Into a crowd of affordable, scholarly translations of Pindar's Odes steps Andrew Miller's new edition for the University of California Press. In a word, this edition, for reasons I'll provide here, stands ‘best and preeminent over others’ (here I borrow from Peleus’ command to Achilles before he heads off to war at Troy at Iliad 11.783 as Miller does on p.2).

It provides a clear, readable, enjoyable English translation, extensive notes which render accessible to the general reader Pindar's foreboding array of mythological and cultural allusions, a helpful self-pronouncing glossary, and a masterful, erudite introduction that, I think, will become a standard resource. Together, these make this edition of the Odes a powerful tool for the modern student.

I highly recommend it for use in classics in translation courses, and foresee a special use in interdisciplinary courses that combine the humanities and the study of athletics (Miller's discussion of Greek athletics in his introduction is very useful to that end).

Still, it has limitations in its efficacy in expected classroom use—which I'll also note below.

First, some brief setting. Pindaric studies and translations of the poet himself tend to overwhelm the novice reader. So great is the gap between Pindar's propositional content (long-dead athletes in long-forgotten Panhellenic contests) and poetic form (epinikia—commissioned odic performances which rehearsed athletic victories for athletes and their families) from modern readers’ own literary interests and sensibilities that many lightly-glossed or lightly-introduced editions of the Odes are simply incomprehensible to the Greek-less non-classicist. This makes these texts close to unusable in a modern high school or college classroom; it goes without saying that the poetic importance and beauty of Pindar is simply lost for these unfortunate students.

Miller's Odes aim for the middle way in Pindaric translation, hoping to make Pindar accessible to the general English reader while sacrificing as little as possible in textual fidelity. He uses a pleasant iambic rhythm (to render ‘verse as verse’), without excessive adherence to Pindar's own poetic form which might produce strange concoctions in English. His diction is, as he describes it, ‘vigorous’ (xi) while remaining plainly understood for a college-age reader. His straightforward verse translations in Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation (Hackett, 1996) laid the foundations for this approach.

His plain, effective rendering of Pindar is enviable—and reminds this reviewer most of Diane Arnson Svarlien's under-appreciated translation for Perseus Project 1.0 (Yale University Press, 1991).

The result is memorable lines of English poetry. For instance, the famous opening lines of Nemean 5 sing (219): ‘I am no statue-maker, fashioning images / that stand in idleness and do not budge / beyond their bases. No! On every / cargo boat and every skiff, sweet song, / set forth now from Aegina, spreading wide the news’. And this from Nemean 3: ‘Various actions thirst for various rewards; / what triumph at the games most loves is song, / deftest escorts of crowns and deeds of prowess’ (204). Olympian 1, which, to the average reader, determines whether one turns the page or not, reads: ‘Best is water, and gold, like blazing fire by night, / shines forth preeminent amid the lordliness of wealth’ (25).

As impressive as Miller's achievement is, I list now a few criticisms of this volume.

The introduction, while notable for its broad learnedness and laudable in its clarity of prose, will occasionally lose a non-academic audience (namely, the audience we teach). It impresses the classicist; but liberal use of transliterated Greek and phrases like the ‘dative case with modal force’ (23) will hinder the general reader.

The introduction missed an opportunity, I think, to put into plain English why Pindar is considered to be the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Rather, we get a lot of the how he did it. But a general-purpose introduction, I think, should fill out the picture of the enduring beauty of Pindar's poetry, and give modern voice to Quintilian's appraisal that his verse was an eloquentiae flumine (‘flood of eloquence’) (10.1.61).

Desired by this reviewer, too, was a broader take on the influence and afterlife of Pindar's poetry—e.g., on the influence of the Pindaric ode in European letters in the centuries following Pierre de Ronsard's Odes (1550). Admittedly, some brief mention is made in the preface, where Miller notes Voltaire's famous quip on the divin Pindare: i.e., that he is a poet whom all praise but no one understands. But this is too subtle for the average student to really take note.

In English, for instance, the influence of the Pindaric form is great: Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Shelley (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) all imitated Pindar to great effect, producing some of the more memorable odes in the English language.

Lastly, the present volume lacks a helpful bibliography for students wishing to dip their toes into the exciting waters of contemporary Pindaric studies (alluded to in the preface and introduction to this edition). In this respect it is deficient with regard to the impressive ode-by-ode secondary scholarship apparatus presented by the Oxford World's Classics 2008 edition.

But these are desires for amplification of the present volume and do not affect my strong recommendation. The work as it stands is the best one-volume edition of Pindar's Odes to high school and college students currently available. Its scholarship will satisfy the expert; its dependable, enjoyable, often beautiful rendering of Pindar's poetry will satisfy the student and teacher alike.

In closing, I would like to thank Lucinda Alwa, magistra carissima mea, for her notes and suggestions on this review—an educator well-versed not only in Pindar, but in lighting a love of Greek and of Latin that does not fade.