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.