The translations - or "conversions" - in this book make available to contemporary readers of English-language poetry a wealth of poems that belong to what T.S. Eliot called "the tradition." From Homer, Sappho, and Archilochus to Catullus, Horace, and Virgil; from Dante, Villon, and Lope de Vega to Baudelaire, Rilke, and Pessoa; this book presents fresh versions of many of the best-loved poems in the Western European tradition in strikingly new versions, allowing readers without access to the originals the opportunity to possess, in some measure, both the sense and style of these monumental works. Ryan Wilson's first book of poems, The Stranger World - winner of the prestigious Donald Justice Poetry Prize - explored the ways in which human beings may discover themselves in life's unforseen and unpredictable phenomena. That book, described by poet and professor James Matthew Wilson as "a most astonishing debut" and "maybe the best first book by a poet I've ever read," lays the groundwork for Proteus Bound, in which the author's practice of xenia, or "hospitality," welcomes poems from more than a half dozen languages, spanning nearly three millennia, into English.