David West

David West was born in Aberdeen in 1926 and studied at Cambridge. After posts at Sheffield and Edinburgh he became Professor of Latin at Newcastle in 1969 and held the chair until he retired in 1992. Obituaries remember a professor who left his office door open and welcomed anyone who wanted to talk.

His scholarship treats Roman poems as poems. He looked at how an image is built and how an argument moves through an ode. Reading Horace appeared in 1967, and a study of Lucretius's imagery followed in 1969. Later he wrote a commentary on Shakespeare's Sonnets (2007), and he chose George Herbert's "Easter Wings" for his farewell lecture at Newcastle.

The Penguin Aeneid of 1990, revised in 2003, is his best-known book. He felt a plain prose version did more justice to Virgil than many so-called poetic translations. A tribute from the Association for Latin Teaching calls it arguably the best English prose translation. His other major work is a three-volume Oxford edition of Horace's Odes, with translation and commentary, published between 1995 and 2002 as Carpe Diem, Vatis Amici and Dulce Periculum. When he died he was working on a translation of Gavin Douglas's Scots Aeneid.

Start with the Aeneid. It follows Aeneas from the fall of Troy to Dido's Carthage, then down to the underworld and on to the war in Italy, and the 2003 edition adds West's introduction. If you want to see how he reads a poet line by line, the first Odes volume, Carpe Diem, is the place to go next.