Poem of the week: Epigram 28 (After Callimachus) by Stephanie Burt

A good pub-quiz question for shy, bookish types: who invented the library catalogue? The best answer is probably Callimachus. Born around 310BC, in Cyrene, on the north coast of Libya, he produced a 120-volume guide to that dazzling store of the ancient world’s knowledge, the Library of Alexandria. Working there must have been a humbling experience.

Poets often like to boast about how the grandeur of their work will grant them immortality – think of the Roman poet Horace calling his own odes “a monument more lasting than bronze”. Not Callimachus. In an age of bombastic epics, he preferred modest, learned miniatures, witty dramatic monologues, and poems about the ephemerality of love.

“I’m tired of flashy long poems,” he complains, in the American poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s new version. “Shorter means sweeter.”

Like Alexander Pope’s Imitations of Horace, which name-dropped 18th-century celebrities, Burt’s marvellous new book After Callimachus brings an ancient voice into the modern world. Her Callimachus sends text messages, reads Ezra Pound and listens to Taylor Swift. These are playful homages, rather than strict translations.

When one poem begins “The f---ers named an airport for a tyrant,” it’s clear we’re not in ancient Alexandria any more. But some of the changes are more subtle. In the poem below, for instance, the Greek original was a dramatic monologue in the voice of “Micylus”. Scholars are not sure who Micylus was – a forgotten poet, perhaps? It has been suggested the name was chosen because it means “small”; one critic translates it as “Titch”.

I like to imagine that the mouse-like Micylus was the author of one of the old scrolls Callimachus found at the library, unregarded even in his own day, but resurrected through this tribute to a quiet life. By leaving out Micylus’s name, Burt turns the poem into a gently rhymed epitaph for Callimachus himself, written with a featherlight touch. Arguably, this poem’s modesty is as much an act as Horace’s boasting – but I know which I’m more charmed by.

Epigram 28

Cover me quietly, stone.
I wrote verse. I meant little in life,
blamed few and injured none;
I tried to get along.
My writings kept me warm.
If I with my featherlight pen
confused prestige with worth,
praised evil, or ever wronged
the few who wanted a fight,
allow me, generous earth
to do no further harm—
let me atone in my sleep;
I with my good will,
so lightly and often given,
who rest with nothing to keep,
and nothing to offer heaven.

From After Callimachus: Poems by Stephanie Burt (Princeton, £22). To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop