Homunculus

Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies 'one of the strangest documents of the human mind', and W.H. Auden singled him out as a 'really remarkable poet'. Womack's versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.

James Womack is a poet and translator. He is the author of two previous collections: Misprint (2012) and On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017). He translates from Spanish and Russian, and has produced versions of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Manuel Vilas for Carcanet. He has also translated works by authors including Silvina Ocampo, Roberto Arlt, Sergio del Molino, Batyr Berdiev and Annasoltan Kekilova. He lives and works in Cambridge.