On process, or lack thereof

 A couple of weeks ago I had the great luck to attend an undergraduate seminar with a brilliant guest speaker, Josephine Balmer, who made the first modern British translation of Sappho (1984, revised 1992) and has taken up several other, often neglected classical poets since. In preparation for the seminar we read an interview she'd done with Professor Lorna Harwick, one of the longest established and most serious voices in UK classical reception studies. You can find it here.

Something she said about the difference (for her) between translations and versions struck a chord with me:

People will ask me, ‘What do you think is the difference in your work between a translation and an original poem or a transgression,’ and to be honest I’ve reached the stage where I just don’t know. I have to be honest about that. I mean when I start a piece of work, I don’t know whether it’s going to be a translation or an original poem that has a basis in a text or whether it’s going to be a poem that subverts the original text. It just actually comes out of some kind of creative process that I don’t really understand. x I have in the past tried to explain it and I realise that I haven’t really got the vocabulary in which to do so.

My experience with the Greek Anthology for the World's Classics was pretty similar: I'd not intended to put it into verse, it just started turning into one somewhere in Book 1, and I still don't understand why. What I've produced is, for sure, a translation -- I know that much -- but my own process remains pretty opaque to me.

In case it's of interest, here's a poem I translated recently (i.e., it's not in the book), but with the detritus left in that tends to accumulate as I play with phrasing and ordering. Macedonius was a hupatos under Justinian in the sixth century, and his epigrams were included in the Cycle of Agathias.

5.247

MACEDONIUS THE CONSUL

Your name is Parmenis, for Constancy;

A fitting name, I thought when first I heard,

But you have made a lie of it, and now

I hate you more than death. You shun the man

Who cares for you, and set your sights instead

Upon the man who does not — just until

He takes his turn at falling, so that you

Can shun him, too. Your kiss is like a hook,

Spurring to madness, and I took the bait;

And now from rosy lips I hang and wait.

I took your bait of madness; now I hang

So in turn

He falls for you, and then can take his turn

For when a man

Is 

You shun the one

Who loves you, and pursue 

For when a man

Is smitten, you avoid him; 

Has fallen for you, then you run away;

And if he does not love, 

The World's Classics translation on Google Books and Amazon UK

For the skint, bits of my new translation can be read for free on Google Books. Presently these are Books 1 (Christian epigrams), 8 (Gregory of Nazianzus), 13 (mixed metres) and 14 (riddles and sudoku).

Amazon UK has most of the introduction, which Google doesn't; and a fair bit of the rest, with enough pages missed out here and there that you'll get annoyed and buy the book (they wish).

I hope you enjoy exploring it.

Two walking-sticks

These poems by Hellenistic poets both begin with a rare-ish word for walking-stick, leading me to think they may be in conscious dialogue. Leonidas is third century BC; Phanias, maybe second? All we really know is that he is early enough to make it into the Garland of Meleager, in the first century BC.

6.293 (on YouTube)

LEONIDAS <OF TARENTUM>

His walking-stick, and yes, those little shoes —

These spoils of victory adorn your shrine,

Cyprian queen, taken from Sōchares,

The Cynic; and his grubby oil-flask too,

And tattered wallet that had gone to holes

But used to bulge with wisdom. Nevermore:

For Rhodōn, young and handsome, set them high

Amid the garlands of your vestibule

To mark how he was victor in the chase,

Snaring the elder who had seemed so wise.

As Francis Cairns points out in Hellenistic Epigram: Context of Encounter, the ‘little shoes’ subtly establish that the lifelong Cynic fell hard for Rhodōn: after a symposium he processed in kōmos to stand outside the young man’s door and serenade him, making a scene and publicly acknowledging his helplessness against Aphrodite’s power. The rest of Sōchares’ gear is the stereotypical uniform of the Cynic philosopher who professes indifference to society’s comforts and pretences. Often in epigram these Cynic gurus have trouble sticking to their principles, if they even try.

Leonidas wrote a kind of companion epigram, 6.298, in which he presents an alternate outcome: that Sōchares persists in his austerity till he starves to death. As events unfold in 8.294, though, the philosopher's mask of virtue has fallen aside. Sōchares' antics in party-slippers are the talk of the town. Tauta ta blautia; 'those little shoes'. 

6.294 (on YouTube)

PHANIAS

The walking-stick that kept him on his feet;

The leather tawse and giant fennel-stalk

That lay beside it, and that used to smite

The brows of infants, and the pizzle too,

That flexed so readily and sang so sweet;

The slipper with a single rigid sole;

The skull-cap, from a head devoid of hair.

Gifts for lord Hermes. Callōn set them here,

The keepsakes of a teacher in a school.

His limbs are fettered now by grizzled toil.

A pizzle is a dried bull's penis. They had a long history as a flogging instrument, though now they mostly become dog chews. Naturally there is a Wikipedia page.

Three books, three lamps

The lamp is the lover's frequent night-time accomplice in epigram. It lights the way to the chamber of the beloved, reveals their beauty, and bears witness to the consummation of desire. Maria Kanellou studies the motif systematically and sensitively.

The following epigrams, two by Meleager and one by 'Pompey the Younger' (whom I would like to be Octavian's rival, the son of Pompey the Great), are from books five, six, and seven. Though the lamp is primarily an erotic motif, it can cross between epigram's sub-genres to become dedicatory and funerary. 6.162 is new for the blog, the others are in the book.

5.8

MELEAGER

You holy Night, you lamp: no celebrants

But you we chose, to witness to our vows.

His was to love me always, mine to leave

Him never; and the two of you were there.

But now he says those oaths are borne away

On water, void: and, lamp, you see him now

Enfolded by another — and by more.

6.162 (on YouTube)

MELEAGER

To you, friend Cypris, Meleager leaves

His favourite lamp, the playmate in his games,

Accomplice to your night-long revelries.

7.219

POMPEY THE YOUNGER

She bloomed so finely, was desired by all; 

She gathered by herself the lily-blooms

Of all the Graces. LAÏS looks no more

Upon the Sun driving its golden team

Across the sky. She sleeps the destined sleep.

The young men nightly vying at her door,

The lovers’ scratches, the confiding lamp:

All these she has renounced and put aside.

A fawnskin for Dionysus, a dog for Pan

6.172 (on YouTube)

ANONYMOUS

Woman of Cnidus, Porphyris, now leaves

Her double thyrsus that is like a spear,

Garlands and anklet, wearing which she raved

And footloose wandered Dionysus’ way,

An ivied fawnskin pinned across her breast.

For your own self, before your temple porch,

She sets aloft these her insigia,

Emblems of beauty and insanity.

I am particularly pleased with my version of 6.176 because I am soppy about dogs, and badly missing one dog in particular. Macedonius was a 'Consul' (Greek hupatos) at Byzantium under Justinian in the early sixth century AD; he is one of the poets whose epigrams came into the Anthology through the Cycle of his younger contemporary, Agathias. 

6.176 (on YouTube)

MACEDONIUS CONSUL

This dog, and leather wallet, and this spear

With crooked barbs I hereby dedicate

To Pan and to the spirits of the trees.

But I will bring my dog back to the fold,

Alive, unharmed, that I may have my friend

To share my scraps and keep me company.

'This spear' is sigunos, a word not found in LSJ. Aristotle notes it as a Cypriot word, and I reckon Macedonius found in in Aristotle. He must have chosen it to suggest a setting on Cyprus:

‘So that the same word may obviously be at once strange and ordinary, though not in reference to the same people; sigunos, for instance, is an ordinary word in Cyprus, and a strange word with us.’ - Poetics 3.21, tr. Ingram Bywater

Darius' bridge across the Bosporus

When Darius the Great set out to crush the nomadic Scythians he took his great army across the Hellespont on a pontoon bridge built by one Mandrocles, an engineer from the island of Samos. This was before Darius determined on subjugating the Greek city-states. The Great King was good business for lots of Greeks early in his reign.

Darius immediately rewarded Mandrocles with immense wealth, some of which the engineer spent commemorating the success of his project. He commissioned a painting of the army crossing the bridge, with Darius looking on, and dedicated it to Hera in her great sanctuary on Samos (legendarily the goddess's birthplace). An unknown poet supplied an inscription in verse:

He bridged the fishy span of Bosporus:

Now Mandrocles sets up this souvenir

Of his pontoon-work in our Hera’s shrine.

He took a coronet for his reward,

And crowned his Samians with martial fame,

When he fulfilled the will of Darius.

The epigram comes to the Anthology (6.341) through Herodotus, who gives a great account of the bridge episode at 4.87-8.

I'll next move onto some of the erotic epigrams of the Anthology, from Book 5.

Exchanging Aphrodite for Athena...and vice versa

These two mock-dedicatory epigrams are near-neighbours in Book 6 of the Anthology, and purport to record two women's changes in career and life circumstance. Effectively the women trade places. In 6.283 a formerly haughty courtesan has no choice but to exchange Aphrodite, goddess of sexual attraction, for Athena, patron goddess of weavers. In 6.285, a woman raised to the loom chucks it in and becomes a courtesan instead. I guess it is written as a satire on the type of poem represented by 6.283.

In the first poem, I take the liberty of paraphrasing the implacable divinity named in the Greek as Nemesis as 'the goddess of What Comes Around'. My excuse is that it unpacks her meaning and role in the poem more clearly for a modern audience, but really it just popped into my head and I loved how it sounded.

6.283 (on YouTube)

ANONYMOUS

She used to boast of how she ruled them all,

Those wealthy lovers; never bent a knee

Before the goddess of What Comes Around.

And now for pay she plucks the spindled wool

In meagre measures. Though she took her time,

Athena has despoiled the Cyprian.

I like to think there is a hint of condescension in the lemma of the second epigram — 'Nicarchus, apparently (dokei)', because it's the sort of thing you'd expect of a smutty satirist like him? Like Lucillius, Nicarchus was a poet known to and imitated by Martial.

6.285 (on YouTube)

NICARCHUS, APPARENTLY

Till recently, Nicarete would toil

In service to Athena at the loom,

Plying the shuttle on the web of yarn.

But then she took her basket and her spools

Out to the street along with all her gear —

Burned them in offering to the Cyprian.

‘Be off with you’, she said, ‘Starvation-wage

Of women who lack courage. All you know

Is how to kill the bloom of being young.’

And she has chosen garlands and the lyre,

That girl, and goes to parties, and enjoys

An enviable life amid good cheer.

‘A tenth of what I earn I’ll bring to you’,

She told the Cyprian; ‘Keep me in trade

And I shall render to you what is due.’

Arms for Apollo; dolls for Artemis

These two epigrams are newly translated for the blog and I enjoy the contrast that comes from pairing them. Mnasalcas was a poet of the early third century BC, so quite early in epigram's literary development; the authorship of 6.280 is unknown.

6.264 (on YouTube)

MNASALCAS

The shield of Alexander, Phylleus’ son,

I hang here as a holy offering

To lord Apollo of the golden hair.

Worn is my rim and tired by constant war,

Worn too my boss, but courage makes me shine,

Courage I earned in arming that brave man

Who set me here. From when I first was made,

I never have been worsted or outdone.

The second epigram sets its scene at the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis on Mount Taygetus, on the border between Laconia and Messenia. The two states disputed control of the site for centuries. As at Artemis' sanctuary at Brauron in Attica, the cult activities at Limnae centred on rites of passage for girls. Both populations were Dorian, and the epigram gives Doric word-forms to this young Spartan or Messenian girl leaving girlhood behind for marriage.

6.280 (on YouTube)

ANONYMOUS

Timareta is soon to wed, and leaves

Her drums, and lovely ball; the braided net

That bunched her hair; her dolls as well, for you,

Limnaean Artemis. She is a girl,

And you a maiden also, as is right.

She also leaves the clothing of those dolls.

So, Leto, hold your hand above this girl.

The daughter of Timaretus is chaste;

Chastely preserve her on her sinless way.

A gender-nonconforming veteran of the sex trade

Myrinus was a poet of the Garland of Philip, so, of the later first century BC or earlier first century AD; four of his epigrams make it into the Anthology.

Here is the Greek:

τὴν μαλακὴν Παφίης Στατύλλιον ἀνδρόγυνον δρῦν 
ἕλκειν εἰς Ἀίδην ἡνίκ᾽ ἔμελλε χρόνος, 
τἀκ κόκκου βαφθέντα καὶ ὑσγίνοιο θέριστρα, 
καὶ τοὺς ναρδολιπεῖς ἀλλοτρίους πλοκάμους, [p. 436] 
φαικάδα τ᾽ εὐτάρσοισιν ἐπ᾽ ἀστραγάλοισι γελῶσαν, 
καὶ τὴν γρυτοδόκην κοιτίδα, παμβακίδων, 
αὐλούς θ᾽ ἡδὺ πνέοντας ἑταιρείοις ἐνὶ κώμοις, 
δῶρα Πριηπείων θῆκεν ἐπὶ προθύρων.

Δρῦς in the first line means tree, commonly an oak. It is the dry- in Dryad, wood-nymph, and is cognate with δόρυ, the word for a spear, called that because it is made of wood. We might think calling someone an 'oak' implies physical strength and solidity, but this is not the only place where it is used figuratively for a man who is old and worn-out.

I dithered over μαλακὴν Παφίης. The Greek μαλακός means soft, gentle, feeble; in an erotic context it implies taking a passive role, within the default ancient paradigm that made sex an asymmetric relation of  pleasure-taking penetration by the socially more powerful partner(s). I toyed with having the second line end 'bottoming in bed' before deciding it wouldn't sit well with a notional inscriptional context, or with the delicate euphemism of 'the Paphian' (a title of Aphrodite).

This is part of a wider, open question about what sort of tone we decide to read into, and pass on from, Myrinus' original. Typically it's read as contemptuous satire, but I prefer to see the poet expressing fascination and guarded respect for Statyllius' abilities and determinedly nonconformist life. Line by line, that preference helped shape my choices as a translator, little decisions (not 'greasy', but slick and conditioned) that add up. 

6.254 (on YouTube)

MYRINUS

Statyllius the androgyne was old,

Worn to a stump by sensuality:

Passage of time was soon to haul him off

To Hades. Summer dresses, scarlet-dyed;

The wigs of human hair, kept slick with nard;

The haughty slippers from his well-turned feet;

His garderobe of cottons; and his pipes,

That breathed so sweetly for companions

In late-night antics — these he set aside,

Upon the threshold of Priapus’ shrine.

I've read that Tony Harrison made a version of this poem, and I'm trying to track it down; if it was at all like his covers of Martial in U.S. Martial (1981) he will not have gone for nuance. Harrison also did a Palladas: Poems (1975) that I've yet to see.

On a seashell, and asking questions of monuments

An unusual epigram by Theodoridas, a lyric poet and epigrammatist of the 3rd century BC. Theodoridas was from Syracuse on the eastern coast of Sicily, and the following epigram suggests a fairly local setting: Pelorias (modern Capo Peloro) is the promontory at the island's northeastern point.

The shell is a marine 'labyrinth' in the original because of its spiral shape. The Greek of the poem is unusually convoluted and comes back round on itself in near-repetition, like the shell it describes:

Εἰνάλιε λαβύρινθε, τύ μοι λέγε: τίς  ς᾽ ἀνέθηκεν 
ἀγρέμιον πολιᾶς ἐξ ἁλὸς εὑρόμενος; — 

παίγνιον ἀντριάσιν Διονύσιος ἄνθετο Νύμφαις 
（δῶρον δ᾽ ἐξ ἱερᾶς εἰμι Πελωριάδος,） 
υἱὸς Πρωτάρχου: σκολιὸς δ᾽ ἐξέπτυσε πορθμός, 
ὄφρ᾽ εἴην λιπαρῶν παίγνιον Ἀντριάδων.

Whether or not they were really used in that way (and it can sometimes be hard to tell), dedicatory poems are written as if for inscription on objects and structures in plain view: tombs by the roadside, offerings in sanctuaries, statues of victors in sport and war. Often they explicitly anticipate a passer-by or visitor who will read them aloud, and sometimes that reading-aloud becomes a dialogue between the visitor and the monument. Any such dialogue is also a monologue twice over, albeit a collaborative one. The visitor supplies both of the voices; the monument supplies all of the lines.

It is a cliché for these dialogues to open with the visitor posing questions to the monument -- what are you, why are you here, who placed you here? -- and requesting answers. The difference with a seashell is that it is an object that might speak back without needing to resort to inscription. If you hold it to your ear and listen, you will hear the sea...and maybe, just maybe, something more.

6.224 (on YouTube)

THEODORIDAS

You spiral seashell, whisper in my ear — 

Who set you here, who was the beachcomber

That took you trophy from the surging sea?

‘I am a toy for Nymphs within the cave,

And it was Dionysius set me here,

A gift from holy Cape Pelorias.

He is Prōtarchus’ son. The winding strait

Spat me upon the shore, that I might be

A toy for glistening spirits of the cave.’

Courtesans' gifts to Aphrodite, by the two Antipaters

These epigrams are by the two Antipaters, of Sidon (late 2nd century BC) and Thessalonica (late 1st century BC, an Augustan court poet). They fall within a substantial run (6.206-211) of poems notionally written to accompany thank-offerings to Aphrodite by women retiring from careers as courtesans. 

The women are moving from the care of Aphrodite 'Pandemos' (vulgar) to that of Aphrodite 'Urania' (heavenly) because they are leaving the profession to enter a new chapter in their lives as respectable married women.

6.206 (on YouTube)

ANTIPATER <OF SIDON>

These sandals that were comfy on her feet,

Labour of love of skilful shoemakers,

Bitinna gives; Philaenis brings the net

That tamed her straying hair, dyed in the blooms

Of surging sea; and as for Anticleia,

She gives her fan; the veil that hid her face,

Worked delicately as a spider-web,

Is pretty Heracleia’s; and the snake,

Her shapely ankles’ golden ornament,

Well-coiled, from she who shares her father’s name,

Our Aristoteleia. These best friends,

Alike in age, now dedicate their gifts

To Cythereia the Uranian.

Philaenis' hair-net is dyed scarlet with orchil, made from seaweed.

Poems on retiring courtesans go all the way back to literary epigram's early years, with Philetas (4th-3rd century, 6.210) and Leonidas of Tarentum (3rd century, 6.211). How often they found good husbands in real life I would not care to guess, but in the epigrams of Book 6 the trope is so firmly established that the second of my poems can play around with it. 6.208 puts the scene in an ecphrastic frame. We do not see the women in the act of dedication; instead we take it in at second-hand, through art. If the other poems in the sequence are notionally dedicatory inscriptions, 6.208 is notionally the caption to a painting.

6.208 (on YouTube)

ANTIPATER <OF THESSALONICA>

The one with sandals is Menecratis;

It is Phēmonoe who brings the cloak,

And Praxo has the cup. That is the shrine

Of Aphrodite, and her statue too.

The work is Aristomachus’, of Thrace.

All three are citizens, and courtesans;

But they have chanced to meet the Cyprian

In mellow mood, and now each one of them

Becomes the property of just one man.

 

Two trumpets for Athena Ilias

These two dedicatory epigrams are by poets of the Hellenistic age, when Greek superpowers warred on each other almost without pause.

The cult of Athena Ilias was by then already ancient, and from the fourth century BC a 'Confederation of Athena Ilias' celebrated a Panathenaic festival at Ilium (Troy), attested by coin finds (an article by Aneurin Ellis-Evans sums up what is known). Miccus is from Macedonia, and leaves his trumpet a long way from its native Italy.

6.195, by Archias, is a variant on Tymnes' poem.

6.151 (on YouTube)

TYMNES

Miccus of Pella hung this booming horn,

The war-god’s, in Athena Ilias’ shrine:

Etruscan instrument, through which that man

Many a bygone time did bellow out

The siren calls of parley and of war.

6.159 (on YouTube)

ANTIPATER OF SIDON

I am a trumpet, that in former time

Gushed forth the bloody war-song in the fight

And issued too the sweet refrain of peace.

And here I hang, your gift, Pherenicus,

To the Tritonian maid: for I have ceased

From roaring out the bellowing clarion.

Two fictive dedicatory inscriptions, by Callimachus

Placed sequentially in Book 6 of the Anthology, these two poems are by the famous Alexandrian scholar-poet Callimachus, one of literary epigram's early masters. Like many of the poems I’ve been posting lately these are fresh versions and won’t be in the book.

In this first poem, 6.149, the inscription ‘speaks’ when the passer-by reads it aloud, but speaks in the persona of the dedicated object, and what does a bronze cockerel know about anything? Including that it is a bronze cockerel? A statue cannot bend to see the inscription on its own base, and it's not as though cockerels are great readers to begin with.

'The Tyndarids' are Castor and Pollux, twin sons of Leda, the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, and brothers to Helen of Troy. Pollux was a famous boxer, so the victory being celebrated by Euaenetus son of Phaedrus is surely meant to be in a boxing-match. Strictly speaking only Castor is a Tyndarid; Pollux’s father was Zeus, making the boys only half-brothers despite being twins. Improbable in normal circumstances, but when gods get involved, all bets are off.

6.149 (on YouTube)

CALLIMACHUS

The man who set me here, Euaenetus,

Assures us (for I cannot tell myself)

That I am hung here for a victory,

His own, and I a cockerel made of brass,

And dedicated to the Tyndarids.

I trust the son of Phaedrus, he in turn

Being the offspring of Philoxenus.

The second poem, 6.150, is written as if to be inscribed on the base of a votive statue of a young woman in a sanctuary of Io/Isis. Callimachus asserts identity between the goddesses through a patronym that he probably invented for this poem, ‘Inachian’ (Inakhios). Inachus was the mythical founder and first king of Argos; his many children included Io, the city's first priestess of Hera. Io was said to have spent time in Egypt and introduced the cult of Isis, and was occasionally identified with her. Both goddesses were depicted as horned, Io because Zeus had turned her into a cow when Hera got jealous of him sleeping with her. Greek mythology's list of reasons not to sleep with Zeus is never-ending.

6.150 (on YouTube)

THE SAME

Inachus’ Isis — in her shrine she stands.

Daughter of Thales, Aeschylis fulfils 

The promise of her mother, Eirene.

In myth, both Io and Isis were well-travelled, and Callimachus does not specify a notional location for the sanctuary in which Aeschylis' statue has been placed. The poem invites us to take a guess, if we want. A cult of Io at Argos is not firmly attested, but that is not to say there was none; there is better evidence for her worship at Antioch. But it is Isis who is named, not Io. Callimachus’ own Alexandria had a temple of Isis on the royal island (now sunken) of Antirhodos, and of course there were plenty of others across Egypt.

Isis was worshipped as the loving and determined mother who revived Horus, and surviving spells show that people often appealed to her to protect their own children from disease, or to ensure safe childbirth. The scenario conjured by Callimachus’ fictive inscription, and by the imaginary statue it accompanied, is that Eirene had promised the statue to Isis as payment if she kept Aeschylis safe through one or other of these dangers. Now she gratefully fulfils her vow.

Shields of the defeated, from southern Italy

The shields of my last blog post were hung in temples as dedications by the men who owned them, on the occasion of their retirement from successful careers as mercenaries. The shields in the poems below might have hung alongside them, but are there for a very different reason -- they were taken as spoils by the victors in battle. The first of these epigrams is in the book, as is a companion poem (6.129) by the same author; the second is freshly translated for this blog post. Both of them celebrate the victories of Greek city-states over non-Greek peoples in southern Italy in the third century BC.

Shields are cumbersome objects and very heavy. Anyone trying to run from a battlefield would need to throw theirs away; hence the famous injunction of Spartan women to their menfolk to come back either with their shields (victorious), or on them (dead).

Leonidas was from Tarentum, the modern Taranto in Apulia, just at the instep of the heel of Italy's boot. Nossis was from Epizephyrian Locris, right down in the toe. These were major and long-established cities in what the Romans called Magna Graecia, the Greek presence in coastal southern Italy.

The Lucanians were a native Italic people, and the Bruttii were close relatives who lived just to the south of them in what is now Calabria.

6.131

LEONIDAS <OF TARENTUM>

These long shields taken from Lucanians,

This row of bridles, and the polished spears

Hung on each side, bereft of horse and man: 

To Pallas. Man and horse, black death devours.

Nossis is a woman poet but seems every bit as keen on war as Leonidas, at least when their own cities are winning at it. The adjective that I translate as 'keen fighters', ōkumakhos, is found only in this poem and may be her own coinage.

6.132

NOSSIS (on YouTube)

Bruttian soldiers cast these arms away

From shoulders fated to a sorry end,

Falling beneath the blows of Locrians — 

Keen fighters, of whose courage they now sing,

Hanging within the temples of the gods,

And do not miss the forearms of those men,

The cowards they forsook and left behind.