie attended Trinity College, Oxford
Broad St, Oxford OX1 3BH, United Kingdom
James Michie attended Trinity College, Oxford
(This edition reproduces the highly lauded translation by ...)
This edition reproduces the highly lauded translation by James Michie. “For almost forty years,” poet and literary critic John Hollander notes, “James Michie’s brilliant translations of Horace have remained fresh as well as strong, and responsive to the varying lights and darks of the originals. It is a pleasure to have them newly available.”
https://www.amazon.com/Odes-Latin-Modern-Library-Classics-ebook/dp/B000XUDHBG/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Martial, the father of the epigram, was one of the brilli...)
Martial, the father of the epigram, was one of the brilliant provincial poets who made their literary mark on first-century Rome. His Epigrams can be affectionate or cruel, elegiac or playful; they target every element of Roman society, from slaves to schoolmasters to, above all, the aristocratic elite. With wit and wisdom, Martial evokes not “the grandeur that was Rome,” but rather the timeless themes of urban life and society.
https://www.amazon.com/Epigrams-Modern-Library-Classics-Martial-ebook/dp/B0061C1MWQ/?tag=2022091-20
2002
James Michie was born on June 24, 1927, in Weybridge, Surrey, England. He was the second of three children of James Michie, a banker, and his wife Marjorie (née Crain): the elder of his two brothers, Donald, became a distinguished scientist, who worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley, and after the war became the leading expert on artificial intelligence, among the very first to divine the potential of computers as a universal means of communication.
James Michie went to school at Marlborough and attended Trinity College, Oxford. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, in Classics; after taking Mods, though, he switched to English Language and Literature.
Michie was a chief editor at Heinemann Publishers, London from 1951-1961. It was Michie who published Sylvia Plath's first book of poems, The Colossus (1960). Michie followed up by publishing Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Since 1961 he became a director of Bodley Head Publishers and worked there until 1989.
In 1959 James Michie published his first book of poetry. Possible Laughter. Since that time, he has proven himself an accomplished poet. However, the critical acclaim that Michie has received is not only for his poetry, but also due to his work as an interpreter, editor, translator, and assembler of stories. Michie has translated the works of others, often ancient writers, and published collections such as the Poems of Catullus, the Odes of Horace, and Helen/Euripides, the first two being Latin texts, and the third, a Greek tragedy.
Michie is particularly noted for editing The Book of Longer Short Stories, featuring twelve British stories from such authors as W. Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad.
In 1964, Hart-Davis brought out Michie's translations of Horace's Odes. Many of these versions are fully rhymed, with couplets much favoured: this, together with the tendency of the English to extend the originals, has the effect of smoothing and rounding the odes in a way the Latin does not. Often the rhyming is ingenious, though the freedom of its occasional absence also brings benefits. Thirteen of the odes, eleven of them Alcaics, are in the original metre.
Other translations followed, among them the poems of Catullus, Euripides' Helen, poems from The Greek Anthology, Martial's Epigrams, Ovid's The Art of Love, and Virgil's Eclogues: a formidable tally. In 1973 came a high point of Michie's work as a translator, a selection of La Fontaine's fables. The liveliness and sheer fun of the originals mesh wonderfully with Michie's gifts, not least his love of rhyme and of startlingly varied line lengths. Geoffrey Grigson, a stern enough critic, thought Michie's versions the best to have appeared, "earthier and sharper than Marianne Moore's."
In 1985, with the poet PJ Kavanagh, Michie co-edited the Oxford Book of Short Poems, which cunningly took poems of 13 lines as its boundary. In 1989 Michie returned to the fabulous with a handsome edition of Aesop's fables, retold in verse and finely illustrated by John Vernon Lord.
In 1990 Michie helped produce a new rendition of Aesop’s Fables in verse, accompanied by illustrations from John Vernon Lord. Although the traditional tales gained acclaim, the book was also lauded for the fresh and exciting illustrations by Lord. In 1994 Michie once again assembled some favorite verse in Collected Poems.
Michie's own poems appeared at longer intervals: 24 years on from his first book came New & Selected Poems (dedicated to PJ Kavanagh), which included all but seven of the 32 poems in Possible Laughter, and added an equal number of new poems, many describing the shifting weathers of the heart. The rueful note of self-deprecation is more marked here than in his first collection, though the air of playfulness and of defiance malgré tout is sustained, as is the technical dexterity.
Collected Poems appeared 11 years later, in 1994, with a further 21 poems. Love and death are again predominant themes, though considered with Michie's characteristic light touch.
Michie caused controversy in 2004 when his poem, Friendly Fire, was published in The Spectator (under then-editor Boris Johnson). The poem, purporting to be satirical, was a scathing attack on Scotland and the Scottish people from the perspective of an Englishman advocating the cultural and physical genocide of the people of Scotland.
Michie always had a weakness for Catholics, notwithstanding his professed atheism.
Michie was twice married and divorced. He married first, in 1954, Daphne Segré, who came to England from Jamaica with a scholarship at the Royal College of Music and became a distinguished piano teacher. Michie's second marriage was to Sarah Courtauld, in 1964. He is survived by the children of that marriage, Jake, Drogo, and Flora; by Edward, the son he had with a much-loved companion, Clare Asquith; and by his daughter with Tatiana Orlov.
