by Daisy Dunn
In the twentieth century, E. V. Rieu revealed a similar aptitude for translating the monumentalism of Homer into natural English. ‘How strangely the Trojan and Achaean soldiers are behaving’, he wrote of the soldiers at Troy, ‘strangely’ replacing ‘wondrous deeds’ in the Greek of the Iliad. We might expect T. E. Shaw – Lawrence of Arabia – to have relished translating passages of Homeric heroism, but I was intrigued as to how he would have handled the delightfully domestic scene of Odysseus’ reunion with his wife Penelope in the Odyssey. It turns out rather well. His lively and often colloquial turn of phrase – ‘my heart is dazed’, ‘these shabby clothes’ – finds a contemporary counterpart in Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of the poem.
Many more male translators of the classics have been published through history than female. While recent years have witnessed the release of some fantastic translations by women, several of which have found a place in this anthology, it would have been unrepresentative to have sought a 50:50 ratio in a collection that spans the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. In making my selections I chose the texts which most appealed to me on their own merit.
I haven’t always chosen the translation that is closest to the ancient text. Sometimes a looser translation can capture the spirit of a piece in a way that a strictly accurate one cannot. Ted Hughes’s telling of Ovid’s story of Pygmalion, a man who fell in love with a statue of his own creation, is masterly even where it deviates from the Latin. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid stated that Pygmalion was disgusted by women’s vices. Hughes tells us what those vices were. His Pygmalion is deeply psychological, picturing ‘every woman’s uterus’ as a ‘spider’, her perfume as a ‘floating horror’. Ovid’s Pygmalion fears bruising her lifelike flesh. Hughes’s grips her ‘to feel flesh yield under the pressure/That half wanted to bruise her/Into a proof of life, and half did not/Want to hurt or mar or least of all/Find her the solid ivory he had made her’.
I find that the best translators respect the ancient texts while making them their own. One of my favourites is based on a Latin comic novel about a wealthy former slave called Trimalchio who hosts a dinner party. The mysterious translation I have chosen was originally – but deceptively – attributed to Oscar Wilde. Though this attribution has since been retracted, the story still reads like a celebration of Victorian decadence. You can almost hear the voice of Wilde – or even Huysmans – in the description of Trimalchio, the louche protagonist of the story, being ‘carried in to the sound of music… bolstered up among a host of tiny cushions’. It is not surprising that the Roman story went on to inspire F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the twentieth century.
Elsewhere in this collection, early modern England encroaches upon Francis Hickes’s seventeenth-century translation of a story about a dream by the ancient satirist Lucian. ‘After I had given over going to schoole’, wrote Hickes, merging his own voice with that of the Greek satirist, ‘and was grown to be a stripling of some good stature, my father advised with his friends, what it were best for him to breed mee to: and the opinion of most was, that to make mee a scholler, the labour would be long, the charge great, and would require a plentifull purse…’ When a translator accommodates a story to his own times and tongue he helps to keep it alive.
The hundred stories from classical literature included in this collection owe their survival to the lasting impression they made upon the minds of those who read them. I have tried to strike a balance between what we might call ‘classic classics’, such as John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid, and the less familiar or expected. I have included old translations, new ones, verse and prose, and a handful of my own. There are erudite but highly readable contributions from classical scholars such as Benjamin Jowett, Aubrey de Sélincourt, Martin West and the poet Robert Graves – on Caligula rather than his uncle (I) Claudius – as well as writers better known for their works of English literature. Louis MacNeice offers a fine translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Walter Pater’s translation of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ from Apuleius’ Golden Ass is to my mind unparalleled. Percy Bysshe Shelley clearly had great fun digesting Plato’s description of the primordial separation of man from woman, in which the king of the gods ‘cut human beings in half, as people cut eggs before they salt them, or as I have seen eggs cut with hairs’.
I close this anthology with a penetrating translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy by Queen Elizabeth I. I found the monarch’s apparent sympathy with the protagonist of the story incredibly moving. It brought home to me the fact that, for all the centuries that separate us, we might just as easily find ourselves in the characters of an ancient story as those of our own world.
DAISY DUNN, 2019
Author’s note
I envisaged this anthology as a kind of grown-up version of the books of myths and legends I enjoyed as a child. While some of the stories are suitable for children, a good number of them contain sexual themes, as found in the original texts, or are stylistically aimed at the adult reader.
Within the extracts themselves, [italic type within square brackets] denotes a stage direction or other observation in the original translated text. My own occasional editorial interpolations in the texts – mainly in the form of linking passages to connect a sequence of extracts from the same text or, very occasionally, in footnotes, appear in unbracketed italic type.
THE BIRTH OF LOVE
Theogony
Hesiod
Translated by Barry B. Powell, 2017
In the beginning there was nothing but Chaos. Then came Gaia (Earth), Tartaros (the Underworld), and Eros (Love). Later, from Gaia, came Ouranos (Sky or the Heavens). As early as the seventh century BC, a Greek poet named Hesiod composed a poem on the origins of the cosmos entitled the Theogony (‘Birth of the gods’). He described the often violent geneses of the familiar ancient Greek gods out of these primordial deities. This extract from his superbly sprawling poem culminates with the dramatic birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, out of her father Ouranos’ severed genitals.
From Chaos came Darkness and black Night, and from Night came
Brightness and Day, whom Night conceived and bore by uniting in love
with Darkness. Earth bore starry Sky first, like to her in size, so that
he covered her all around, everywhere, so that there might always
be a secure seat for the blessed gods. And Earth gave birth to the blessed
Mountains, the pleasant halls of the gods, the nymphs who live in the wooded
hills. She bore the barren waters, raging with its swell, Sea, without making
delightful love.
But then, uniting with Sky, Earth bore deep-swirling Ocean,
and Koios, and Kreios, and Hyperion, and Iapetos, and Theia, and Rhea,
and Themis, and Mnemosynê, and golden-crowned Phoibê, and beloved
Tethys. After them was born crooked-counseled Kronos, the youngest
and most terrible of these children, who hated his powerful father.
She bore too the Cyclopês with their overweening spirit – Brontês
and Steropês and mighty Argês, who gave to Zeus the thunderbolt
and manufactured the lightning. These creatures were like the gods
in all other ways, but they had a single eye in the middle of their foreheads:
So they were called “Round-Eyes,” because there was a single round
eye in their foreheads. Strength and power and device were in their works.
Earth and Sky had three other children, great and strong,
scarcely to be named—Kottos and Briareos and Gygês, prodigal children.
One hundred arms sprang from their shoulders, scarcely to be imagined,
and fifty heads grew out of the shoulders of each, mounted on powerful
limbs. Their strength was unapproachable, mighty in their great forms.
Of all the offspring of Earth and Sky, these were the most terrible children.
Their father,
Sky, hated them from the beginning. And as soon
as one of his children was born, he would hide them all away in a hiding place
of Earth and would not allow them to come into the light, and Sky took
delight in his evil deed. But huge Earth groaned within from the strain,
and she devised an evil trick. Quickly making a gray unconquerable
substance, she fashioned a huge sickle, and she spoke to her dear children.
She said, encouragingly, but sorrowing in her own heart; “My children,
begotten by a mad father, if you are willing to listen to me,
let us take vengeance for your father’s wicked outrage. For he first
devised unseemly deeds.” So she spoke, but fear seized them all, nor did
any of them speak. Then, taking courage, the crooked-counseling Kronos
answered his excellent mother. “Mother, I will undertake this deed
and I will bring it to completion, for I do not like our father and his evil
name. It was he who first began unseemly deeds.”
So he spoke,
and vast Earth rejoiced greatly in her heart. She took Kronos and hid
him in an ambush. She placed the saw-toothed sickle in his hands.
She laid out the whole plot. Great Sky came, dragging night, and he lay
all over Earth, wanting to make love, and he was spread out all over her.
Then the child reached out from his ambush with his left hand,
and with his right hand he held the huge sickle, long and saw-toothed,
and furiously he cut off his father’s genitals, and he threw them away,
to fall backwards. They did not flee from his hand for nothing!
Earth received all the bloody drops that shook free, and as the years
rolled around, she bore Erinys and the great and mighty Giants, shining
in their armor and holding long spears in their hands, and she bore
the nymphs that people call the Ash Nymphs upon the boundless earth.
When he first cut off the genitals with his sickle made of an unconquerable
substance, he threw them from the land into the churning sea, where they
were borne for a long time over the waves, and a white foam [aphros]
arose around the deathless flesh. And in it a young woman was raised up.
She first came to holy CYTHERA, and then from there she arrived in
CYPRUS, wrapped in waves. She came forth an awful and beautiful goddess,
and around her slender feet grass grew. Men and gods call her Aphrodite,
a goddess born from the foam, and also lovely-crowned Cythereia—
because she was born of the foam, and Cythereia because she came
to Cythera. And Cyprogenea, because she was born on stormy Cyprus,
and Lover of Laughter because she came to light from the genitals.
THE ORIGINS OF THE TROJAN WAR
Cypria
Epic Cycle
Translated by Martin L. West, 2003
Homer’s epics describe the events and aftermath of a legendary war fought between the Greeks and Trojans in the Late Bronze Age. The ten-year conflict began after Paris, a prince of Troy, judged Aphrodite to be the most beautiful goddess, and as his reward absconded with Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon consequently marched a Greek army against Troy. A host of poets working in Homer’s wake produced sequels and prequels and adjuncts to these stories. The poems of this so-called ‘Epic Cycle’ are fragmentary, but this one, the Cypria, which is thought to have been composed in the sixth century BC, survives in detailed summary. The poem described Paris meeting Helen for the very first time and the Greeks arriving in Troy. It also included this intriguing backstory, recorded by an ancient scholar on the Iliad, as an additional explanation for the cause of the Trojan War.
There was a time when the countless races [of men] roaming [constantly] over the land were weighing down the [deep-]breasted earth’s expanse. Zeus took pity when he saw it, and in his complex mind he resolved to relieve the all-nurturing earth of mankind’s weight by fanning the great conflict of the Trojan War, to void the burden through death. So the warriors at Troy kept being killed, and Zeus’ plan was being fulfilled.
THE TRUCE
Iliad, Book III
Homer
Translated by E. V. Rieu, 1950
The story of the Iliad of Homer is set in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War. At the beginning of this extract from the poem, the messenger goddess Iris comes to tell Helen that the Greeks (‘Achaeans’ or ‘Argives’) and Trojans have agreed to a truce. Her lover Paris is to fight her forsaken husband Menelaus, King of Sparta (‘Lacedaemon’) man to man for her and her goods. We meet Priam, King of Troy (‘Ilium’), and a great many of the characters who predominate on the battlefield, including Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army.
Meanwhile Iris brought the news to white-armed Helen, disguising herself as Helen’s sister-in-law, Laodice, the most beautiful of Priam’s daughters, who was married to the lord Helicaon, Antenor’s son. She found Helen in her palace, at work on a great purple web of double width, into which she was weaving some of the many battles between the horse-taming Trojans and the bronze-clad Achaeans in the war that had been forced upon them for her sake. Iris of the Nimble Feet went up to her and said: ‘My dear sister, come and see how strangely the Trojan and Achaean soldiers are behaving. A little while ago they were threatening each other with a terrible battle in the plain and looked as though they meant to fight to the death. But now the battle is off, and they are sitting quietly there, leaning on their shields, with the long javelins stuck on end beside them, while Paris and the redoubtable Menelaus are to fight a duel for you with their great spears, and the winner is to claim you as his wife.’
This news from the goddess filled Helen’s heart with tender longing for her former husband and her parents and the city she had left. She wrapped a veil of white linen round her head, and with the tear-drops running down her cheeks set out from her bedroom, not alone, but attended by two waiting-women. Aethre daughter of Pittheus, and the ox-eyed lady Clymene. In a little while they reached the neighbourhood of the Scaean Gate.
At this gate, Priam was sitting in conference with the Elders of the city, Panthous and Thymoetes, Lampus and Clytius, Hicetaon, offshoot of the War-god, and his two wise counsellors, Ucalegon and Antenor. Old age had brought their fighting days to an end, but they were excellent speakers, these Trojan Elders, sitting there on the tower, like cicadas perched on a tree in the woods chirping delightfully. When they saw Helen coming to the tower, they lowered their voices. ‘Who on earth,’ they asked one another, ‘could blame the Trojan and Achaean men-at-arms for suffering so long for such a woman’s sake? Indeed, she is the very image of an immortal goddess. All the same, and lovely as she is, let her sail home and not stay here to vex us and our children after us.’
Meanwhile, Priam had called Helen to his side. ‘Dear child,’ he said, ‘come here and sit in front of me, so that you may see your former husband and your relatives and friends. I bear you no ill will at all: I blame the gods. It is they who brought this terrible Achaean war upon me. And now you can tell me the name of that giant over there. Who is that tall and handsome Achaean? There are others taller by a head, but I have never set eyes on a man with such good looks or with such majesty. He is every inch a king.’
‘I pay you homage and reverence, my dear father-in-law,’ replied the gracious lady Helen. ‘I wish I had chosen to die in misery before I came here with your son, deserting my bridal chamber, my kinsfolk, my darling daughter and the dear friends with whom I had grown up. But things did not fall out like that, to my unending sorrow. However, I must tell you what you wished to know. The man you pointed out is imperial Agamemnon son of Atreus, a good king and a mighty spearman too. He was my brother-in-law once, shameless creature that I am – unless a
ll that was a dream.’
When he heard this the old man gazed at Agamemnon with envious admiration. ‘Ah, lucky son of Atreus,’ he exclaimed, ‘child of fortune, blessed by the gods! So you are the man whom all these thousands of Achaeans serve! I went to Phrygia once, the land of vines and galloping horses, and learnt how numerous the Phrygians are when I saw the armies of Otreus and King Mygdon encamped by the River Sangarius. I was their ally and I bivouacked with them that time the Amazons, who fight like men, came up to the attack. But even they were not as many as these Achaeans with their flashing eyes.’
The old man, noticing Odysseus next, said: ‘Tell me now, dear child, who that man is. He is shorter than King Agamemnon by a head, but broader in the shoulders and the chest. He has left his armour lying on the ground, and there he goes, like a bellwether, inspecting the ranks. He reminds me of a fleecy ram bringing a great flock of white sheep to heel.’
‘That,’ said Helen, child of Zeus, ‘is Laertes’ son, Odysseus of the nimble wits. Ithaca, where he was brought up, is a poor and rocky land; but he is a master of intrigue and stratagem.’
The wise Antenor added something to Helen’s picture of Odysseus. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I can endorse what you say, for Odysseus has been here. He came with Menelaus on an embassy in your behalf, and I was their host. I entertained them in my own house, and I know not only what they look like but the way they think. In conference with the Trojans, when all were standing, Menelaus with his broad shoulders overtopped the whole company; but Odysseus was the more imposing of the two when both were seated. When their turn came to express their views in public, Menelaus spoke fluently, not at great length, but very clearly, being a man of few words who kept to the point, though he was the younger of the two. By contrast, when the nimble-witted Odysseus took the floor, he stood there with his head bent firmly down, glancing from under his brows, and he did not swing his staff either to the front or back, but held it stiffly, as though he had never handled one before. You would have taken him for a sulky fellow and no better than a fool. But when that great voice of his came booming from his chest, and the words poured from his lips like flakes of winter snow, there was no man alive who could compete with Odysseus. When we looked at him then, we were no longer misled by appearances.’