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Fragments (Penguin)

Page 3

by Heraclitus


  An old drunk

  leaning on a youngster,

  saturated with bad wine,

  head weaker than his feet . . .

  74

  Dry, the soul

  grows wise

  and good.

  75

  A dry light dries the earth.

  76

  See note.

  77

  A man in the quiet of the night

  is kindled like a fire soon quenched.

  78

  Only the living may be dead,

  the waking sleep,

  the young be old.

  79

  Time is a game

  played beautifully

  by children.

  80

  Applicants for wisdom

  do what I have done:

  inquire within.

  81

  Just as the river where I step

  is not the same, and is,

  so I am as I am not.

  82

  The rule that makes

  its subject weary

  is a sentence

  of hard labor.

  83

  For this reason,

  change gives rest.

  84

  Goat cheese melted

  in warm wine congeals

  if not well stirred.

  85

  Corpses, like night soil,

  get carted off.

  86

  The living, though they yearn

  for consummation of their fate,

  need rest, and in their turn leave

  children to fulfill their doom.

  87

  In thirty years a newborn boy

  can grow to father him a son

  who grows by then

  to father sons himself.

  88

  Thirty, therefore, names

  the moon of generation.

  89

  Ex homine in tricennio potest avus haberi.

  89

  Look: the baby born

  under the new moon

  under the old moon holds

  her grandchild in her arms.

  90

  Even a soul submerged in sleep

  is hard at work, and helps

  make something of the world.

  91

  Since mindfulness, of all things,

  is the ground of being,

  to speak one’s true mind,

  and to keep things known

  in common, serves all being,

  just as laws made clear

  uphold the city,

  yet with greater strength.

  Of all pronouncements of the law

  the one source is the Word

  whereby we choose what helps

  true mindfulness prevail.

  92

  Although we need the Word

  to keep things known in common,

  people still treat specialists

  as if their nonsense

  were a form of wisdom.

  93

  Fools seek counsel

  from the ones they doubt.

  94

  People need not act and speak

  as if they were asleep.

  95

  The waking have one world

  in common. Sleepers

  meanwhile turn aside, each

  into a darkness of his own.

  96

  The habit of knowledge

  is not human but divine.

  97

  The language of a grown man,

  to the cosmic powers,

  sounds like babytalk to men.

  98

  To a god the wisdom

  of the wisest man

  sounds apish. Beauty

  in a human face

  looks apish too.

  In everything

  we have attained

  the excellence of apes.

  99

  The ape apes find

  most beautiful

  looks apish

  to non-apes.

  100

  People ought to fight

  to keep their law

  as to defend the city’s walls.

  101

  The luckiest men die

  worthwhile deaths.

  102

  Gods, like men, revere the boys

  who die for them in battle.

  103

  Insolence needs drowning

  worse than wildfire.

  104

  Always having what we want

  may not be the best good fortune.

  Health seems sweetest

  after sickness, food

  in hunger, goodness

  in the wake of evil, and at the end

  of daylong labor sleep.

  105

  Yearning hurts,

  and what release

  may come of it

  feels much like death.

  106

  All people ought to know themselves

  and everyone be wholly mindful.

  107

  To be evenminded

  is the greatest virtue.

  Wisdom is to speak

  the truth and act

  in keeping with its nature.

  108

  Not to be quite such a fool

  sounds good. The trick,

  with so much wine

  and easy company, is how.

  109

  Stupidity is better

  kept a secret

  than displayed.

  110

  Sound thinking

  is to listen well and choose

  one course of action.

  111

  What use are these people’s wits,

  who let themselves be led

  by speechmakers, in crowds,

  without considering

  how many fools and thieves

  they are among, and how few

  choose the good?

  The best choose progress

  toward one thing, a name

  forever honored by the gods,

  while others eat their way

  toward sleep like nameless oxen.

  112

  Not far from the ancient city

  of Miletus lived

  the son of Teutamas,

  whose name was Bias.

  I would have it known,

  this one man more than others

  earned the good esteem

  of worthy people.

  113

  Give me one man

  from among ten thousand,

  if he be the best.

  114

  As for the Ephesians,

  I would have them, youths,

  elders, and all those between,

  go hang themselves, leaving the city

  in the abler hands of children.

  With banishment of Hermodoros

  they say, No man should be

  worthier than average. Thus,

  my fellow citizens declare,

  whoever would seek

  excellence can find it

  elsewhere among others.

  115

  Dogs, by this same logic, bark

  at what they cannot understand.

  116

  What is not yet known

  those blinded by bad faith

  can never learn.

  117

  Stupidity is doomed,

  therefore, to cringe

  at every syllable

  of wisdom.

  118

  While those who mouth high talk

  may think themselves high-minded,

  justice keeps the book

  on hypocrites and liars.

  120

  Unus dies par omni est.

  119

  Homer I deem worthy—

  in a trial by combat—

  of good cudgeling,

  and Archilochos the same.

  120

  Any day stands
/>
  equal to the rest.

  121

  One’s bearing

  shapes one’s fate.

  122

  After death comes

  nothing hoped for

  nor imagined.

  123

  The revenant keeps watch

  over the dead and living.

  124

  Nightwalker, magus,

  and their entourage,

  bacchants and mystics

  of the wine press,

  with stained faces

  and damp wits . . .

  125

  Initiation, here,

  into the ancient mysteries

  so honored among men

  mocks holiness.

  126

  They raise their voices

  at stone idols

  as a man might argue

  with his doorpost,

  they have understood

  so little of the gods.

  127

  Dionysus is their name for death.

  And if they did not claim

  the statue of the drunk

  they worshipped was a god,

  or call their incoherent song

  about his cock their hymn,

  everyone would know

  what filth their shamelessness

  has made of them

  and of the name of god.

  128

  A sacred ritual

  may be performed by one

  entirely purified but seldom.

  Other rites belong to those

  confined in the sodden

  lumber of the body.

  129

  Tainted souls who try

  to purify themselves with blood

  are like the man

  who steps in filth and thinks

  to bathe in sewage.

  130

  Silence, healing.

  Notes

  On the order: This book retains, in all but a few places, the ordering and numbering of fragments from Bywater’s nineteenth-century arrangement, grouped by topic. My deviations from Bywater are noted below. In the early twentieth century, Diels believed that an alphabetical arrangement of the fragments, because it was random, was less tendentious. Wheelwright, on the other hand, observes that Diels himself has been tendentious in using the discontinuity of his arrangement to show that the writings of Heraclitus were not a coherent whole. In my translation, the ordering of fragments, word choice, transitional logic, emphasis on threads of meaning, and so on serve my own best inklings of a coherence and lucidity that have survived the destruction and imperfect representation of what Heraclitus wrote.1. Bywater 1 and 2 are transposed here to put the poetic passage about the Word first, as several translators have already done. The usual translation of the Greek logos has been “Word.” This reverberates with the diction in the Standard Version of the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” John must have had the powerful tradition of Heraclitean thought in mind when he used this term in his original Greek. Logos indicates not only the lexical word, but also all means of making ideas known, as well as ideas themselves, the phenomena to which ideas respond, and the rules that govern both phenomena and ideas. The holistic logic (logos) of this range of meanings must have been a large part of the word’s appeal, as the next fragment confirms. In the second sentence in the Greek, ambiguous syntax may suggest that Heraclitus separated the essences of things and said how each thing truly is. It may mean, on the other hand, that the ignorant fail to do this. The latter seems more plausible, since Heraclitus makes no other such personal claim for his accomplishment, but insists repeatedly on the limits of such claims, as in the next fragment.

  2. See the note on 1.

  9. The discussion of Heraclitus here omitted is from the Suda, or Suidas, an unreliable literary encyclopedia from about the tenth century C.E.

  11. See the note on 12.

  12. The Greek word Sibylla, or “Sibyl,” appears in this fragment for the first time ever. No one knows where it came from. Ton theon, “the god” of sibylline prophecy, Ho anax of the previous fragment, was the Lord Apollo, god of prophetic wisdom and of the cosmic fire of the sun. For more about the word theos, see the Introduction.

  16. I have provided my own examples from Hesiod and Pythagoras in this and the next fragment, to illustrate their supposed folly. Heraclitus, no doubt, would have chosen other examples.

  17. See note on 16.

  24. The usual translation of koros, as satiety, gives the literal meaning, but loses the strong connotation of insolence, important to the personifying logic of this and many other fragments.

  31. Jones’s literal translation of this fragment is: “If there were no sun, there would be night, in spite of the other stars.” Because the sense of the Greek seems incomplete, I introduce the questions into my translation, to suggest possible connections with the logic of reversal in fragments 35, 36, and elsewhere.

  35. This rough paraphrase introduces the mention of gods and monsters to clarify the distinction between the polymorphous concreteness of Hesiod and the unifying abstract thought Heraclitus preferred.

  36. The exact phrasing of the original Greek is difficult, but scholars agree about the general sense. I have simplified the second half, which says literally that fire mixed with various spices assumes various names.

  41. This, the most famous fragment, is usually translated: “You cannot step in the same river twice.” According to Plutarch, Heraclitus says, “You cannot step into the same rivers twice.” My rephrasing tries to clear away distractingly familiar language from a startling thought. It seems unlikely to my mind that the ancient authors who refer to this idea quote Heraclitus exactly.

  42. Here Stobaeus quotes Arius Didymus’s report of what Cleanthes thought about what Heraclitus said. I have omitted this as a less interesting and less reliable version of the same passage as reported by Plutarch in fragment 41.

  51. Heraclitus is quoted as saying, “An ass prefers straw [or refuse] to gold.” Aristotle, who takes this to refer to food, does not say whether the reference to food is explicit in the original or his own inference.

  53. This fragment, like fragments 89 and 120, exists only in a Latin paraphrase of the Greek.

  54. This fragment is omitted as repetition of the second part of 53.

  60. I have introduced a question here to compensate for a vagueness that seems to come from loss of context.

  66. An untranslatable pun in this fragment involves the Greek words for bow and life, biós and bíos.

  76. Fragments 74, 75, and 76 overlap. This translation separates the sense of 74 and 75, and omits 76.

  89. This fragment, like fragments 53 and 120, exists only in a Latin paraphrase of the Greek.

  112. The name of the town here is Phriene. But little is known about Phriene, so I mention nearby Miletus instead. Miletus was an important city from the heyday of Minoan culture until the Ionian revolt in Heraclitus’s time.

  120. This fragment, like fragments 53 and 89, exists only in a Latin paraphrase of the Greek.

  121. This fragment is often translated: “Character is fate.” More literally, a man’s ethos is his daimon. A person’s customary ways of being and acting, in other words, are that person’s guiding genius. I prefer the crisper phrasing, “Character is fate,” because the Greek is crisp, but meanings lost in the pithier version seem worth keeping.

  129. Fragments 129 and 130 are transposed for the sake of resolution.

  130. The one word, akê, has several meanings: silence, calm, lulling, healing.

  Bibliography

  The following books contain translations into English or commentary in English or both.

 

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