This past weekend, Alicia E. Stallings, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, came to campus to give two talks as part of the 27th annual Roberts lecture series put on by the Classical Studies department.

Stallings, a “decorated poet” and translator as described by Classical Studies professor Marc Mastrangelo, resides in Athens, Greece. Her poetry focuses on subjects including classical mythology, motherhood, family and contemporary Greece. This was her first visit to Dickinson.

In her first lecture, “Translator as poet, poet as translator,” Stallings said, “My life as a translator and as a poet are woven together.” She shared her journey in poetry and translation, from her first published translation of Catullus’s Poem 46 in “Classical Outlook” in 1990. 

Stallings shared that after moving to Athens in January 1999, she was further confronted with the intricacies of language and translation, which she used as a way to learn modern Greek. She also discussed the interplay of the way that her bilingual children understand both Greek and English in a different way from how she does.

She described translations as “losing the texture and color of the original,” and that she has to balance conveying literal and metaphorical meanings. “Translation is a kind of sexual reproduction. It will have some of the DNA of the translator and of the target language,” she said.

Stallings said, “I believe in radical fidelity” when it comes to the “metameaning” of translation, as opposed to each literal word. 

She read several of her poems aloud, including “The Companions of Odysseus in Hades” and “Refugee Fugue.” The latter explores Stallings’s experience with and reaction to Greece’s refugee crisis, in which thousands of migrants suffer and drown attempting to reach Greece by sea.

Regarding the form of her poems, Stallings described rhyme as “a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. It makes it clear that this is a poem. For me, rhyme is a kind of echolocation. It’s a way of proceeding through the world by sound. It has a lot of mystical properties to me.”

Her second lecture, “Poets, Painters, Parthenon and Plunder,” examined the artistic and literary reactions to the plunder of the Parthenon by British Lord Elgin in the early 1800s, the marbles of which continue to reside in the British Museum today. 

She discussed the reactions of British poets including Keats, Byron and Hemans to the marbles’ arrival and exhibition in London, which ranged from praise to virulent criticism. She also discussed the legacy of their loss today in modern Greek art and poetry.