TRANSLATIONS AND THE TEXT "TO APHRODITE"

Translations and the Text

Before entering into a detailed commentary on Dionysius' Poem I, it seems
useful to talk for a minute about translations, what they are and what they
and intended to do. In the last half of the 20th century, the Classics have
gone through a new phrase in the long history of an ancient philological
discipline, one in which artistic translations of almost every major classical
author have flooded the book market. It is not just a question of getting out
one readable translation so that those who do not study Greek or Latin can
read the writing of classical authors. We now he a choice of half a dozen
translations of each author, some close to the original text, others trying to
recreate the feeling of the original in modern wording. Some translations
are poetic works in their own right, but many are intended for the college
market where copies of a Homer or Vergil are required reading for a
Classics course and can sell tens of thousands of copies.

But there is another side to this. After l950 the number of students studying
the Greek and Latin language in colleges declined severally, many colleges
dropped the Classics as a discipline in those economically tight time. But
soon a way for the field of Classics was discovered as a possible salvation.
Teach courses in "Classics in Translation" to classes of eighty or more
rather than Homer in Greek to a class of five or less.

This caught on and actually saved doomed Classics Departments which had
been teaching on a virtually tutorial level. With more students there could
be more faculty and tenured security re-cementing translation programs into
the stable college curriculum.

With this new and exciting level of activity, more translations appeared, and
in many cases obscured the actual texts which from which they were derived.
Why read Homer in painful dictionary-based Greek when you can
"do Homer" in three weeks in an Epic Course? By the end of the century
people starter to realize that the translations and the original were not at all
the same thing, and there has been a resurgence of interest in the classical
languages, especially in collage Greek in the last decades, as student verge
away from easy discussion courses and seek something which requires effort
to confer mastery.

But there is more to say about Translation as a process. Robert Frost put his
finger on the situation years ago when he said that "Poetry is what is lost in
translation.". If you change the words to another language which has
different word-associations, and you change the phonetics of the words and
phrases, and even the sentence and verse structure (as must often be done to
avoid translation-ese effects), you create a new and separate piece of writing.
You have not trans-lated or "brought it across" at all, you may have
given a fair representation of the overall meaning, but you have demolished
the form in the process. Few translations can afford to be form-conscious
and at the same time readable, it takes too much effort with too little chance
of succeeding.

Coming back to Sappho, the question stands: How does she translate?
I can answer this question best by giving you several translations to examine,
before we go on to look in detail at the Greek. Registering on what the
translation does without the Greek, you can compare your impression with
what you understand after reading through the commentary. There are hundreds
of English translations of Sappho dating back over the last two centuries,
and there will be still many more coming in this present decade.

With patience one could sample them all, and see if they match well with
the Greek.

This should be the acid test: If after examining a number of accepted
translations, we find that the translation and the text only match in general
outline and meaning, and do not have the same detailed traits of sound and
configuration of the words, then we would have to admit that Sappho is
really not at all translatable.

Let me give first a nicely done but flowery late Victorian translation by
A.S. Way, which was considered excellent in its time:

Rainbow-throned immortal one, Aphrodite,
Child of Zeus, spell-weaver, I bow before thee ---
Harrow not my spirit with anguish, mighty
Queen, I implore thee!
Nay, come hither, even as once thou, bending
Down from far to hearken my cry, didst hear me,
From the Father's palace of gold descending
Drewest anear me
Chariot wafted: far over midnight-sleeping
Earth, they fair fleet sparrows, through cloudland riven
Wide by tumultuous wings, came sweeping
Down from thy heaven,
Swittly came: thou, smiling wt those undying
Lips and star-eyes, Blessed One, smiling me-ward,
Said'st, "What ails thee? --- wherefore uprose thy crying
Calling me thee-ward?
Say for what boon most with a frenzied longing
Yearns thy soul --- say whom shall my glamour chaining
Hale thy love's thrall, Sappho --- and who is wronging
Thee with disdaining?
Who avoids thee soon shall be thy pursuer:
Aye, the gift-rejecter the giver shall now be:
Aye, the loveless shall now become the wooer,
Scornful shalt thou be!"
Once again come! Come, and my chains dissever,
Chains of heart-ache! Passionate longings rend me ---
Oh fulfil them! Thou in the strife be ever
Near, to defend me.

The first problem with this translation is linguistic. My spell-check found a
surprising number of words which were not known or in use now, beyond
the archaic "thee/thou" pronouns. Some were poetisms which the author invented
to give a sense of the Greek wording, others were certainly archaic
or bookish even then. Although the language is completely consonant with
the Art Nouveau movement of the early century, and quite nicely done if
one thinks of the floral decorations and intentional archaisms of the post
William Morris period, it is singularly out of step with our stripped, post-
Art Deco, straight and minimalist preferences.

The translator did know the Greek well, he knew that something had to be
done to carry across some of the loveliness of the Greek words and phrasing,
and he did this with the current poetic vocabulary of his time. The result
is quite lovely, given the translator's setting from a century ago. For
most of us, this translation would not work at all. As Sappho is clear and
sharp and direct, Mr. Way is flowery and wordy and indirect. It is useful
however as a reminder of the way language continually changes. Here in the
span of a single decade, we see huge changes in today's TV or our children's
speech patterns. Is translation going to be done over every few years to keep
up with the changes in the way we speak? Yes, and that may be the reason
that we are going to experience such a flood of new translation of the classics,
decade by decade.

Next is a translation which I did a few years ago to accompany an earlier
and much simpler Web version of this Study on Sappho. It was intended to
serve as a translation accompanying the transliteration of Poem I (Greek on
the web was not feasible back then), and I later found that it was linked,
cross referenced, lifted and purloined (with or without my name) throughout
the Internet, which must mean indirectly that it was not considered a
bad translation. Looking it over, I see it has few words or expressions
which deviate far from normal common English usage of the year 2000,
and it may be the "ordinariness" of this translation which is also fairly literal,
which is its best claim to fame.

Many colored throned immortal Aphrodita,
daughter of Zeus, wile-weaver, I beg you
with reproaches and harms do not beat down
O Lady, my soul
But come here, if ever at another time
My voice hearing, from afar
You gave ear, and your father's home leaving
----golden --- you came
Yoking the chariot. And fair, swift
Doves brought you over the black earth
Dense wings whirring, from heaven down
through middle air.
Suddenly they arrived, and you, O Blessed One,
Smiling with your immortal countenance
Asked what hurt me, and for what
Now I cried out.
And what do I want to happen most
In my crazy heart. "Whom then you desire
Persuasion to bring to you, dearest? Who
Sappho hurts you.
And if she flees, soon will she follow,
If she does not take gifts, she will give,
If she does not love, she will love
Despite herself"
Come to me now, the harsh worry
Let loose, what my heart wants to be
Done, do it!, and you yourself be
My battle-ally.

Comment from the translator:

"Many colored" is of course clumsy, but a deficiency in the English
language which has no words for the Greek "poikilos" which corresponds
fairly well with Latin. "varius". "Colored" can be of a single
hue so not suitable. We have had to get along with Joseph's Coat of
Many Colors for centuries, and Mr. Way's suggestion of the "rainbow"
is a fair effort to supply the right term, but entirely too fancy
and not in the Greek at all.

"Wile weaver" does translate 'dolo-ploka' exactly, but the Greek was
probably a common adjective for many a woman, whereas this is
too strong a neologism in English. But many translations have used it
so often that we might almost think it a native English word.
"Beat down" is too brutal and direct, but fits the imperative 'damna',
which means dominate, crush. If a suitable word does not come up, I
would always go with the simplest expression, as here.
"My voice hearing" follows the Greek word order, as "father's home
leaving". This is done to catch the archaic quality of the Greek, it is
still understandable now although word inversions are often not registered
in today's usage.

"Black earth" has to stay exactly as it is, since it is an allusion to the
world of Homer with his own tag expression. Never touch an allusion,
this is no place for poetic invention.

"your immortal face" . Face seems too ordinary and daily, while
"countenance" is formal and evasive for "prosopó " which stands
forth as "pros + op". Nice clear word with immediate meaning but
built in formality in Greek usage.

"Asked what hurt me..." This is kept close since the goddess it talking
like mother to child, "Why are you hurting", better reversed for
English as "who hit you?". But we want to keep the 'hurt' word, the
eternal scraped knee needing a bandaid.

"And if she flees..." This paragraph (stanza as it were) has to retain
the bipartite nature of each line, slowly building tensions between the
present and assured future situations, like a magical incantation
bringing the two parts of a broken relationship tougher inexorably.
The lines have to look inexorable, until the last word, where in the
short line "despite herself" does no justice to the Greek 'ouk etheloisa',
which as "(even) not wishing" modifies and caps the unidentified
"she" of the whole paragraph.

The reading 'etheloisa=ethelousa' as a nom. sg. fem. has been
emended to 3 person plural 'ethelousan' assuming that the person was
a man and both of them were unable to restrain themselves. Such was
the fear of homosexuality in the l850's that a text could be emended
just to change the subject.

The last paragraph has to be translated very simply wiuth a minimum
of words and no decoration, as here done. This was done in the
translation monosyllabically so far as possible, matching the one and
two syllable words of the Greek which express an in-turning of the
feelings, until that last most difficult word "battle ally" for
'symmachos'. This was the special word for a sworn ally in the throes
of battle, whether Homeric goddess Athena or a confederate ally in
the world of Greek politics. She uses the word in a critical sense,
since it is an unexpected word for a woman in that male dominated
society. For this I never found a good translation into English.
So it would appear that some of the clumsiness of this translation was
intentional, in an effort to keep close to the Greek rather than exfoliate
into a rival poem of parallel quality. For this age, this may be the
best way to go. And again the warning that it is the poetry which is
lost in the translation.!