"An excellent piece of work. Lombardo and McClure have struck the right balance between literal and lyrical, formal and informal . Each of the letters has a distinct voice-something clear in the Latin but difficult to convey. "There are many small pleasures for the reader looking at the Latin (duplicated line-starts and -ends, verbal effects, etc.). Most are unobtrusive, which is all to the good. This translation is not designed to be a crib, though it wouldn't be bad as one. More importantly, the poems read well in English.

There are lots of glancing references to the tropes of elegy, but they won't slow down the first-time reader of the poems. The translators have even made something of several of the puns (e.g. verbum/vela dare ), an impressive feat. " Welch's Introduction is perfectly pitched ; it gives a lot of useful information in short compass, and it does so in a lively manner, with full attention to the scholarship but not so as the general reader would notice." -Laurel Fulkerson, Professor Emerita of Classics, Florida State University.