The Songs of Bilitis

About this book

An invented ancient voice speaks through brief prose poems of country life, song, memory and loss. Pierre Louÿs places Bilitis first in Pamphylia, then in Mytilene and Cyprus, surrounding her poems with a purported biography and a story of their recovery from a tomb. The English translator's preface explicitly explains the supposed translation from Greek as a literary pretence. Bilitis and the archaeological discovery belong to Louÿs's fiction. The opening Bucolics in Pamphylia gives that fiction a world of flocks, olive trees, flowers and domestic mornings. Song of the Fields invokes Pan, a later Song becomes a mournful dialogue, and The Rain watches the small changes brought by a spring shower. Alternating title pages and prose passages give each piece a distinct pause on the page. This English edition credits Horace Manchester Brown with translating Louÿs's French and includes his preface, signed at Milwaukee in September 1903. Its illustration list names a portrait of Pierre Louÿs and three further plates. The Aldus Society published the London and New York volume in 1904. Its pastoral and mythological setting accompanies mature literary material rather than a historical collection of surviving Greek poems.