Translator's Note
A. Epic
One way to gain fresh perspectives on Greek epic poetry lies in fragmenting the text, culling and curating lines, small sections, even phrases, and translating them in a newly fragmented state. The narrative context is not destroyed but quieted, muted, so that miniscule poetic moments—relative to the entire texts from which they are torn—can resound in different ways.
The first two fragments in this section are taken from scenes in the Iliad that are charged with pathos and foreboding. To let sound the urgency of the words pouring from the speaker’s mouth, I have rendered the lines with (almost) no spaces between words. These lines can be resituated into nearly any scenario implied by the Iliad’s sweep: somewhere, someone panics and is anguished at the looming possibility of a loved-one’s death in the war at Troy. But even as the line itself has been abstracted, detached from its narrative groundings, the utterance of desperation grounds itself in bodies already in the storm of trauma, its aftermath preceding an event. The “heart”, the “heat” (of living bodies), the “face” of my translation attempt to register a deep embodiment of trauma.
In a kind of reversal of perspective, the third epic fragment lets the narration of trauma reverberate around the one gone, presumed dead, mourned. Whether one can summon the particular setting of this line or hears it against a generalized ambience of the Odyssey’s displacement and violence, my translation attempts to make visible the ways this type of trauma can rush all at once into consciousness, troubling boundaries of self and place in a tumult of uncertainty. This is felt in particular in the suspension of the word “tears” between noun and verb: “tearsnoiseagonyspirit breaking."
B. Lyric
In these lyric fragments I am straining to make a poetic vocabulary from—out of—the grammatical and material elements of these texts. For instance, the opening of my translation of Alkaios, “Torn / [first person…],” gathers its language from the graphic editorial markers signifying missing text (“Torn”) as well as the grammatical descriptors through which language learning is filtered (“first person”). Hopefully this both reminds us of the fragile materiality of all texts and urges translators towards aesthetic possibilities in the very language about language: a meta-language poetry that mobilizes more of the dimensions of what Bernstein has called a “total meaning complex,” in these cases the editorial and grammatical features of ancient texts that translation typically elides.[i] In the right-hand column of my translation of Sappho, these two approaches spread into unauthorized meanings and senses that nevertheless bind the translated and translating texts in unfurling coils and tendrils of languages in processes of exchange.
My translation of a selection from Theognidea repeats the sense of urgency performed in my translations of the Homeric passages. Additionally, I have emphasized the negativity of the thought by playing the negating word (οὐδὲ), which occurs only once in the line, across the English line.
C. Presocratica
Each of the three “presocratic philosophers” included in this section experienced some sort of forced migration: Xenophanes was exiled from his native Kolophon (an ancient Greek city around the middle of the Aegean coastline ofwhat is now Turkey) probably around 540BCE; Parmenides dwelled in (and was likely born in) a colony founded by a diasporic population from the eastern Aegean city of Phokaia (modern Turkish city of Foça); Empedokles of the Western Greek city Akragas on the island of Sicily regarded himself a cosmic exile.
These pieces advance protocols already at work in my translations of epic and lyric poetries. The Xenophanes fragment sings along with the Homeric poems of sufferings rendered by forced migration. My translation illustrates a voice on the page that haltingly lunges through a remembrance of exilic wandering, repeatedly stressing the first-person and causing that person to hover in the span between subject (ἐγὼ) and object (ἐμαυτὸν). These selections from Parmenides and Empedokles stage a multiplicity of readings, inviting and encouraging multiple perspectives on the lines and their interpretation through translations. For example, in my Parmenides translation the chasm following “primary” exposes the reader’s choice of interpretation, as the poem might continue vertically (from “primary” to “swept”) or horizontally (from “primary” to “self”). Also operative is the meta-language poetry, where “the object of primary / self” translates the grammatical description of με as a first-person singular accusative.
Similarly, in the translated lines from Empedokles I try to bring awareness to the choices readers, editors, and translators make that inform interpretations. Here, options for exploring the poem multiply and ask for several (re-)readings, opening the translations in the direction of the “experiential”.[ii] This seems to harmonize with Empedoklean stress on differentiation and teeming, ever- (re-) generating multiplicities. Here, in a sense, Empedokles names and is a philosophy of translation.
Notes:
[i]. Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” in Christopher Beach, ed., Artifice & Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics (Tuscaloosa, AL and London: University of Alabama, 1998), 4.
[ii] Adrienne K. H. Rose, “Retranslating Ibykos and Li Bai: Experimental, Rhizomatic, Multi-Media Transformations,” Intertexts 19, no. 1 (2015): 95, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631810.
Bibliographical details:
Text of the Iliad is from David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen, eds., Homeri Opera, vols. 1-2, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920).
Text of the Odyssey is from Thomas W. Allen, ed., Homeri Opera, vol. 3. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1917).
Text of Sappho is from Anne Carson, trans., If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage, 2002).
Text of Alkaios is from David A., Campbell, ed. and trans., Greek Lyric I: Sappho and Alcaeus (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1982), with emendations based on Ewen L. Bowie, “Early Expatriates: Displacement and Exile in Archaic Poetry,” in Jan Felix Gaertner, ed., Writing Exile: The Discourse in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 36-37. EBSCOhost.
Text of Theognidea is from M. L. West, ed., Iambi et Elegi Graeci: ante Alexandrum Cantati: Vol. 1: Archilochus, Hipponax, Theognidea. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Text of Xenophanes is from Daniel Graham, ed., The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) [=DK B45].
Text of Parmenides is from David Gallop, ed. and trans., Parmenides of Elea: Fragments: A Text and Translation and Introduction (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1984).
Text of Empedokles is from Brad Inwood, ed. and trans., The Poem of Empedocles: a Text and Translation with an Introduction, rev. ed. (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2001) [=DK B115].
D. M. Spitzer