The Sweetness of Honey and the Sting of Bees: A Book of Love from the Ancient Mediterranean - Hardcover

Two Thousand Year Old Passions Live On
Unlike war or empire, love leaves little trace for the archaeologists: only the written kisses survive the brief incandescent alchemy of human passion. Michelle Lovric describes how she and Nikiforos Doxiadis Mardas worked on their book:"When Niki and I sat down to work on Sweetness of Honey, we knew that we wanted to breathe warm life into the love poems and letters of both the great and unknown vanished lovers of the ancient Mediterranean. If you go back to the primary material, peel off the layers of worthy Victorian translations, you find that the two-thousand-year-old words are as fresh, passionate and sometimes as rude as today's raw poetry and song lyrics... ancient poets are not shadow but a mirror of our own experiences.When Niki and I began to translate, we had this thought very much in mind. So we didn't sit in studious silence. We played songs that echoed the joy, desperation and mischief that we were finding in the Latin and the Greek. We played Beautiful South's 'Song for Whoever,' the anthem to literary promiscuity which strongly echoes Meleager. We played Jeff Buckley's 'Hallelujah.' We played Billie Holiday, k.d. lang and Tracy Chapman. We wanted to make the book seductive to people who didn't even know they could love the classics. The cover is gold-stamped and die-cut to reveal an alluring glimpse of a beautiful face. Our photographer, received a most unusual brief: for the backgrounds we poured honey onto an old mirror, sprinkled it with gold dust, and added an antique gold bee.The rich and unusual result has won both praise and love. I can honestly say that of all the books I have created, it is the one which still gives me the most pleasure." - Michelle Lovric