Aldington's Myiscus

A GIRL SPEAKS

He is lovely; sweet and dear to me is the name of Myiscus; what reason have I for not loving him? | For he is beautiful, by Aphrodite, all beautiful; and if he is cruel -- Love mingles bitter with the sweet.

So runs Aldington's version (p.34) of Meleager AP 12.154. He stays close to the Greek. Compare Paton's Loeb:

Sweet is the boy, and even the name of Myiscus is sweet to me and full of charm. What excuse have I for not loving ? For he is beautiful, by Cypris, entirely beautiful ; and if he gives me pain, why, it is the way of Love to mix bitterness with honey. 

 The big difference lies in the heading he has assigned: 'A GIRL SPEAKS'. What motivates it? Headings of this kind frame the reader's experience of the translated poem, and at many points in the history of epigram's modern exegesis they have helped steer readers away from disallowed truths around gender and sexuality in the Greek original. Their frequent allies are categorisation, creative ambiguity, and avoidance or outright alteration of pronouns -- any number of translators have thereby turned pretty boys into pretty girls.

De-gaying epigram is easiest when the Greek name of a male beloved rings ambiguously in modern ears, as 'Myiscus' does not. Any reader is going to know that he is masculine. Fallbacks in such a case can include rearrangement and recategorisation of poems, a game Aldington does not play; or occasionally refocalisation, in which paratext plays a vital role. That would be the easy thing to think about Aldington's 12.154 if we met it in some other context --  but literary epigrams are invariably encountered in some kind of sequence, and Aldington has already given us several Myiscus poems that are openly homoerotic. Here are a couple:

By Eros, Tyre brings forth beautiful lads, but Myiscus outshines the others as the bright sun outshines the stars. (AP 12.59, p.25)

One beauty is all I know, my keen eye sees Myiscus only; I am blind to all the rest. | He seems to me everything. Do the eyes see thus to flatter the heart? (AP 12.106, p.30)

So why does he title his final Myiscus poem 'A GIRL SPEAKS'? Is it that in this poem Myiscus gains a little agency, the power to say no? Once again, I am left wondering.

Meleager resexed

This week we begin digging into the versions of Meleager made by Richard Aldington a little over a century ago (1920). The following epigram by Meleager is placed among the erotic poems of Book 5. Its position there is not an infallible guide to its content: when Cephalas divided heterosexual from homosexual amours, he occasionally made mistakes. But I don't doubt that it belongs where he placed it. The motif of the lamp is characteristic of epigrams about faithless partners in opposite-sex liaisons.

I give Aldington's version first, then mine:

WRITTEN IN WATER

You, holy Night, and you, Lamp, were the only witnesses of the oaths we took; she swore that she would love me and I that I would never leave her; you witnessed our common testimony.

Now she says that the oaths were written in water and you, Lamp, see her in the arms of others!

 

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.

The faithless lover of Meleager's original is unambiguously a 'he', and Aldington must have known that. Even if he weren't classically educated, which he was, he will have had recourse to the Loeb: quite apart from its facing-text translation, Paton's was the most up-to-date version of the Greek text. The gender of the first-person speaker is no more explicit in the Greek than is the gender of the 'others' with whom the betrayer now consorts, but the scenario is clear enough.

Why then 'she'? At this point we are off into storytelling. Did Aldington not feel comfortable writing/translating from a female character's point of view? He liked women well enough. Did he think it might make the poem read as homosexual? Maybe it's better not to dig too deeply.