From The Catalogue of Women

Trinity Journal of Literary Translation | 21

From The Catalogue of Women

trans. Claudio Sansone

...handsome Agamemnon, lord of men, married the dark-skinned Clytamnestra, daughter of Tyndareus. She engendered, in that Great Hall1, the beautiful-ankled Iphimede and Electra both, whose formed2 beauty competed with that of the immortals. The well-greaved Achaeans slaughtered Iphimede at the altar of swift Artemis of the golden arrows, so that on that day, paying the beautiful-ankled Argive —illusory phantom—3 as blood-money, the ships might might sail down to Ilium; but the deer-hunting archer4 easily kept her5 safe, and let fall lovely ambrosia taken from deep in the earth, and placed her where her skin may set firmly, immortal and incorruptible forever.6 And now the the tribe of men in that land call her the priestess of Artemis, renowned servant of the shooter of arrows.

1 The House of Atreus. 2 I have added ‘formed’ because I felt ‘beauty’ was reductive of eidos, which in its most literal sense means ‘form, shape’. It has been translated (in this same semantic setting) as ‘countenance’ and ‘appearance’, seemingly with a similar intent to underscore the particularly human component of beauty. I have also wanted to emphasise it in order to juxtapose Electra’s eidos with Iphimede’s eidōlon. 3 As Solmsen notes, the term eidōlon (which belongs at the head of the next line, fits very clunkily into the text, gramatically speaking. This likely to be both for emphasis, and to connect the sentences through the word in a rhetorical turn that will not translate nicely, so instead I have emphasised it in a different way, much to the same effect, as an injunction. 4 Artemis. 5 The ‘real’ Iphimede, rather than her phantom left to be sacrificed. 6 Solmsen suggests that this passage promotes an “illustrious destiny which is not the same as in the Cypria” (353). However, having reviewed Proclus’ summary of the lost epic, I find the destiny is exactly the same, and have no reason not to suggest the location she is transported to is indeed Tauris. As Solmsen later notes, however,

Pausanias attests that in the Ehoeae Iphemede is said to have been transformed into Hecate by Artemis—this evidence could change the way we read the passage, as the implications would then abound—I would venture to suggest the entrance to the underworld, given Hecate’s Cthonic affiliation, and the view of her presiding over liminal spaces.

22 | Ancient Greek

“Prayer for Charasos”

αλλ’ ἄϊ θρύληϲθα Χάραξον ἔλθην νᾶϊ ϲὺμ πλέαι· τὰ μέν̣, οἴο̣μα̣ι, Ζεῦϲ οἶδε ϲύμπαντέϲ τε θέοι· ϲὲ δ’̣ οὐ χρῆ ταῦτα νόειϲθαι,

λλὰ καὶ πέμπην ἔμε καὶ κέλ⟦η⟧`ε΄ϲθαι πόλλα λί̣ϲϲεϲθαι̣ βαϲί̣λ̣ηαν Ἤ̣ραν ἐξίκεϲθαι τυίδε ϲάαν ἄγοντα νᾶα Χάραξον,

κἄμμ’ ἐπεύρην  ρτ̣έ̣μεαϲ· τὰ δ’ ἄλλα πάντα δαιμόνεϲϲ̣ιν ἐπι̣τ̣ρόπωμεν· εὐδίαι̣ γὰρ ἐκ μεγάλαν  ήτα̣ν̣ αἶψα πέ̣λ̣ο̣νται·

τῶν κε βόλληται βαϲίλευϲ Ὀλύμπω δαίμον’ ἐκ πόνων ἐπάρ{η}`ω΄γον ἤδη περτρόπην, κῆνοι μάκαρεϲ πέλονται καὶ πολύολβοι. Sappho

From Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (ZPE) 189 (2014) Preliminary Version

Soon readers will be flooded with exacting critical analyses of this recently discovered fragment—analyses which will be composed by expert classicists with whom I cannot hope to compete. I present here a stylised translation of the recently discovered fragment by Sappho, instead to render something of the emotion and power of her poetry. Sappho’s poetry bursts off the page with energy, and I have tried to re-create that urgency, and the subtle agonising I perceive in the original, by preparing this as if it were piece for performance. This is not an entirely original idea, also because Sappho herself often addressed her poems in a very direct fashion to a listener/audience, but it is just one more way in which translation may help render a true sense of the original. I have refrained from annotating it to shreds, again because many others more qualified will be doing that soon, but I must note that I purposefully read daimon as ‘luck, fortune’, feeling it would communicate better to a modern reader in this way.