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,