Introducing F. A. Wright

'Noteworthy as perhaps the feeblest verse translation of any ancient poet'

-- so wrote Peter Whigham (1975) as he surveyed the predecessors to his own Meleager. Whigham himself, though, was reliably dreadful, so let us not prejudge. Who then was 'F. A. Wright', and what can we make of his Complete Poems of Meleager of Gadara (1924)?

Frederick Adam Wright (1869-1946), F.A., LL.D., was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He taught classics at Birkbeck for an astounding thirty-seven years (1898-1935) and seems to have thrown himself into the role of affable don. In the 1910s he had published a small handful of classical notes, giving his address as 'Katoombah', Thorpe Bay, Essex. Then came a flurry. He wrote a History of Later Greek Literature and translated later Greek authors: Alciphron's Mimes, Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story, and what he called the Complete Love Poems of the Palatine Anthology, all in the same year, 1923. His Meleager of 1924 will have been spun off from that last one. The same year he had a full Martial out, though at least for that there was a co-author.

Frankly I don't understand his publication history at all. Look on his (online) works, ye research-active, and despair:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Wright%2C%20F%2E%20A%2E%20%28Frederick%20Adam%29%2C%201869%2D1946

How did he possibly cram in so much between 1923 and 1925? A trickle before his mid-fifties, and then all this. Had he been stockpiling it all in a trunk under his bed? Actually that is my least hopeless guess. Roger Pearse has done better digging than I, on his excellent blog.

When Wright comes to the Anthology -- and we may presume he comes in a hurry -- he accepts the erroneous tradition that Meleager had arranged his Garland alphabetically, finds no trace of that arrangement in the Greek Anthology today, and concludes that all traces of it must have been obliterated by its 'later editors' (one would not go to him for the details). Accordingly he is free to devise an arrangement that respects the evident trajectory of Meleager's career, and in this too he follows a known though misleading path. We will look into that next time.