On small mistakes

No matter how expert, every translator messes up somewhere. So it's with humility and respect, and in the conviction that I will have done worse, that I present here two instances where I was able in a small way to improve on the old Loeb by W. R. Paton.

Paton took on a daunting task. Never before had the whole Greek Anthology been translated into English, and he not only did it (with the minor exception of the poems he reckoned too obscene -- he put those into Latin instead) but did it well. In industry and breadth of learning he towers above me, and none of us could find our way around the Anthology without him.

Still, even Homer nods. Here are two occasions where I was able, or was helped, to fix a glitch.

9.333 (Mnasalcas)

Let us stand by the flatland of the strait,
To view the shrine of Cypris of the Sea;
And see the fount beneath the poplar’s shade
Where sip the beaks of darting kingfishers.

 

This epigram is in the book. 'Darting' in the final line is the Greek xouthos. Paton has yellow kingfishers, and at first so did I, but my wife asked "Are there yellow kingfishers?" and of course I couldn't find any. Xouthos does have a secondary meaning as a yellow or tawny colour, but its basic sense is of rapid movement, and secondarily of the sounds made by rapid movement, especially of wings: nimble, darting, rustling, whirring, buzzing.

 

13.23 (Asclepiades)

Though you be pressed for time, o passer-by,
Listen however briefly to the tale
Of Botrys and his overwhelming woe:
Eighty years old, he buried here his boy,
An infant, but his babble made some sense,
Already showed capacity. I cry
Not just for Botrys but for his dear son,
Robbed of life’s pleasures when he was undone.

This is one of the 'polymetric' epigrams preserved in the Anthology only because they are metrically unusual. Where I put 'an infant', Paton has 'a boy of nine'. The second couplet of the Greek runs:

ὃς πρέσβυς ὀγδώκοντ᾽ ἐτῶν τὸν ἐννέων ἔθαψεν

ἤδη τι τέχνᾳ καὶ σοφὸν λέγοντα.

Paton takes ἐννέων to be a genitive plural of the Greek numeral ἐννέα, 'nine', and pairs it with the genitive plural ἐτῶν: 'of nine years'. But ἐννέα does not decline -- no matter the gender or case, it's always just ἐννέα. Instead I am sure the plural ἐτῶν goes with ὀγδώκοντ᾽, 'eighty', which likewise does not decline: Botrys is an old man of eighty years. Instead I reckon ἐννέων must be a metrically convenient one-off formed from from ἐν(ν)εός, meaning dumb or speechless; or as Latin would have it, infans.

I did not spot this because I am better at Greek than Paton was -- in plain fact it is the other way around. But hard-pressed Paton was several thousand epigrams in, with hundreds left to go. Unlike him, I could make a litttle time to pause and wonder: what would be so special about a boy of nine already making some sense when he tried to speak? The solution followed from there.