Never short of an opinion on these matters, Vladimir Nabokov ended his 1941 article “The Art of Translation” with a series of “requirements” for the production of an effective translation. According to the first of these, the translator “must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses”. This leaves the field open for British Council-sponsored versions of promising young Bulgarians or Finns, but puts translators from the classics in an awkward position. Admiring Gavin Douglas’s 16th-century translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Ezra Pound solved this problem by pronouncing the translation better than the original. George Chapman’s Jacobean translation of The Iliad is a wonderful thing, and one of the great unread texts of the English canon, but as good as, better than Homer? That’s a tall order.

Most modern translators of Homer never get to test Nabokov’s suggestion against the Homeric Hymns for the good reason that they have tended to ignore these poems. Pendants to The Iliad and Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns are a series of 33 addresses to the gods, ranging from a few short lines to more than 500 lines in length. The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation includes translations of the hymns by Chapman, Congreve, Shelley and Richard Hole, but a short extract by John D Niles is the sole 20th-century example. The publication of a new version of these poems by Peter McDonald is thus an important addition to the canon of ancient Greek poetry available in English.

“I will sing about the Earth,” begins a hymn to Gaia. These poems are songs of the Earth, connecting with deep, chthonic forces:

she is the oldest of all;

deep-grounded, she gave birth

to everything, and still

she feeds the world, dry land

and sea, and birds in the sky

from an always open hand

McDonald’s approach to Homer’s text is eminently neoclassical. It is for the most part in sharp contrast to that of Christopher Logue, whose War Music is full of anachronisms and contemporary references, and written without any knowledge of Greek on Logue’s part. McDonald is in many ways the anti-Logue: these are translations, not versions or adaptations. The term “translation” covers a multitude of approaches, however. Dryden subdivided it into “metaphrase” (word for word), “paraphrase” (sense for sense) and “imitation”, which leaves the original behind. McDonald sticks close to his texts, even as he speculatively reconstructs them from papyrus fragments, but weaves all manner of mazy patterns in his voluminous notes.

The avoidance of anachronism is not total: addressing the problem of the anomalous hymn eight, McDonald describes how he has resorted to “simultaneous archaism and anachronism”. The resulting “yearning for devilment” underwrites his achievement throughout this audacious and authoritative act of repossession.

McDonald’s neoclassicism carries over into his own poetry too. Herne the Hunter is his first collection since his Collected Poems of 2012 and numbers among its classical touches a translation from Hesiod and a portrait of Orion the hunter. Myth forms a backdrop to contemporary concerns, but the poems of Herne the Hunter drift between childhood and adulthood with a fine disregard for merely linear chronology.

“Their dead weights balance him,” begins the first poem in the collection, “Two Salmon”. Seamus Heaney’s work is full of images of weights and balances, and for McDonald as well the metaphor of keeping or losing his balance acquires real emotional urgency. Northern Irish poets from Heaney to Leontia Flynn are given to channelling memories of their parents through poems about driving, and McDonald is no exception, as in “A Dip in the Road” and “The Fifties”. Origins and the home place are darkly inscrutable: the mysterious Dulligan in “A Coach in Horses” “always took / the same road from wherever he was going”.

Geoffrey Hill has been an important influence on McDonald, and in his “Florentines” he describes horses’ “stricken faces” as “damnable and serene”. In the midst of distress, the lyric poem delivers serenity – a culpable serenity, even. McDonald’s also explore their share of emotional damage but come up short against the temptations of formal self-satisfaction. A favoured solution to this is the embrace of states of unknowing: “there is nothing to know” (“Two Salmon”) and “what you know is nothing” (“A Storm”). Another solution is explored in “A Sting”, whose speaker is determined to “draw out the pain this smarting skin completes”.

Few contemporary poets, even those who end up as professors of creative writing, are scholars in any sense that Dryden or Matthew Arnold would have recognised. McDonald is undoubtedly one such. Yet Herne the Hunter is charged with energies that overflow the scholarly. It is difficult to read a poem by an Irish writer about a Japanese sword without thinking of Sato’s “ancient blade” in Yeats’s “The Winding Stair”, “still razor-keen”. Scholarly allusion aside, McDonald’s “The Swords” is unmistakably poetry with an edge, ending with an image of the swords’ “held force within / to try an edge against your skin”. It is unusual to publish a Collected Poems at 50, as McDonald has done, but Herne the Hunter is no post-Collected lap of honour. Its poems are searing, sorrowful and serene, and represent a real and moving achievement.