A. E. Stallings
Published: 2020-04-28
Total Pages: 118
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"A virtuosic, witty, charming translation of the greatest epic ever written about mice, with wonderful illustrations by Grant Silverstein. Stallings’ elegant rhyming couplets are the perfect choice to honor the mousy Muse."—Emily Wilson, Professor of Classics, University of Pennsylvania From the award-winning poet and translator A. E. Stallings comes a lively new edition of the ancient Greek fable The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice. Originally attributed to Homer, but now thought to have been composed centuries later by an unknown author, The Battle is the tale of a mouse named Crumbsnatcher who is killed by the careless frog King Pufferthroat, sparking a war between the two species. This dark but delightful parable about the foolishness of war is illustrated throughout in striking drawings by Grant Silverstein. The clever introduction is written from the point of view of a mouse who argues that perhaps the unknown author of the fable is not a human after all: “Who better than a mouse, then, to compose our diminutive, though not ridiculous, epic, a mouse born and bred in a library, living off lamp oil, ink, and the occasional nibble of a papyrus, constantly perched on the shoulder of some scholar or scholiast of Homer, perhaps occasionally whispering in his ear? Mouse, we may remember, is only one letter away from Muse.” "[Stallings] couplets . . . have a lively, nimble music that should captivate modern ears . . . Providing an earthy, oboe-like obligato to Ms. Stallings's airs are the illustrations of Grant Silverstein, cross-hatched sketches that multiply like mice on the page . . . The Battle, in which beans are happily worn rather than eaten, still has the power to delight."—Wall Street Journal A. E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Athens, Greece since 1999. She studied Classics at the University of Georgia, and later at Oxford University. She has published four collections of poetry, Archaic Smile (which won the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award), Hapax (recipient of the Poets’ Prize), Olives (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Like (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry). Her translation of Lucretius (into rhyming fourteeners), The Nature of Things, was called by Peter Stothard in the TLS “One of the most extraordinary classical translations of recent times.” Grant Silverstein is an American artist who specializes in etchings of a narrative character and in studies of figures, landscapes, and animals. With his wife and two cats, he spends winters holed up in his studio in rural Pennsylvania, where he uses a catch and release system for visiting mice and the occasional frog. Come spring, he ventures forth to display his work at outdoor festivals; he feels fortunate to have made his living this way for forty years. He has illustrated two previous Paul Dry Books titles, Davey McGravy by David Mason and The Verb 'To Bird' by Peter Cashwell.
