Body Bags / Simonides

Website: www.stanzapoetry.org

Simonides was the Greek poet who wrote one of the classical world's most famous epitaphs, for the Spartan dead at Thermopylae. Here some of his epitaphs appear in translations by poet Robert Crawford alongside evocative, square format, black and white photographs by Norman McBeath.

Body Bags / Simonides

Robert Crawford's Scots versions of the ancient Greek poet Simonides sit arrestingly beside Norman McBeath's photographs.

The greatest poems of the ancient Greek poet Simonides are body bags. Zipped inside are the remains of human lives. Most of Simonides’s work survives as fragments. Often no longer than captions, these fragments’ very brevity gives them an eerie contemporaneity in our era saturated with its own shortened text messages. Here are tiny ‘texts’ that are eroded yet seem set to last forever. Remembering those lost in combat zones, the epitaphs of Simonides go with the apparent timelessness of black-and-white photography; yet, like photographs, they are occasioned by particular instants. Photographs, body bags, curt memorials, they are tagged with the names of the dead.

Ootlin, tell oor maisters this: e lie here deid. We did as we were telt.

Robert Crawford and Norman McBeath would like to express their sincere gratitude for financial support from: Creative Scotland; The University of St Andrews; The Scottish Government through an Arts and Humanities Award administered by The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Part of StAnza.

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