Translator's Note

From the age of 25, and for the next 67 years, Xenophanes wandered through Greece, reading his poems to those who would listen. The poems that survive, all in fragments, reveal a poet of a sharp philosophic mind—and by sharp, I mean not only the acute insight the poetry offers, but also the honed edge of satire that cuts through it. He mocks Homer and Hesiod (fragment 6) for teaching us that the gods behave as we do: shamefully. He chides Pythagoras (fragment 17) for that philosopher’s claim of continuous memory through many different lives, recognizing in the bark of a dog, the voice of an old friend from lifetimes ago. 

But in that mockery lurks a subtle revolution in thought. He notes (fragments 3-5) a tendency in humankind to paint the absolute other as a portrait of ourselves—those gods, so like us in their unthinkable unlikeness. We offer potencies we cannot fathom the limits we find ourselves within. Xenophanes will have none of it. Iconoclast to popular opinion in ways that Socrates will fully embody (and fully suffer the consequences of), Xenophanes begins to posit a god or a God of another kind: kin to no human, kin to no creature at all. As Diogenes Laertius puts it: a sphere that “is the totality of mind and thought, and is eternal.” It is a new thread in the weave of Greek thought, one that Anaxagoras and Empedocles work into the tapestry of their own concerns, considering the world as originating from something other than the elements, from Mind, from Love, from Strife. Xenophanes claims there are many worlds, but none exist at the same time; he is the first to say that the soul is a form of breath; he reminds us that what breathes is also what dies. 

Some say he had no teachers; others say this is not true. Boton of Athens taught him, or Archelaus. Born in Colophon, but banished, he lived in Sicily, Elea, and Catana. Then he roamed. It is said he was sold into slavery, but freed by two followers of Pythagoras. He felt few things in life became thinkable. And some things in life unbearable: he buried his sons with his own hands.

My main effort is simply to fuse back together the ancient conglomeration of poetry and philosophy, proceeding by image foremost, seeking language of honest surprise that also maintains faithfulness to the text. I’ll allow multiple meanings to accrue in a single word to give some sense of the thicker context in which a given word dwells. Lastly, I arrange the fragments to read as a broken poem, looking for a logic that will hold the whole together in feelingly coherent ways—here, a working through the strange nature of belief, of the nature of the gods versus a God, and the creation of the universe that follows forth.

Dan Beachy-Quick

In the Classroom

Fragmented Diversion: Consider how Dan Beachy-Quick’s translation of Xenophanes would read if the fragments were arranged in a different sequence—how many different stories can be told about the nature of the god(s) and the universe, through the simple act of rearrangement? Following the notion of the "broken poem" introduced in the Translator's Note, break up the fragments into even smaller pieces and construct a new poem out of the stanzas they create.
Bonus points if you scatter the fragments somewhere to be excavated and reconstructed by another reader.