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Title: A Disservice to Martial
Review: This is a very poor translation. Martial is a lively, urbane poet with a razor-sharp wit; his language is precise and powerful. James Michie's translation is insipid as poetry, and often unrecognizable when set next to the Latin. A single example: Mr. Michie has a penchant for translating simple Latin words like "terra" into configurations like "turf and dew," rather than the obvious and elegantly simple "earth." In Michie's translation, Martial's more beautiful elegiac lyrics are made gaudy and his urban bullets of observation become flaccid. Get the Loeb Martial and a good dictionary and work through the epigrams yourself. You will be better served by Loeb's literal translation than something that sounds as if it were written by a mediocre pre-Raphaelite poet.
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