Maybe reading Pindar fluently might be the end goal of all Greek study. Karpfen famously said Ronsard, Hoerdelin, du Bellay, Voltaire among had greatly misunderstood and that a line so simple as “water is the best nourishment” was even claimed to be mean another thing entirely until the close of the XIX century. I don’t how much of this is actually urban legend, but I have never seen a sixth-former or any schoolboy for that matter at ease with Pindar. If I were to approach him together with Bacchylides after Homer, would that be easier? I have heard Bacchylides is significantly easier How can I tackle his syntax and vocabulary?
Yes, it’s always best to read Homer first. And reading Bacchylides will certainly make it easier to get a handle on the epinician conventions that he and Pindar both follow.
“Water is best” (ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ—there’s nothing about nourishment) is not an isolated maxim but introduce a theme that is familiar and readily intelligible in its context: celebrating a victory in the Olympic Games. There’s nothing obscure or puzzling about it.
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Pindar was a lyric poet and more than learning to read, you have to learn to know how to recite or sing it if possible, because that is how it was intended to be interpreted, recognizing the tonal accent and the difference between long and short vowels.
If you don’t feel up to it, start by reading Greek texts like Lucian’s on the Syrian Goddess, Herodotus, Argonautica, Homer and Hesiod in that order. That will give you a good amount of vocabulary that Pindar used.
The other part you question does not make much sense, poets like Hölderlin did not translate Pindar’s first Olympian ode nor did they offer those translations as the “true interpretation of Pindar”.
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I don’t know much Greek, I haven’t even completed the first chapter of Athenaze ( my knowledge is basically confined to the 1st and 2nd declensions). The statements I had made came from Karpfen -or as he was known in the Brazilian press- Carpeaux. In his magnum opus “História da Literatura Ocidental” or “History of Western Literature” he wrote of Pindar:
„A maior parte das poesias de Píndaro21 chama-se “Epinikioi”: canções de vitórias, quer dizer, de vitórias em jogos esportivos; são epinícios olímpicos, píticos, nemeus, ístmicos, assim denominados conforme os lugares nos quais as festas esportivas se celebraram. A primeira impressão da poesia pindárica é: aristocracia. Não há, no mundo, poesia mais solene, mais nobre; daí a atração irresistível que Píndaro exerceu em todos os séculos aristocráticos: Ronsard e os outros poetas da Pléiade tentaram odes pindáricas; depois, Malherbe e a sua escola, Chiabrera, na Itália, Cowley na Inglaterra, os poetas ingleses de idade augustana como Gray, os classicistas do fim do século XVIII, de Meléndez Valdés até Hölderlin – um cortejo ilustre de equívocos ou fracassos. O segredo de Píndaro reside na mistura inimitável de nobreza e religiosidade; este poeta parece mais perto dos deuses que dos homens, separando-se do vulgo pelo estilo arcaico e obscuro, que na imitação moderna se torna artifício insuportável. E por isso um céptico como Voltaire falou, a propósito de Píndaro, como de um poeta que possui o talento – “de parler beaucoup sans rien dire”, autor de “vers que personne n’entend Et qu’il faut toujours qu’on admire”. Píndaro é o mais difícil dos autores gregos. Os seus hinos costumam referir-se à cidade na qual o vencedor nasceu ou à família à qual pertence, e os mitos particulares da cidade ou da família constituem o conteúdo do poema. Não existe, porém, relação inteligível entre o mito e o feito esportivo, de modo que o poema se transforma em rapsódia incoerente; pelo menos para nós. O estilo não ajuda a compreensão. A linguagem de Píndaro é densa, rica em comparações estranhas, diz tudo por metáforas singulares, complica as frases pela ordem arbitrária das palavras. A admiração convencional nunca admitiu defeitos em Píndaro; responsabilizou pelas dificuldades da leitura os próprios leitores, que seriam incapazes de acompanhar a elevação do poeta inspirado; Píndaro tornou-se paradigma da inspiração divina na poesia, quase exemplo de profeta-poeta. Mas quando o progresso da filologia permitiu compreensão mais exata, as grandes frases inspiradas se revelaram como lugares-comuns brilhantes, e, às vezes, nem brilhantes: o famoso começo da primeira Olímpica – “hydor men ariston”– quer apenas dizer que a água é uma bebida saudável, e essa idéia não é das mais profundas.“ (p.58-59, volume I)
It translates to:
„The greater part of Pindar‘s Poems are called Epinikoi. That is, Songs of Victories in athletic competitions. They are Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, Isthmian epinikoi, thud called according to the places in which the events celebrated took place. The first impresssion one can draw from Pindar‘s poetry is aristocracy. No other poetry in the world is more solemn, more noble, thence comes the great irresistible attraction to Pindar‘s poetry from the ages, centuries and Spirits of aristocracy. Ronsard and other poets from the Pléiade attempted to compose odes after the manner of Pindar. Afterwards, Malherbe and his circle of disciples, Chiabrera in Italy, Cowley in England, the Augustan Age poets like Gray also, the classicist poets at the end of the XVIII Century, from Melendez Valdes to Hölderlin, they all tried to do the very same. They formed a succession of faliures and equivocations. Pindar‘s true secret is that he Mixed religiosity with nobility. He seems closer to his gods than to men. He separates himself from the mass through his archaic and obscure style, which put to a modern translation results it becomes an unbearable mannerism. And that is the reason why a skeptic Rationalist like Voltaire accused Pindar of: – “de parler beaucoup sans rien dire”, and of being an author of “vers que personne n’entend Et qu’il faut toujours qu’on admire”. Pindar is the hardest of all Greek authors. His Hymnus usually draw from the town in which the competition’s winner was born or from the family in which he was born. Particular myths from the town or from the individual’s family make up for the bulk of a poem. There isn‘t however any sort of analogy between the poem‘s content and what it celebrated. It becomes all the more incomprehensible -to us at least. His style does not help. Pindar‘s language is dense, full of weird comparisons and unique metaphors. It gets all the more confusing when he arranges his words in an arbitrary order. Conventional admiration could not afford any blemishes to Pindar; it took all reading difficulties to mean an inadequacy on the part of the reader; Pindar became the prototype of divine inspiration in poetry, almost a poet-prophet. But when the advent of modern philology did come, a more precise understanding of his writings also came, the great brilliant, inspired phrases became admirable commonplaces, some not even so admirable. The beginning of the famous First Olympic springs to mind: “hydor men ariston”– it only means to say that water is most nourishing or healthy drink and this idea is altogether not very profound“ (p.58-59, volume I)
To summarize the opening sentence of Pindar’s First Olympian::
“Water, gold, sunshine — these are tops, but when it comes to athletic contests, the Olympic Games beats all.”
Not very profound perhaps, and the language, while elevated, is not difficult. But the ode honors the tyrant of Syracuse, who has just chalked up a win in the horse-race at Olympia, and the key to understanding the ode is to recognize that simple fact.
Joseph,
Why did you choose On the Syrian Goddess as your first suggested reading? Introduction to Ionic, or is there some reason to think there’s a lot of overlap between that text and Pindar?
Mark
I admire your ambition but I think you should learn to walk before you run.
If you are unfamiliar with Greek mythology this will be an added difficulty. Make your way though Athenaze then read Homer if you like but postpone Pindar until you have mastered more of the language.
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I second Seneca2008. I’ve already stated this on another post but apparently it did not sink in. Don’t just listen to Athenaze, listen to all of the elementary textbooks. I say ‘listen’ not ‘read’ because if you can listen to 1 to 2 hours a day of Greek while multitasking and commuting than you can expose yourself to a lot more Greek, further ‘the ears remember better than do the eyes’. (a paraphrase of a Christopher Rico quote). I’m guessing that more than 95% of students who try to learn Ancient Greek fail. Don’t even worry about mastering the greatest authors yet that is very far into the future. Before you start thinking about step 100 you have to think about how you’re going to get from step 5 to step 10. Your current concerns should be asking yourself how are you going to read at least 200,000 words of elementary text without getting bored and frustrated. Work on that problem first, then worry about Pindar. On 28 different occasions over the last 30 years of my life have I sat down and said to myself “Ok, I’m going to learn or improve a language” and only 16 of those occasions were a success. The most common cause for my past failure was not understanding how much time the enterprise takes. You’ve said in a former post that you estimate it will take 5000 hours to learn Pindar which is reasonable. But you need a plan for how you are going to get through the first 500 or 1000 hours without getting burned out and discouraged. I strongly recommend learning to speak the language and watching a few youtube videos on how to learn a language. I’m fluent in Arabic which is a category 5 language and I can tell you that Ancient Greek using the same metric is a category 7 language. You’ve undertaken a very difficult task and you’re going to have to seriously double-down if you want to obtain your goal.
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Why do you guys think Ancient Greek is so much harder than other languages? Greek syntax seems to be no harder than that of Latin, at least to beginner whose only experience is reading very small extracts from it. The lexicon isn’t that large. Vieira and Bernardes used 30-35K lemmas in Portuguese, Victor Hugo used around the same range in French. Pindar, Sophocles and Homer did not break the 9k lemma barrier. Is all this difficulty just because of the particles and the verbal morphology? What is it about the language that makes it so hard?
I have no idea whether Greek is harder than other languages. my students do better in Greek than those who study latin perhaps because they are more motivated. both languages have their difficulties and peculiarities.
i think this is a fruitless discussion. if you are interested in learning Greek work your way through your chosen textbook do the exercises and then start reading some straightforward texts. its as simple as that. if you are motivated you will succeed. i dont know where this figure of a 95% failure rate comes from. its not my experience.
there are many ways to learn things, choose the method that suits you best.
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I recall the saying that “Greek is hard to learn, easy to master, while Latin is easy to learn, hard to master.”
Nobody ever explained it to me, but I suspect the gist of that is that Greek has more forms to learn, a larger vocabulary to acquire (including the many compounds and their shades of meaning), and the particles. Once you have that down, though, it’s easy to be express yourself for the same reasons: simple and easily understood means of shading meaning “left or right” as it were.
Latin on the other hand is so regular as to have been handed down by space aliens and has a smaller vocabulary, but for the same reason it’s hard to express yourself in it – it doesn’t “have a word for it” so you’re reduced (or expanded) to circumlocutions and the development of a common understanding of different terms of art built from the same few words.
This was the opinion of Erasmus, at least. It’s also claimed to be one reason why the early Christological controversies which so convulsed the Greek world didn’t engage the West very much: Latin didn’t have the terminology to express any of it.
I for one wouldn’t attempt Pindar before I’d read basically the entirety of Ancient Greek verse twice. I still can’t figure out what he’s talking about.
Is it the Doric morphology that throws you off or do you think even if the words had their Attic spelling you still wouldn’t get it?
None of that, obviously. His thought is difficult.