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Rex
(Ernest) Warner
(b. March 9, 1905, Birmingham, Warwickshire, Eng.- d. June 24, 1986, Wallingford, Oxfordshire) Rex Warner, a prolific writer, author and scholar of the Classics grew up in England as a contemporary of the poets W.H. Auden and C. Day Lewis. A noted historical novelist, poet, critic and accomplished translator of Greek and Roman texts, he is considered a literary legend. After graduating from Wadham College, Oxford (1928), Warner became a schoolteacher and taught in England and Egypt. In the 1940s, he served as director of the British Institute in Athens. He moved to the United States in 1961, and from 1963 to 1974 served as a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Warner's early novels are expressionist allegories with a radical bent that raise concerns about power and maniacal capitalism; highly regarded among these are The Wild Goose Chase (1937), and The Aerodrome (1941), considered to be his masterpiece in this genre. Warner also wrote several fictionalized historical novels, including The Young Caesar (1958), Imperial Caesar (1960) and Pericles the Athenian (1963); his essays, such as The Cult of Power (1946) and Men of Athens (1973), were also influential. He wrote only one book of poetry, Poems (1937). Warner made his mark in the field of translation of ancient texts as the translator of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides's work, The Peloponnesian War; the translation sold nearly one million copies. Warner's translations from Greek, also including Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (1947), Xenophon's Anabasis (1949), and Euripides' Hippolytus(l950) and Helen (1951) are elegant, clear, and direct. He was the translator as well of the Modern Greek poet, George Seferis, who won the Nobel Prize in 1963. |