Reviews & Comments
“…an enchanting volume….profoundly entertaining….the book breathes fresh life into the poetry of the Consolation.”―Dana Delibovi, Cable Street
“That such a collage could ever have been brought out in print at all is a marvelous thing; that it could be reprinted in the godforsaken year of 2024 is close to a miracle.”―Steve Donahue, The Best Books of 2024: Literature in Translation
I would not be surprised if there are Boethian scholars who have refused to translate the Consolation just for fear of walking through a minefield of Boethian verse….But see Boethius: The Poems from On The Consolation of Philosophy, Translated Out the Original Latin into Diverse Historical Englishings Diligently Collaged by Peter Glassgold for an interesting series of Old English experiments. —Joel C. Relihan, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
The project Glassgold undertakes is linguistic and poetic, a tribute to the literary history of the Consolation in English that conflates and combines quotations from familiar texts, specimens of language, and evidence of the concept of change itself. — Kenneth C. Hawley, Director, Brian S. Donaghey Center of Boethian Studies
Writing in prison, Boethius―a philosopher of late antiquity who had served the king of the Ostrogoths―explores why bad things happen to good people. The universal resonance of the question provided On the Consolation of Philosophy with an unmatched translation pedigree: it was Englished by Alfred the Great, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I, among others. Peter Glassgold’s gorgeous translingual renderings of the Latin poetry from the book refashion the originals and their English rephrasings into a composition of “lower limit speech, upper limit music,” letting the reader overhear, in snatches, how Boethius was received over the ages. Sometimes intimately near and clear, sometimes estranged and distanced by older linguistic forms, Glassgold’s experiment shows that abstract sound poetry of the avante-garde (zaum, Lautgedichte) can be reconceived historically, as philology. In poetry, it is incomprehension that is the mother of beauty.
—Eugene Ostashevsky
Glassgold’s luminous layerings of Boethius launch us deep into the stratospheres of English. What a consolation to have these ancestral strains back in print. — Richard Sieburth