Wells, James Bradley, Ph.D. - Faculty Bio

This new translation of Pindar’s songs for victorious athletes marries philological rigour with poetic sensibility in order to represent the ethereal music of his language for a modern audience. Pindar’s poetry is synonymous with difficulty for scholars and students of classical studies. His syntax stretches the limits of ancient Greek, while his allusions to mythology and other poetic texts assume an audience that knows more than we now possibly can, given the fragmentary nature of textual and material culture records for ancient Greece.

James Bradley Wells provides an authoritative introduction, both to the poet and his art as well as to ancient athletics. Brief introductions to each victory song and a glossary supply mythological and historical information necessary to understanding Pindar’s poetry for those coming to the works for the first time. His is the largest body of textual remains that exists for ancient Greece between Homer (conventionally dated to 750 BCE) and the Classical Period (480–323 BCE), and constitutes a rich resource for politics, history, religion and social practices.

Vergil. Eclogues and Georgics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022)

That Wells comes at Vergil from two angles of approach—that of classics scholar and that of a poet in his own right—makes him perhaps uniquely qualified to deliver us these exciting new translations of Eclogues and Georgics. The triumph here is that Wells brilliantly grafts elements of English prosody onto Vergil's original, enriching the work without obscuring its original cultural context. Indeed, Wells's innovative application of Hopkins-esque sprung-rhythm and compounds—hawkshriek, ironrust, doombent—enlivens the text, helping Vergil's work take on new resonance and urgency in English. As a piece of translation and a piece of poetry, Wells's innovation is refreshing and his achievement is tremendous.

—Iain Haley Pollock, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and author of Ghost, Like a Place

Pindar’s Verbal Art (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009)

Pindar's Verbal Art offers a learned call to students of Pindar to make the fact of performance central to their analyses. Wells argues that recent scholarship does not sufficiently appreciate the fundamentally oral nature of epinician, preferring to conceptualize it instead as a written text. Instead, Wells recommends an ethnographic or sociolinguistic method that treats the epinician text as a record of a speech (not a text) event by uncovering "the communicative strategies that structure the event of epinician performance itself." For Wells, the interaction between performance and audience is central; the audience must be considered an agent of production and the ode itself a negotiation with a diverse audience for a place within the tradition.

—Nigel Nicholson, Reed College, author of Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece and The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition and the Deinomenid Empire

Poetry Publication

The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015)

Although the speaker in the opening of James Wells's beautiful The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece says in the opening poem, "I do not have the tonguefeel for nomenclature," I wouldn't pay that much mind. Because this little book is all about noticing and naming with exquisite precision both exterior and interior landscapes, such that by the end of it you too might more fully inhabit your imagination and the great questions that reside there.

—Ross Gay, Indiana University, author of Inciting Joy and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

The great Greek paradox, from Sophocles to Kazantzakis, is "wonder and dread," and James Wells uses this paradox in his poems. In his muscular, densely descriptive, word-loving language, Wells articulates the double-edged ancient realities of nature and of man that still echo in modern Greece. And he hears wonder and dread in the echoes of recent centuries too. What he gets into his poems is the many-layered quality of Greek history, culture, language and nature. His poems, inspired by this, are layered with it, and he can look at London or Illinois, and at Greece itself, with a special, almost holy, attentiveness.

—Reginald Gibbons, Northwestern University, author of Renditions and How Poems Think

Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013)

James Bradley Wells's volume of poems is a meditation through Midwestern rural settings. Guiding him is biblical and classical story. We hear a skilled wordsmith's Frostian meditation as he bicycles about his Promised Land, Canaan and Vergilian terrains, and pedals around a family Missouri farm, an Indiana or Kentucky backyard, New York's Upper West Side, and the Rome studio of Fellini's Satyricon. We overhear talk about his grandfather's land projects and Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, tune in to Marsilio Ficino's astrology determining our medical "humors," and glimpse the medieval Cloud of Unknowing. Throughout this carefully constructed romp, on bike or not, Wells is close to the land, his deep companion. As the poet rambles through mystic vision and reveals farm and tombstone incident, there lives the cry of the skeptic philosopher poet Lucretius. An astonishing achievement.

—Willis Barnstone, author of The Gnostic Bible, The Restored New Testament, and Stickball on 88th Street

Wells's poetry, fiction, and translations of poetry have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Journal of Italian Translation, The Museum of Americana, New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Nude Bruce Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Solstice: A Magazine for Diverse Voices, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stone Canoe, Western Humanities Review, and World Poetry Review, among other journals.