The paraclausithyron is at the door of the courtesan; the porch belongs to the second flame, the virgin. Gow/Page express some uncertainty about the exact image this is supposed to evoke.
By the way, Paul, English “cravings” is not quite right. “Crave” is usually associated with food or other material things, not with love. “Desire” or “passion” are better.
See my post above on ἐπὶ παστάδος, edited without seeing yours.
So the metaphor throughout is burned by love, not inflamed by passion? Is that always the metaphor in these? I assumed that the aorist ἔκαυσε meant something set ablaze.
I also see that I would have done better searching for διστάζω instead of διαστάζω
So the metaphor throughout is burned by love, not inflamed by passion? Is that always the metaphor in these? I assumed that the aorist ἔκαυσε meant something set ablaze.
Not “got burned” in the colloquial sense of being taken unawares, but rather the fire metaphor, both being set aflame and being destroyed by fire. My suggested correction was to counter your present-tense “enflames me.”
I only made it into present tense for the Englishing because I didn’t want to write “inflamed”, making it seem like it was over, now with ἤλγηκα having present effect right after. Also why I had “am pricked”, not “was pained”. (Though I found the dirty joke appropriate too.)
But now I don’t understand. Is ἔκαυσε meant to indicate a passion set ablaze with energy, or a harm caused by a passion (or its results)?
I didn’t want to write “inflamed”, making it seem like it was over,
But that’s just the point: he claims he’s no longer in love, οὐκέτ᾽ ἐρῶ.
Is ἔκαυσε meant to indicate a passion set ablaze with energy, or a harm caused by a passion (or its results)?
Everything implicit in the English word “burned”.
καὶ πυρὶ καὶ νιφετῷ με καὶ εἰ βούλοιο κεραυνῷ
βάλλε, καὶ εἰς κρημνοὺς ἕλκε καὶ εἰς πελάγη·
τὸν γὰρ ἀπαυδήσαντα πόθοις καὶ ἔρωτι δαμέντα
οὐδὲ Διὸς τρύχει πῦρ ἐπιβαλλόμενον.
And throw fire and rain, and if you should wish, lightning, at me,
And draw me into crags (?) and into the waves.
For the one exasperated (act. with dat. object ?) by passions and subdued by love,
Zeus’ fire does not grieve (?) him when it is set on him.
(I didn’t flip the last two lines to put the second into the direct object, but it should be obvious.)
I’m not inclined to correct your guesses when you can’t be bothered to look anything up. (Inevitably you get some right, or approximately right, but that’s no cause for complacency; and if you’ll forgive me, you are too fond of congratulating yourself.) And you don’t seem to realize that’s only one step toward understanding an epigram. Epigrams have structure and point, and they use language with precision. (How you managed to remember πεπαλαικα ποθοις … εἷς μὲν ἑταίρης εἷς δὲ κορης, εἷς δὲ νέου without τρισίν and the rest after all that discussion is beyond me.) You should at least know that οὐδὲ does not mean not.
Can’t be bothered? It took me about 100 times the effort (lowball) to read a few dozen sentences using ἀπαυδαω in the TLG. The Aesop’s fable of the hare being alternately licked and bitten by the dog seemed clearest. Elsewhere, where I understood less, it seems to mean being speechless. Sometimes from labor and being out of breath?
Regardless, it’s helpful when you point out where I’m wrong, even if no one wants to correct me. Some Greek example to help me out would be amazing, but I would be ashamed to ask for that much, and can easily search the TLG myself once I know I’m wrong.
How you managed to remember πεπαλαικα ποθοις … εἷς μὲν ἑταίρης εἷς δὲ κορης, εἷς δὲ νέου without τρισίν and the rest after all that discussion is beyond me.)
The εκαυσε discussion came after, and I remember that line slightly more accurately now. But it’s my below average memory that leads to my extraordinary measures in method.
You should at least know that οὐδὲ does not mean not.
I have a guess, but will have to look up some examples. Connectives give me serious trouble. I’ve looked it up a hundred times and it obviously hasn’t stuck, so maybe it’ll stick better with this.
EDIT: The first hit made it easy for οὐδέ: “οὐδ’ ἢν Ἀγαμέμνονα εἴπῃς”. However, looking back up at the epigram, I must have understood it when reading, but for whatever reason that didn’t make it’s way to the page.
Over the long timespan of ancient Greek literature, and in view of the wide diversity of different authors, many words have a range of meanings. Searching for precisely the right sense for a particular passage out of a large number of TLG citations every time you’re uncertain about the meaning of a word doesn’t seem like a productive use of your time, particularly when you can go straight to LSJ and pinpoint the right sense by seeing the range of meanings of a particular word and its usage in various authors. in a manageable format. You could be reading more Greek in the time you’re spending on searching in TLG.
ἀπαυδήσαντα – I had to look this up myself. Why would you resort to TLG, when LSJ glosses this specific locus, along with a few other other passages, as “faint”? This is not a common word to begin with, and this meaning is quite rare: I doubt you will ever encounter it again. You can see that from the LSJ entry. If you don’t recognize the -αυδαω component, you could look that up But I don’t think you will get the meaning in this passage from απ+αυδαω. I thought ἀπαυδήσαντα might be similar to απαγορευω, meaning something like “deny” or “reject” or “disavow”, but that meaning didn’t make sense here.
βάλλω + acc. of the person generally means not just “throw”, but “throw and hit”, or just “hit”. This is another point you could have found in LSJ, and maybe you would remember this usage instead of continuing to routinely translate the verb as “throw”.
ἀπαυδήσαντα πόθοις καὶ ἔρωτι δαμέντα – a neat chiasmus.
τρύχει – “consume”; literally “eat”.
νιφετῷ – “snow”
οὐδὲ – “not even”. It’s not a connective here. It’s the negative of και in the sense of “even”.
καὶ πυρὶ καὶ νιφετῷ με καὶ εἰ βούλοιο κεραυνῷ – Starting the translation with “and” here, as if “and” were a connective to something that preceded it, is not quite right. The phrase, as articulated by the three και, is a tricolon. Starting with the phrase with και as the initial word in the line, where there is nothing to transition from, together with the two και that follow, makes the three elements more vehement and more hyperbolic, as if the phrase were set in caps or bold type. Hard to convey in English.
Joel, I admit to having some sympathy with your method, but you take it much too far. When I have a problem with vocabulary (as I all too often do), I look it up in LSJ. If I want to pursue it further, only then might I resort to the TLG. But many of your mistakes are simply careless, or thoughtless. And you ought to have been able to see at a glance that οὐδὲ is not a connective here.
The story is possibly apocryphal, and I no longer remember the details, but a famous classicist was once asked at a gathering his profession. He responded “I look things up for a living.”
My method, as I suggested above, is to read through a passage once without looking anything up. Sometimes just looking at the Greek and understanding it are synonymous. At other times more digging is required. Since I’m a chicken, often even when I think I understand it completely, I’ll look stuff up to make sure I haven’t had a mental short circuit. Seriously, when guys whose initials are include L and S have done all that hard work for you, why not take advantage of it, especially for casual and rapid reading?
I don’t know the grammatical definition of “connective”, and didn’t mean to use the word so precisely. What I see at a glance that οὐδέ is doing the same thing in οὐδ’ ἢν Ἀγαμέμνονα εἴπῃς, yes, and is not οὐ. I reached for a poor gloss, which happens frequently. Perhaps it is because of carelessness, though I think not.
When the LSJ acts as a big book of glosses, it’s at its worst, not its best. The word, from my glance through the TLG, and as I tried to indicate in the last post, means something like “speechless” literally, “απο-” + the very common Homeric talking verb “αυδαω”, but gets used with connotations of breathlessness and exhaustion. It seems to occur a number of times in Tragedy, and then is more common in later Greek (as are many of the words that I’m having trouble with in this thread). Here’s Plutarch:
Μόνα δὲ ταῦτα τῶν ἀθλημάτων ἐφέντος αὐτοῦ τοὺς πολίτας ἀγωνίζεσθαι, ὅπου ἡ χεὶρ οὐκ ἀνατείνεται, ἐπύθετό τις τὴν αἰτίαν· ὁ δέ ‘ὅπως’ εἶπε ‘μηδεὶς αὐτῶν ἐν τῷ πονεῖν ἀπαυδᾶν ἐθίζηται.’
“Faint”, sure, I can see it. And I can see why someone in the 19th century would have gone for that, as the word was used more broadly for exhaustion then.
But how does it help the reading part of things, to have a gloss for everything? You would have to call up the English words to mind while you’re reading.
I could pick out a number of points like this. You brought up λάβρῳ πυρί earlier and glossed it as “raging”. Fine, I’m sure that’s a better gloss than whatever I chose (I don’t remember), but I was thinking of the stormwinds that had sunk Odysseus’ raft, which were λάβροι ἀνεμοι, which I saw back in August/September. Again, thank you for the correction, but the next time I run into it, I doubt that I’ll be thinking of an English word. I’ll be thinking of λάβροι ανεμοι and λάβρον πῦρ
But I am genuinely curious now. Isn’t there anyone here, that when they got to the point that they could pretty much follow what all the characters were saying in a Platonic dialogue, or a tragic play, that simply read a few for fun? Or anything that they hadn’t read yet before?
I’ve been doing this since August. It’s been fun, it’s been rewarding. If my ability to read Greek atrophies, I will let you all know so that you can be the first to tell me “I told you so.” But you guys were saying roughly the same sort of thing about my methods in the Unseens thread. That certainly turned out to be hugely beneficial to my Greek.
Again, my only measure of my progress is whether I can pick up Greek texts that I haven’t read before and follow along. In the past couple of years, it has gone from “impossible without a lot of help” to “actually possible” for a lot of authors. I hope to get to “like English” at some point, but I think that I have a lot of reading ahead of me first.
For the same reason that you warn people off of interlinears and Loebs. Because, after a couple of years of taking advantage of L&S I notice that my retention of looked up words is poor, and that I am not sufficiently attentive to word formation and context, and I am acting to correct that.
Honestly, I think you are wasting time poring over TLG. You may have learned a lot about απαυδαω, but it’s a word you will probably never encounter again. LSJ lays out all of the meanings you mentioned, and also provides citations which you could have checked had you wanted to pursue the question further. Then, if you weren’t satisfied, you could turn to TLG, but why? In any case, LSJ is a better, more efficient place to start such an investigation than wading through a mass of TLG cites.
And LSJ shouldn’t be dismissed as a 19th century product. It underwent a thorough and complete revision in the middle of the last century. Ιt may have deficiencies but so far it’s by far the best Greek-English dictionary available, and it’s unlikely to be superseded anytime soon, even with the technological advances that made TLG possible. TLG can be used at a very advanced level to nail down questions about vocabulary, but it’s best used as a supplement to LSJ. LSJ is a κτημα ες αει.
The translations you offered, “speechless”, “breathless”, or even “exhausted” (all of which LSJ also mentions), seem weak in the context of the rhetorical hyperbole of this poem. But LSJ also provides citations to other instances where this word is used to mean “faint”, which you could pursue if you wanted to. Maybe “dumbstruck” might be better, but if we’re going to attempt a translation at all, the poem requires something extravagant and exaggerated, in keeping with its tenor. “Gobsmacked by desire”? (We would use the singular in English.) Maybe there’s a hint of irony, given the literal meaning of the components of this word, in that the hyperbolic, vociferous poet here is clearly not “speechless” or “dumbstruck”. Or is that reading too much into it? “Struck speechless” might do the trick, consistent with the idea implicit in βαλλε and επιβαλλομενον, but “speechless” alone seems too weak and commonplace.
Instead of spending your time researching récherché words in TLG, I think you would be better off devoting more time and attention to grammar and syntax, which are areas where all too often you seem to be guessing. You also need to think harder about the coherence of the texts you’re trying to translate. If your rough translation doesn’t seem to fit together or flow naturally, you need to think about it again and ask yourself where you went wrong.
One other point: posting half-finished and less than fully coherent translations on Textkit, with gaps in vocabulary where you don’t understand a word offhand and with gross errors in grammar and syntax, isn’t helpful. It cries out for someone to step in and correct the errors and gaps, because an erroneous translation could confuse participants in Textkit and undermine one of its primary purposes, namely, to help people attempting the arduous task of learning ancient Greek. I’m not sure what purpose posting half-baked translations serves, but it makes the job of those who step in to correct the errors all the more time-consuming and difficult.
I hope you won’t take this too harshly. Your contributions to Textkit are valuable and I hope you won’t be too exercised at me for posting this. I hope you will continue to post your efforts at translation, which are often useful springboards for discussion. But when you post an error-ridden translation – especially when you could do better with a little more attention to grammar and syntax – I personally have to spend a lot of time going through it and trying to set it right. Not that I’m always right myself, as Paul and mwh showed me yesterday.
There are a few points to respond to here, with the most important last:
Why look at the TLG over a word I won’t see again? Primarily so that we could have a thread and discussion. Normally, I’d move on and wait until I saw it again. Also, no, it wasn’t wasted time. For one thing, I read a lot of Greek while I was doing it, which taught me things about a few different words. More importantly: No word is an island. Words are not random constellations of sounds. From ἀποαὐδάω I learned about possibilities for ἀπο in composition, about αὐδάω, and about a language that says of “out-of-speech” where we would say of “out-of-breath”. Who knows where it will prove useful?
I didn’t provide a perfect gloss. I’m not trying to translate, I’m trying to learn to read. Once I’ve read for a few years, and Greek is like English to me, then I can be bothered with translating. These Englishings are just so that we can have a discussion.
Nobody learns from this, and people are actively misled. The first is untrue, because I learn a great deal. The two mistakes on this thread that really stand out to me are taking πεπάλαικα for passive because of the dative beside it, and taking πείθων as passive because of the dative beside it. I wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t been explained to me. It wouldn’t have been explained to me if I hadn’t done a quick translation.
Unfortunately, it’s not a problem of my not knowing the forms, it’s a problem of not having the forms well enough internalized for my brain to pay attention to the right things when reading. Yes, I could correct this by doing a careful mechanical process of some kind for every sentence, but that’s hardly helpful for internalizing the forms and sensitizing my mind to what is important.
But what about the people being misled? Am I corrupting the youth with my poor translations (not to mention innovating on tradition)? First, they have still got their Loebs. This is a learning forum, and not a textbook, and I don’t pretend that my translations are anything other than what they are. Further, these threads always provoke a discussion about a wide range of points about Greek.
No one should view it as a burden to participate though. If it’s really a burden to let something wrong stand on the internet, simply drop in with a “notice that πειθων is active”, etc., and I’ll do my best to do the heavy lifting, as the thread originator. But remember that this is supposed to be enjoyable, even if μηδαμοῦ ἄλλοθι ἐντεύξεσθαι αὐτῇ ἀξίως λόγου ἢ ἐν Ἅιδου.
it’s a problem of not having the forms well enough internalized for my brain to pay attention to the right things when reading. Yes, I could correct this by doing a careful mechanical process of some kind for every sentence, but that’s hardly helpful for internalizing the forms and sensitizing my mind to what is important.
What you call a “mechanical process” is a necessary part of learning Greek. You will never internalize the forms and the syntax unless you make sure you understand the grammar as you read. If you do that, eventually you will internalize the grammar. But if you don’t – if you keep guessing at the meaning and hoping you got it right – I’m afraid you will never read Greek fluently and with accurate comprehension. Some of the time, your method works – you do get it right – but not as often as you may think, and not often enough.
Ancient Greek is not necessarily easy, but there’s little point in puttering around with it if you’re not willing to do the hard work of mastering the grammar. If you do the hard work, however, it’s very rewarding.
So I’d encourage you to spend a little more time on thinking about grammar as you read and translate. You might also try working your way through Dickey’s composition book.
Guessing? No, of course not. You have said this before, and it’s impossible. If people could read Greek by guessing all of the forms, we would be wise to ditch all of the grammar books tomorrow.
I’m afraid that I can conjugate the perfect and the participles well enough. It would be impossible to read otherwise. πεπάλαικα is perfect active 1st person, and if I wanted it to be middle/passive it would likely be πεπάλαιμαι, though you can’t always predict the middle perfect from the active perfect. πείθων is the present active participle, and πειθόμενος the middle/passive, from πείθω. (Though it’s the confusion with πείσομαι active future from πάσχω that always trips me up on active/passive sense for various forms of πείθω.) ἔκεισε is 3rd person aorist of καίω, I believe, which doesn’t quite get used like our English “burn” much of the time.
The problem is that, unless you get into habits like turning the words into English one by one, or searching head for the verb of a sentence, etc. – which would kill any possibility of fluency, of course – you have to read phrases and sentences all at once or they don’t make sense. And I’m afraid that the above forms aren’t always sufficiently internalized for me to do at the phrase level with no mistakes yet.
Michael mentions “carelessness”, and no doubt I could be more careful, but to me it feels much more like standing on a surfboard. You fall off because you’re trying to do fifty things at once and can’t go slowly, not because of carelessness.
Also, I’ll repeat my question:
But I am genuinely curious now. Isn’t there anyone here, that when they got to the point that they could pretty much follow what all the characters were saying in a Platonic dialogue, or a tragic play, that simply read a few for fun? Or anything that they hadn’t read yet before?
By “reading” though, perhaps I need to specify, “without turning them into English somehow.”
I’m sure everyone here’s done this, and not just in Greek, but there’s a difference between enjoying the reading fluency you already have and expecting lots more reading at this level of fluency to significantly improve the accuracy of your reading.
The first novel I read in Italian was The Kite Runner (because it was for sale by the tills at the supermarket) - I was pretty pleased with myself that I got the whole way through and understood all the major events. I recently pulled it off the shelf and started reading it again and realised quite how much I’d missed the first time. The thing that changed in between was lots of work taking care to produce accurate, natural Italian sentences and memorise vocabulary (especially when it wasn’t cognate with an English word, much less of a problem in Italian than Greek).
Yes, I read more novels as well and I picked up in-context vocabulary and learnt things about syntax that aren’t so well expressed in textbooks, and I had a lot of fun, but I don’t pretend that my Italian improved just from this. In fact, speaking the language more accurately improved my reading much more than reading it improved my speaking.
And that’s not because I wasn’t open to the idea. I read Kató Lomb’s Polyglot and was fully ready for lots of reading to bring big benefits. Her great success is convincing you to read real texts early and not to worry about missing out words, but I realise now how much hard work is involved in her method alongside breezily reading a novel or two.
When you have moderate reading fluency, it can feel like listening to the radio with a jackhammer going in the background or watching a game of football through frosted glass. After a while I was just desperate to get rid of the jackhammer, so I did the hard work. If you enjoy the snippets you can hear, and you’re really averse to ‘mechanical’ analysis of sentences that brings results for most people in embedding patterns, then I suppose you have to continue with your current method at least until you find it doesn’t bring you any more progress (if you reach high fluency this way you should seriously write a book about it). It seems to me a better idea to spend some time in the simulator and learn what all the buttons do rather than repeatedly crash the plane until you learn how to fly it perfectly.
I have no doubt that someone like mwh can do it, and no doubt Hylander as well, even if out of modesty he’ll deny it. I myself can pretty much do it with early epic (but not with Plato or tragedy), although there’s little I haven’t read (but I once tried that with The Shield of Heracles, which I’ve never read in translation).
I think reading Greek is a trade-off: you can spend forever one line of Greek, analyzing and looking up everything, which is hardly the thing to do if you want to read the whole poem, play or book. I don’t have patience for that. But there’s a limit there. For example: you translated γεγύμνασμαι μὲν ἑταίρης “I’ve stripped for a whore”. However, you have attained a level of Greek where you should know that even if γυμναζω meant “to undress”, there’s no way that it could take a genitive object to take the meaning “I’ve stripped for a whore”; it should have made you pause for a moment and think about what was wrong with your interpretation. This is an example of the sort of thing you need to pay conscious attention to, in my opinion; I think in children it happens automatically, but not in us grown-ups.
I am genuinely curious now. Isn’t there anyone here, that when they got to the point that they could pretty much follow what all the characters were saying in a Platonic dialogue, or a tragic play, that simply read a few for fun? Or anything that they hadn’t read yet before?
Well, I can say that I read ancient Greek texts I’ve never read before for sheer pleasure. I have to work at understanding some things, and I usually use a commentary and a dictionary, and sometimes I even turn to a translation when I’m stumped. I don’t read Greek as fluently as I would English, and I don’t think I will ever be able to read, and more or less fully understand, anything in ancient Greek without some amount of effort and assistance from commentaries and the dictionary. But that doesn’t mean I have to translate word by word or sentence by sentence. I think I can say truthfully that don’t turn what I’m reading into English sentences, even when I have to make an effort to understand how the Greek text fits together.
Putting in the effort to understand what I’m reading to the fullest extent I can is half the pleasure, especially when the text emerges coherently for me. But it can’t cohere for me unless I understand the grammar and structure. That doesn’t mean analyzing each and every sentence, but rather relying on my internalized grasp of the grammar and vocabulary most of the time.
But I can’t see how anyone can reach the point where they can read ancient Greek with pleasure without internalizing the grammar to the point where they don’t need to resort to analysis most or at least much of the time. And internalizing the grammar (not just the forms, but the syntax, too) isn’t necessarily easy and takes some work.
Sean Jones put it very well.
Been there, done that, as no doubt most of us have. But there is the problem of noise, Sean’s jackhammer. Whenever I’ve read straight through a tragedy that I haven’t read before I always want to go back and do it properly, using LSJ and the best commentary I can find and a plethora of other resources. And then I would read it again, unaided but applying what I’ve learnt in the process. Even then, of course, I’d still be seeing through a glass darkly. I wouldn’t be able to read it properly, and nor would anyone else. We don’t have enough plays for that, and our knowledge of ancient Greek is severely limited by the repertoire. Even with Plato, wholly extant, we’re handicapped by the loss of contemporary dialogues and a whole lot else; but the problem with Plato is not the Greek but the thought. If by some miracle a previously unknown tragedy came my way, rather than just bits and pieces, I’d be very excited but I’d certainly not rush through it, guessing at what particular words meant. (You refuse to call it guessing, Joel, but that is what is, and there’s nothing wrong with that if you’re in too much of a hurry to check or afraid of falling off your surfboard if you do. I just wish you wouldn’t inflict your guesses on the rest of us.)
Of course it’s good to call to mind earlier contextualized occurrences of a word or construction that you come across, especially if there’s significant intertextuality. But taking a look at LSJ would give you an idea of the word’s semantic range, which is even more useful. And take a common-or-garden word such as οὐδὲ, which you translated as “not.” That made sense, but it was not the right sense; and you shouldn’t have needed to search for the Homeric occurrence that you then remembered. You need better controls than random instances that you happen to recall.
And this is where I wax a tad indignant. You tell us that no word is an island, and that words are not random constellations of sounds. Do you really think we do not know that? And you inveigh against turning the words into English one by one, as if that is what the rest of us do. (How many times have I deplored translating?) And—this takes the biscuit—you talk of doing the heavy lifting, as if you are not in the habit of leaving that to others while you go on your merry way.