The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics)

ABOUT DE RERUM NATURA--THE NATURE OF THINGSStephen Greenblatt, in "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" re-ignited interest in a long poem by Titus Lucretius Carus, who lived around the time of Augustus. As Greenblatt tells the fascinating story, the papal secretary, Poggio, searching for old Latin and Greek manuscripts, found a tattered copy of the previously unknown De Rerum Natura in an alpine monastery.Master of church theology, calligraphy and Latin, Poggio recognized the fiery nature of Lucretius' work and gave thought to the fiery nature of the Inquisition. Copies of the manuscript circulated at first only cautiously and only to a few trusted friends. Lucretius' ideas, expressed in noble poetry, challenged thinking of earth as divinely created for the use of man and of a Creator to be worshipped in awe, fear, and trembling.Lucretius, following Greek philosopher Epicurus & his school, sees everything evolving from the dance of atoms, infinite in number in an infinite space. These irreducible entities cannot be divided, created, or destroyed. The atoms are unceasingly in random motion. Some collide & veer off; some collide and stick. These atomic clusters form other clusters; and over enough time and enough collisions, they form all we know, from galaxies, gastropods and us. When we die, the bonds dissolve, and the atoms continue the eternal dance of creation, evolution, dissolution.There are, writes Lucretius, no gods and if there were or are, they have no interest in us. So there is no reason for us to sacrifice Iphegenias for fair winds so the Greek fleet can sail from Aulis to Troy, no reason to be afraid of or worshipful to the gods, and no reason, for ourselves to fear of death or anticipate some future mystic bliss.Six sections form what we have of "The Nature of Things," which ends in the horrors of a plague in Athens. This section is thought by some to be an addition and by others, as evidence Lucretius died before he could revise and complete the manuscripts.Intended as an explanation of everything, the chapters treat of--Matter & Void--The Dance of the Atoms--Mortality and the Soul--The Senses--Cosmos and Civilization--Weather and the EarthThus, the book itself, the creation of a mind striving for reason and understanding presented through poetry of grandeur and nobility. It can make for chicken-skin reading in describing the physical nature of the world although Lucretius's view of human relations makes for X-rated, even blush-raising reading in his discussions of the senses and sexuality.THE TRANSLATIONA. E. Stallings, an acclaimed poet fluent in Latin and Greek, gave herself the challenge of translating the 7,400 lines as rhymed couplets using "fourteeners," a long loping line. "Heptameters are roomy enough," she writes, "to embrace the Latin dactylic hexameter." (p.xxvii). The result has been lauded as smooth, easy to read, flowing. I agree.She uses contemporary images and language where she feels this best conveys the poem as Lucretius' hearers would have experienced it. "Stop the presses" is an anachronism, for example, one of many and intentional, in addition to word choices somewhat more Anglo-Saxon than Latinate. Few would mistake Stallings' translation for a (hypothetical) one by Dr. Johnson.And as in Stallings other poems, here and there, she does not resist the irresistable urge to echo more recent poems, such as "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair." (see p.253). To me, this makes for an extra bit of fun for the reader, as it probably did for this translator, and for a translation that moves energetically.I compared Stallings with a highly regarded previous translation, one by Rolfe Humphries, now 40 years old. They're really different. Humphries' blank verse is almost as if Shakespeare's "little Latin and less Greek" permitted him to translate Lucretius. Stallings' rhymed couplets, in contrast and over the 7,400 lines, is startlingly more like rap's driving beats and end rhymes:Consider, for example, Humphries' in Book II"Why do you hesitate? Why doubt that ReasonAlone has absolute power? Our life is spent in shadowAnd it suffers in the dark."And Stallings,"Why doubt that reason alone can quench this terror with its spark,Especially since life is one long labor in the dark?"Stallings' voice is both her own and that of Lucretius. They are poets, and in this splendid translation, both sounds and sense are honored.ANY READER ALERTS? Not really, although as mentioned, Lucretius may have been channeling the Kama Sutra a bit and is forthright in his detailed, acute observations which constitute much of the arguments. It was an age of candour among some poets such as Catullus and Horace.There's a useful introductory essay and an excellent appendix with notes, also quite different from what Humphries thought telling the reader, the one more oriented to philosophy, the other more to philosophers themselves.OVERALL: Now I have two fine versions of Lucretius, and would not give up one for the other. Readers who already have their cherished favorite may wish to have as much of a good thing as possible and get Stallings's Lucretius too. Readers coming new to Lucretius, however, might happily consider A. E. Stalling's as their first dance with the atoms.

I have read bits and pieces of Lucretius over the years and has a general idea of his ideas. However, reading the whole text in A E. Stallings' wonderful translation was eye opening. The modern world is contained in this ancient text. I wonder what today would be like if Lucretius had not been systematically suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church of the dark ages. He predicted evolution, the atomic basis of matter, scientific method, the big bang, and many other ideas associated with modernity. If Lucretius had not been suppressed we might be centuries more advanced scientifically and technology than we are today. If the reader is interested in the story of how the suppression occurred, read Stephen Greenblatt's THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN, an excellent historical account.

I'm more rating the translation. It was okay, but at the end he says that he took out all the "thee's and thou's " . I happen to like that kind of language, if it sounds more like the original Latin. He also translates something to make it sound like it was bullet shot out of a gun and translates the word "tricked out" when talking about attaching blades to chariots. He does each of these at least twice that I can remember right now in his translation. The actual book is just okay, but I can't really rate that. He sure does have an obsession with atoms, he loves telling you how atoms are everywhere, that there are different atoms and it's the atoms that cause things like magnetism. He also loves mentioning vacuums. It is pretty fascinating how many things he gets right in here in regards to atoms, and Epicureus lived around 400 BC which is who he apparently admired and formed his beliefs about the atoms and vacuums. Anyway, if you like reading ancient texts, this is a little bit of a slog to get through but it has it's interesting moments. If nothing else, it's interesting to see how this Roman reasoned and explained phenomena like clouds, rain, magnetism, stars, things like that. I was really tempted to give it three stars because like I said, it was kind of a slog to get through but that could also be that the translator wanted to make it too "English" and less "Latin", which takes away some of it's charm.

Lucretius missed being translated in full by any of the classic English early modern translators: Chapman, Dryden, Pope. (Dryden did tantalizing selections) So it's fitting that Stallings goes back to those roots with a translation in rhymed fourteeners (think ballad form: da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum/da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, in couplets). There are a number of reasonably good translations available, including Latham's reliable prose in the older Penguin Classics edition, but this is the most ambitious modern attempt at a full, poetic translation of what is both (in Latin) a marvelous, sonorous epic poem and a fascinating account of Epicurean philosophy (serious, scientific, respectful of the gods but the opposite of conventional piety, mordantly disrespectful of love and politics).

An incredible achievement for mankind done more than a century before 0CE. Epicurus through Lucretius speaks to us through time and through the void and makes the idea of particles come to life. We rediscover an ancient new way of understanding the universe along with a framework to live life without fear or superstition. All inside this book with the elegance and simplicity of verses in a poem.

This translation of an ancient book is a fascinating source of information on a surprisingly modern way of thinking from ancient Rome. It is hard to imagine a philosopher at the time of Christ thinking about everything being made up of atoms in constant motion!

An absolutely superb translation of Lucretius. And she does it mostly in rhyming couplets. An amazing piece of translation. Don't live without it.

Wonderful poetry!! Something written so long ago can be pertinent even today.Amazing!!

“The Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura” in Latin) by Titus Lucretius Carus is a first century BC poem, introducing and explaining Epicurean philosophy to the Romans. Although written three centuries after the life of Epicurus, the book is the most complete overview of Epicurean teaching as well as one of the great Latin poems. It has made Lucretius the most famous Epicurean follower and his poem a subject for commentaries ever since.Lucretius is just as his philosophical master an atomist and empiricist, addressing a variety of topics in this work. These start with the base concepts that the universe consists of either atoms or void and that everything in the universe follows the same mechanistic laws. These concepts are then applied to a variety of topics, ranging from the mortality of the soul, the role of the Gods and religion, to the senses, the development of societies and explanations natural phenomena.I enjoyed reading “The Nature of Things” in combination with other sources to give context to sometimes dry prose. As with most of the Penguin classics, the introduction and footnotes are excellent and provide further details and explanations. It adds to the appreciation of this great work. Or as Cicero wrote: "The poems of Lucretius … exhibit many flashes of genius, and yet show great mastership”.

The words in this book are probably different to the original, prior to the translations by the monks and various scholars over the years but the essence still lingers. Here, Lucretius is discovering what is means to think intensely about the objects and symbols that span our glorious planet and the all consuming Universe. This is a sign of our growing intelligence as human beings questioning their surroundings. Our ancestors were already on the right tracks when they discovered fire and ways of crafting tools to hunt and sustain their hunger with but the early civilisations took that to another plateau. Lucretius opens his mind to the wonders of philosophy and the brilliance that intensity of thought brings to us. What I find curious is that many people the world over still haven't reached this stage of evolution.

I couldn't get past the need to make the words into verse.I'm sure the original Latin poetry is lovely. But trying to jam it into 14 syllable rhyming English makes the whole thing difficult to follow.And maybe I am a philistine and this is wonderful poetry, but I wanted to read it more to find out what Lucretius said, rather than to have nice flowery language.So I gave up pretty quickly and bought a prose translation instead (and I bought "The Swerve" too. A great book describing the saving of. on the Nature of Things and its impact in the world. I highly recommend that)

A man filled with the passion to explain why things are the way they are; a mind that rejects any religious explanation and strives for natural explanations for natural phenomena; and a language displaying such an elegant style. If your mind is already bored of irrational explanations for natural causes and so demands natural explanations, this book is the very same attempt done long ago, when a man of the sort had nothing but his mind to satisfy this desire.

I enjoyed the writing, choice of phrases, and insights. I did not like how often Lucretius repeated himself, time after time.