Bound Voices #001: A Conversation with Victoria Moul
Where Pindar meets the nursery — poetry’s past and present in conversation.
“Poetry is what is lost in translation,” Frost said.
But for Victoria Moul, translation is where poetry begins again.
In the inaugural edition of Bound Voices, I speak with poet, translator, and scholar Victoria Moul, whose work bridges languages and centuries.
From the cadences of Latin and Greek to the domestic rhythms of Paris in 2025, Moul’s writing listens across time. A former professor at University College London and now full-time writer and translator, she is the author of Poetry in the Classical Tradition and the curator of the Substack Horace & Friends, where the ancient and the modern meet in luminous conversation.
Here, she speaks about leaving academia, translating what cannot be translated, and how even Pindar might soothe a teething baby.
G. K. Allum: You’ve lived inside several literary traditions at once: Latin, Greek, French, English and even Sanskrit. How does writing a poem in 2025 Paris feel after years immersed in voices from antiquity? Do you hear their cadences in your own lines?
Victoria Moul:
Quite a lot of the poetry I write has some sort of relationship to translation, broadly understood – I mean including all the ways in which one poem might respond to another. But often this is very obscure. I’ve just published a little pair of poems in Poetry London imagining that Moses had not been found, left overlooked in his basket. Those poems arose directly, in terms of how and when I wrote them, from quite intense reading and translating of some poems written by the French poet Robert Desnos during the occupation of France – I mean I turned over the page where I was wrestling with a translation and wrote them pretty much straight down and went back to the translation -- but I don’t think anyone would guess that. There are no obvious links at all and there’s certainly nothing about Moses in Desnos. For me a new poem in English quite often arises somehow sort of sidelong out of quite meticulous work like that – looking up words in another language, trying to work out what is going on and how a poem has the effect it does.
G. K: You recently left academia to write and translate full-time. What was that departure like — liberating, disorienting, or perhaps both?
Victoria:
Certainly liberating! Like all such big life decisions, there were a lot of different reasons for it and there are many different explanations I could give for why I decided to leave academia, from the purely practical to the emotional or intellectual. They are all true in their own ways. But I think it’s crucial that I left my academic post (I was Professor of Early Modern Latin & English at UCL) because we had decided to settle in Paris, where we’d already been based at that point for a year or so – we came initially for a year while both my husband (who’s French) and I had research and visiting fellowships. We have three children, the youngest of whom was born here, so of course both the initial decision to spend a year in Paris, and then the decision to stay there entailed a great deal of practical upheaval and admin. But it was a decision to live in France as much as it was a decision to leave academia.
I also very much wanted to explore different kinds of writing from the purely academic, and I wanted to have more flexibility in my schedule, especially after the birth of our youngest son. We were very lucky that we were able to manage this transition financially, as obviously I earn a lot less as a freelancer than I did as a professor – though the big tax break you get in France if you have a third child was a pleasant surprise and certainly helped!
But in several ways, I’m still an academic, or rather still a scholar. I still sometimes give talks, I still publish academic articles and chapters from time to time, I am still involved in several large academic editing projects and I continue to do quite a bit of academic research for various projects on a paid consultancy basis. As I am working entirely freelance now, I can’t spend more than a morning or so a week on my Substack essay, and it would be impossible to write the sort of thing I do write every Thursday if I didn’t have a huge archive of prior research and thinking to draw on. So the experience has been quite different for me, moving voluntarily out of academia in mid-career, than it is for many younger colleagues who have found themselves pushed out at an earlier stage. I don’t have any regrets about the transition.
G.K: Your Substack, Horace & Friends, moves fluidly between scholarship and creative response. What role do you think public writing such as the essay — the open notebook — plays in keeping classical poetry alive for contemporary readers?
Victoria:
I do write about classical poetry (obviously, from the title!) but I also write a lot about a much more neglected field, which is the Latin poetry of early modernity (roughly 1500–1750), and more broadly about the bilingualism of literary culture in this period – how Latin and vernacular poetry were constantly influencing one another. This is my scholarly specialism and the literature it represents is enormous and very little known. I particularly enjoy finding ways to convey to the general reader what this material is like and why it is interesting, and working with it is a constant creative challenge as well because it is rare that I write about a piece of early modern Latin for which there’s already a translation (unless I made it myself). So even the briefest essay almost always involves making a translation from scratch and deciding what kind of translation best serves the reader in that case.
I don’t really think of myself as an advocate for the classics as such (I mean, the traditional ‘classics’ of Ancient Greece and Classical Rome). A lot of the people writing about those classics at the moment fall or have been pushed either into a certain kind of very traditional sort of bracket – the kind of muscular Christian, let’s save the youth of today by making them all read Plato, Virgil, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis sort of thing – or the slightly patronising (I find) classics of “public engagement”: Homer and computer games and so on. I find both those approaches pretty much equally off-putting and I don’t have sympathy with either of them either by training, culture or inclination. I’m sure a lot of classicists actually feel the same, even if they stay quiet about it!
What I care about is, essentially, poetry and grammar – using grammar as a shorthand for the details of how a literary language works. Though I write about poems in many different languages and from a lot of different periods, that’s the common thread. So I suppose I hope that my essays may open up new poems or authors to readers who share those general interests, but might not have read that particular poet, or anything from that particular language, before – whether that reader is a classicist who’s not read many contemporary English poems, or a keen follower of contemporary poetry who’s never read any Horace or Kālidāsa, or whoever.
But I am very grateful to my readers who are very loyal and patient – I write about such a mixture of things that no essay can be interesting to everyone; but they are very indulgent about just skipping the ones that do nothing for them. People write to me with queries and comments a lot too, which is great. Even a modest Substack subscriber list is a feast compared with the readership for academic writing!
G. K: Translation, for you, isn’t just linguistic — it’s temporal. How do you approach the act of carrying a poem across centuries without flattening its strangeness?
Victoria:
I think I see what you mean by the opposition between linguistic and temporal, which surprised me to start with. I think what you’re getting at is that a lot of the poetry in translation we read – if we do – might be essentially contemporary, so the translator is dealing with a transition between languages (of course) and also between cultures, political contexts and so on but not a huge temporal shift. Of course if you are trying to translate, say, Pindar or an early Pāli poem there is a huge temporal as well as cultural divide. But honestly, there’s no one answer to this because each translation is in a different context. When I am translating a poem because I’m writing about it in Horace & Friends and I need to give an English version, I’ll be conscious of the point or emphasis of that particular essay and the experience of its likely readers. Otherwise, to be honest, when I translate I am translating almost always for myself and perhaps in a funny sort of way also for the original author, rather than with any particular kind of reader in mind – to try to understand the poem, to do justice to it.
G. K: You’ve translated poets as diverse as Gérard Bocholier, Bernard Noël, and Souleymane Diamanka. What draws you to a poet — what makes you want to inhabit their language for a while?
Victoria:
You’re right, I’ve been working recently on translations of these three poets, though in some ways they are not diverse at all – these are all contemporary French poets (Noël is dead, but he only died a few years ago). Formally, however, they are very different from one another. Generally speaking whenever I really fall for a new text, I want to have a go at translating them, though such translations might be very partial or episodic or impressionistic. The Noël case is a bit unusual because I was so very struck by a sequence of his – 11 medium-length poems called Le Tombeau de Lunven – that I have translated all of it. But that is quite unusual.
G. K: Your own poem “Pindar in the Nursery” is both intimate and mythic. How do domestic life and classical imagination coexist in your work — are they opposing worlds, or intertwined forms of wonder?
Victoria:
For me they are not really opposed at all, I suppose because I studied the classics very intensively from quite an early age. But I’ve never been particularly interested in the classical world historically or imaginatively in a broader sense – the periods of history that move me are all later on. And I admit I have always found classical mythology per se pretty tedious. So though as a writer – both a critic and a poet – I do have an intensely classical imagination, it is classical in a literary, linguistic, poetic sense, not in a broader cultural or imaginative one. It is just that these texts are in my head.
The poem you mention, for instance, includes a myth about Aetna and the eagle of Zeus because it’s a poem about Pindar’s Pythian 1 (well, Pythian 1 and a teething baby). I wasn’t really interested in the myths themselves. I was interested in the juxtaposition between what Pindar is doing – celebrating political and athletic victories from the fifth century BC in the grandest possibly way, in great odes commissioned for public performance, which are impossibly beautiful in Greek – and the most domestic and ordinary kind of vignette, trying to get a grumpy, sweaty, teething baby to go to sleep. I suppose the poem is also partly about what you think about, what you draw strength from mentally and emotionally during the most draining stages of motherhood. That just the thought of Pindar, his intricate beauties and his kind of sublimity in such a context is soothing. And of course with grumpy babies, it’s so often you, I mean the mother, who’s stressed really. If you can soothe yourself, they very often go to sleep – the restless monster under Typhon is you, the impatient mother, as much as the intransigent baby or the tooth that’s trying to come through. But the poem is also supposed to be funny because the juxtaposition is so silly. I mean, I wrote it because it amused me.
People ask me about that poem quite a lot, probably just because it’s findable online. I always find it a bit surprising because it was one of the first poems I wrote, I think in fact the first sonnet – when I first started writing my own poems, I had this idea that I should have a quick shot at all the obvious forms. The teething baby is a strapping 10-year-old now who spends all his time playing rugby.
I do write quite a lot about ordinary domestic things, because that’s what I spend a lot of my time on. And some of my poems are written for the children. One of my favourites, called ‘Haricots Verts’, which was published in PN Review, is about finding a finger in a bag of green beans. They like me to say it so they can screech with horror at the end. There’s not much as validating as making children laugh!
G. K: You’re preparing an anthology of poems once popular in the 16th and 17th centuries but now forgotten. What do these “unfashionable” poems reveal about what we’ve lost — or how taste evolves over time?
Victoria:
Well, I think there always tends to be a bit of a divide between what the literati are excited about and what the average reader actually enjoys and finds valuable. When we’re talking about the past, there’s an additional layer because our sense of what was being read and written, and what mattered most, has also been shaped by subsequent critics and teachers and all the ways the canon is formed. Because I have spent many years looking at early modern manuscript sources – mostly people’s private notebooks and verse collections – I have a good sense of which of the ‘canonical’ poets today were actually popular at the time and which weren’t really; and similarly, which poems were copied out by practically everyone, but you hardly ever see in an anthology today. This is as much about the type of poem or its attitude as it is about authorship.
Early modern readers really liked beautifully written poems that conveyed some kind of obvious wisdom. And actually though this sort of poetry is not considered very critically interesting I think modern readers are just the same – Kipling’s ‘If’, a poem that aside from its idioms could well have been written in the 1560s, has repeatedly been voted the UK’s favourite poem, to general critical embarrassment; and think about something like Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’. Try asking a classroom of students who are not literary specialists – so don’t know they’re supposed to sneer at that kind of thing – if they have been moved by a poem or found one useful and at least a couple will say that one. Early modern readers, like ancient ones, took it for granted that literature was supposed to be useful and on the whole I think they were right.
G. K: You’ve spent much of your life translating others. What has translation taught you about your own poetic voice — and what, if anything, remains untranslatable?
Victoria:
Oh, all real poetry is untranslatable! Whoever it was who said that poetry is what is lost in translation was quite right of course. You can’t in any meaningful way translate any really good poem. You have to make a new poem. I am particularly fascinated by the kind of poetry that is most extravagantly untranslatable – either because it is so distant in time, or so linguistically different, or so formally complex. Souleymane Diamanka would be a good example of a poet who is formally extremely challenging to translate – I played my (French) husband a video of Diamanka performing and his first comment was “well of course you can’t translate that!”.
G. K: One of the questions I find myself returning to — and which may yet become the subject of my doctoral work — is this: should a poem remain as it was first written, a kind of memorial to a moment, an artifact of who we were, or should it evolve as we do, revised and reimagined through the changing seasons of our lives?
Victoria:
Hmm, I think that’s quite an odd, poet-centred question, from a reader’s perspective. I think once you have published a poem in whatever way – even if it’s just sending it to a friend – then it’s out there in that form and belongs to other people. Of course a poet is free to revise as they wish and then publish it again. But readers revise too, in their own way – real readers I mean. When you know a lot of poems wholly or partly by heart, for instance, it’s often the case that quite a long poem gets reduced for you in practice to the section that you remember; and memory often also makes small changes to texts. In early modernity – as for most of human history – a lot of the circulation of verse was oral even if it went back into writing in manuscript copies, for example, and people did more or less what they wanted with their favourite poems – made up titles for them, even made up attributions for them – you often see all sorts of random things attributed to someone’s favourite poet – excerpt them or translate them into Latin or write a poem in reply. So I suppose overall I am much more interested in what happens to poems in the hands and minds of readers than what the poet thinks about it after he or she has written it. I’m sure we can all think of good examples of excellent poets saying obviously silly things about their own poems! My instinct would be that, as a writer, once you feel a poem is finished the first time it’s better to let it be. You can always write another poem.
Obviously from a scholarly point of view a poet’s second thoughts can be fascinating though. I’ve worked a lot on Cromwell’s poet, Payne Fisher, and because for a few years he published very frequently, and because he was a poet of political praise at a moment when the political winds were changing direction very rapidly, you can track his revisions quite precisely. They are rather fascinating from a scholarly or historical point of view: for instance, his breakthrough hit was a very good long Latin poem about the royalist defeat at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, which he started working on very shortly after the battle – he had fought himself, on the losing royalist side, and was captured and imprisoned afterwards – and which he published very successfully in 1650. Cromwell was involved in that battle, but he wasn’t in charge. When Fisher revised the poem for republication in the mid-1650s, with Cromwell of course by then firmly Protector, he reallocated several of the best passages to make them about Cromwell, rather than other Parliamentarian commanders. Very tactful!
G. K: You spend much of your time returning to older texts, translating, reframing, and, in some sense, re-living them through contemporary language and sensibility. How do you think about the life of a poem across time? Does it ever truly end, or is it always in conversation with us — and with the present moment?
Victoria:
Ah yes of course poems do die, the vast majority of them almost immediately, when they stop being read, if they ever were. And as a classicist, or even an early modernist, one is constantly aware of all that has not survived – most of Pindar, for a start. We only have a fraction of the poems by him that were known in the ancient world. But poems can certainly die in another way too, when they cease to be comprehensible – either because no-one can read the language well enough, or because the genre or form in which they are written has fallen so out of use that even if people can still technically ‘read’ it, they can’t really make sense of it, they have no literary framework for it. Here I think a good critic or a gifted translator can sometimes help and perhaps give poems of that kind a few more years of life. I hope I am sometimes able to do that.
Editor’s Note:
Speaking with Victoria reminded me that translation isn’t about loss — it’s about continuation.
Her work makes clear that poems, like people, live as long as we keep speaking to them.
You can follow her at Horace & Friends on Substack and victoriamoul.com.
Bound Voices is a new interview series from Ink & Ribbon Press, a nonprofit poetry publisher devoted to craft, discovery, and the permanence of the printed word.