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.