Translator's Note

The Homeric Hymn to Dionysos (Hymn 7) nestles itself squarely between the surviving lengthy narrative hymns in hexameter (to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes and Aphrodite, along with fragments of an even longer narrative hymn to Dionysos) and the shorter or fragmentary invocations. The briefer hymns likely served as introductions or warm-up acts for lengthier epic recitation, while the narrative hymns potentially served as either prologues or as events in their own right. This Hymn to Dionysus (there are two others to the god in the collection, Hymns 1 and 26) is among the lengthier of the shorter hymns at 59 lines, followed closely by the Hymn to Pan (49), both of which pale in comparison to even the shortest of Hymns 2-6 (Hymn 6, To Aphrodite, 290 lines). Though the body of work carries the name of Homer, the individual dates of composition range all through the Archaic, Early Classical, and even Hellenistic periods.

The Homeric Hymns were and are living, sung-and-spoken creatures; I have striven in this translation to walk the line between formality and spontaneity, which honors the double-address (to divine and mortal listeners) occurring when the singer launches in—this is a conversation between singer and sung-about in the same breath, same word, same note as it is a performance before a mortal audience. How should the speaker keep the god’s interest and their audience’s? What kind of rhythm would the particular god want their story told in? Aphrodite is not Apollo is not Hermes is not Athena is not Dionysos.

And it is Dionysos that this hymn sings of and sings to, and (at least a sliver of) Dionysos’ godhead it seeks to hold, a notoriously thorny task for a god of contradictions, ambiguity, and elusiveness (especially in this story and the larger motif it presents, where the god is both smiling, passive youth and snarling lion, victim and avenger).

To that end, I have paid special attention to scaffolding the internal ‘stage directions’ of the text, providing a framework on which a modern performer might hang their breath, their vocal variety, and the emotion they infuse into the word, since I have departed from hexameter and hope to give a contemporary performer some guard rails in its absence. As such, this translation attempts to depict a give and take between staccato and legato, allowing Dionysiac sumptuousness to exist alongside Dionysiac violence, the sharpness of epiphany with the sensual drama of the epiphanic god. My use of punctuation is to this purpose: exclamation points, em dashes, parentheticals that range from single words to half-lines and back again, as in the break between lines 6-7 (“τάχα δ᾽ ἄνδρες ἐυσσέλμου ἀπὸ νηὸς/ληισταὶ”, “Then out of nowhere, men emerged from a galley-ship—/Pirates.”). I hope to honor both the original word order and the sense of suspense with the inclusion of the em dash; the most dangerous word is reserved for last, kept back until the next line of verse and highlighted for best use by a contemporary performer.

An alternate intention with parentheticals is an attempt on my part to capture an element of this hymn that has the potential to go unnoticed amidst the miracles: humor. There are no surprises in this hymn; the singer knows their verses well and foreshadows their ending with a touch of fiendish joy regarding the pirates’ “κακὸς μόρος”, rendered by me as “something evil…a destiny, an idea, a push” (8). Dionysos is an equal partner in this conspiratorial joy and I have striven to capture the playful nudging of the fourth wall by both god and narrator, the textual equivalent of a knowing look shot towards the camera, as exhibited when the pirates identify their quarry at line 10 in the Greek: “υἱὸν γάρ μιν ἔφαντο διοτρεφέων βασιλήων”, rendered by me as “They’d caught a prince (so they thought), a child of a Zeus-beloved king!”.

I make it a custom of using both ‘he’ and ‘they’ for Dionysos in translation, a practice that I believe creates at least a partial mirroring of the god’s gender-non-conforming aspects; in this translation, the pirates perceive ‘he’, the clear-eyed helmsman and the narrator both ‘he’ and ‘they’. Though there is some acknowledgement of the strange youth possessing something other than traditional masculinity (as the captain indicates with his comment of ὅδε δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει, “leave him for the men” (27), a phrase that obliquely casts aspersions of femininity at both helmsman and prisoner-god), I believe the choice to have a split-perception of the god’s pronouns captures the varying abilities to perceive his/their true nature.

Selected Bibliography:

Beaulieu, Marie-Claire. 2016. “Dionysus and the Sea.” The Sea in the Greek Imagination. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Evelyn-White, Hugh G., translator. 1914. “VII. – To Dionysus.” Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Harvard University Press.

Jameson, Michael. 1993. “The Asexuality of Dionysus.” Masks of Dionysus, edited by C. Faraone and T. H. Carpenter, Ithaca (NY)-London. Cornell University Press: 44-64.

Prauscello, Lucia. 2007. “‘Dionysiac’ Ambiguity: HomHymn 7.27: ὄδε δ' αὖτ' ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, No. 28: 209-216.

Rayor, Diane. 2014. The Homeric Hymns: A Translation, with Introduction and Notes. Updated edition, University of California Press.

Emma Pauly

In the Classroom