Translator's Note

This selection of five short poems features Anyte’s most memorable animals: a frisky puppy, a merciless snake, a sporting dolphin, an indulgent goat, and a pair of musical insects. Her animals enchant us with their charming song, playful movement, ruthless killing, and short, but spirited lives. With the possible exception of “To a Goat,” the poems are eulogies, written to celebrate animals that have died. While they lived, these animals were very much part of the human world, and it is this intimacy between humans and animals that Anyte captures so vividly in her verse: a girl holds a funeral for her pet bugs, a billy goat “horses” around with the local children, and a dolphin leaps to and fro around the hull of a ship, delighting in its likeness carved on the prow. This last scene is particularly reminiscent of the Dionysus Cup which features dolphins swimming near a boat with a dolphin beak figurehead.

Anyte does not always name her animals. The epigrams may have been attached to a physical representation of the animal (an ekphrastic epigram), or the identity of some animals may have been intended as a riddle. I have chosen to name the animals in the titles of my translations (the titles are my own, not Anyte’s), but sometimes their identities are far from certain. For example, I call the deceased animal of the second poem a rooster, but it has been suggested that the creature’s “fast-beating wings” would be better suited to an insect than a bird. In that same poem I interpret the killer as a cat, but that too is a conjecture; others have suggested a fox, a weasel, or any other animal that might find a suitable eponym in Sinis, a mythological highwayman. The meter of Anyte’s verse is dactylic hexameter, and her descriptions are often punctuated with metaphors and epithets similar to those found in Homeric epic. Myro’s insects, for example, are called “nightingales of the grass,” a metaphor that elevates the cicada’s shrill whine to the lovely song of a bird with an exceptionally rich literary pedigree. In a similar vein, Anyte highlights the vigorous character of the dog by describing it as “swiftest of all the bark-loving pups” (φιλοφθόγγων ὠκυτάτα σκυλάκων). “Swift” (ὠκύς) is an adjective closely associated with the great warrior Achilles, and the novel “bark-loving” (φιλοφθόγγων) imitates epic compound adjectives like “laughter-loving” (φιλομμειδής, of Aphrodite). The resulting epithet adds a note of levity to the poem without diminishing the pathos of the dog’s early death. In my translations I have tried to capture the playfulness of Anyte’s voice without neglecting the heroic register of her word choice and meter.

Mary Hamil Gilbert

Artist's Note

These five collages combine photos of ancient art and architecture taken during my 2019 travels to Greece and Italy with a digital aesthetic that works to disempower the spatiotemporal boundaries that separate us from the ancient world. By juxtaposing the modern experience of the physical remains of antiquity with Anyte’s poignant descriptions of animals and children, I am responding to the frustration that comes from encountering the fragmentary historical record especially as it pertains to animals, women, and children. To give an example, the collage that accompanies “For a Cricket and Cicada” features images of the muses (associated with crickets and cicadas in ancient Greek thought), the Acropolis caryatids, and the “Tomb of Clytemnestra” at Mycenae. I have always been struck by the melancholy expression of ancient female statues, and the blue hue of this collage is meant to connect these wistful women to Myro’s copious tears.

Claire LeSar is an artist, scholar, and recent graduate of Birmingham-Southern College. Her art confronts historical gaps and inaccuracies and finds purpose in dismantling notions of time, space, and distance; her research focuses on feminist aproaches to modern and contemporary art. She is currently working on a project entitled Ancient Women Speak (supported by a Vail fellowship) to promote the study of ancient women by creating illustrations to accompany their texts. She will begin a graduate program in Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the fall of 2020.