Many more male translators of the classics have been published through history than female. While recent years have witnessed the release of some fantastic translations by women, several of which have found a place in this anthology, it would have been unrepresentative to have sought a 50:50 ratio in a collection that spans the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. In making my selections I chose the texts which most appealed to me on their own merit.

I haven’t always chosen the translation that is closest to the ancient text. Sometimes a looser translation can capture the spirit of a piece in a way that a strictly accurate one cannot. Ted Hughes’s telling of Ovid’s story of Pygmalion, a man who fell in love with a statue of his own creation, is masterly even where it deviates from the Latin. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid stated that Pygmalion was disgusted by women’s vices. Hughes tells us what those vices were. His Pygmalion is deeply psychological, picturing ‘every woman’s uterus’ as a ‘spider’, her perfume as a ‘floating horror’. Ovid’s Pygmalion fears bruising her lifelike flesh. Hughes’s grips her ‘to feel flesh yield under the pressure/That half wanted to bruise her/Into a proof of life, and half did not/Want to hurt or mar or least of all/Find her the solid ivory he had made her’.

I find that the best translators respect the ancient texts while making them their own. One of my favourites is based on a Latin comic novel about a wealthy former slave called Trimalchio who hosts a dinner party. The mysterious translation I have chosen was originally – but deceptively – attributed to Oscar Wilde. Though this attribution has since been retracted, the story still reads like a celebration of Victorian decadence. You can almost hear the voice of Wilde – or even Huysmans – in the description of Trimalchio, the louche protagonist of the story, being ‘carried in to the sound of music… bolstered up among a host of tiny cushions’. It is not surprising that the Roman story went on to inspire F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the twentieth century.

Elsewhere in this collection, early modern England encroaches upon Francis Hickes’s seventeenth-century translation of a story about a dream by the ancient satirist Lucian. ‘After I had given over going to schoole’, wrote Hickes, merging his own voice with that of the Greek satirist, ‘and was grown to be a stripling of some good stature, my father advised with his friends, what it were best for him to breed mee to: and the opinion of most was, that to make mee a scholler, the labour would be long, the charge great, and would require a plentifull purse…’ When a translator accommodates a story to his own times and tongue he helps to keep it alive.