Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation

Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus, were at the same time among the greatest poets of the ancient world. Their work is rarely treated — and still more rarely translated — in its original form as poetry. The complete extant fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles are collected here for the first time in a translation responsive to the original verse texts.

Parmenides’ philosophical fragments are here given as the poetic remains of the thinker from Elea in Southern Italy whom Socrates wondered at and Plato held in awe. What emerges from the poetry is at once an uncompromising vision of absolute Being and a compassionate understanding of the human cosmos.

The poetry of Empedocles –reincarnationist, naturalist, cosmologist, religous leader, physiologist, and metaphysician — is presented here in the personal idiom of the fifth-century Sicilian who has been called the last of the Greek shamans.

“Lombardo’s translations of hard Greek into sound and lucid English is an enviable example of the translator’s art. He translates well because he writes well; he writes well because he knows the tone, texture, and weight of words, how to keep English idiomatic and natural, how to build a phrase and sentence.” –Guy Davenport