Hi! Nice to meet you all, I’m new to this forum and was hoping someone could lend me a hand with some doubts I have. I’ve begun reading Blackie’s Greek-English Dialogues but I’m having some trouble interpreting some passages. For example in page 16:
What does ᾐθρίαζε mean exactly?
In the LSJ I find:
αἰθριάζω: clear the sky, ἀέρα Arist.Pr.941a4:—also = αἰθριάω
αἰθριάω: expose to the air, cool, clear up, of the sky, “ὡς δ᾽ ᾐθρίασε” Babr.45.9.
I think I’m missing something, the context does not ad up to me. In the dialogue they’re talking about how today the breeze is mild and how the warmth will make the grass grow and compare it to yesterday’s weather saying that it was a clear hard frost. How is a clear (or cool) sky a clear hard frost? Or maybe is the English translation that I don’t understand?
On the same page μελῳδήματα αὐτομάτως παρεμβάλλων ἥσυχα is translated as In snatches humming quiet tunes.
παρεμβάλλων : Insert, interpolate
αὐτομάτως: ἀπὸ ταὐτομάτου
I guess I can somehow see how the παρεμβάλλω might be interpreted as “humming”. But I really cannot phantom where the “in snatches” comes?
What about of the αὐτομάτως? How is it reflected on the translation?
In the same page 16 I also have trouble with the ἐπικληθήσομαι (from ἐπικαλέω?), the form only comes up in Ex.29.44-5 apparently but I think it means something quite different there.
First, remember that Blackie’s Greek is a translation of the English, not the other way around.
And I think that you can see from the context of Babrius 45 why he took the sense he did for αἰθριᾶν. Whether or not that was the best Greek sense, I can’t say.
I’ve never seen these dialogues before. They’re very good indeed. The use of particles is especially good; they’re perhaps the most difficult thing about Greek. The English-Greek translations are not literal or word-by-word. They’re evidently aiming at a naturalistic equivalence, as any good translation does. You’ll appreciate them better when you have more Greek under your belt, but you seem to have enough already to get benefit from them.
ᾐθρίαζε means the sky was αἴθριος, there was αἰθρία—i.e. that there was no cloud cover. In cold climates (and this is Scotland) that’s when you get hard frost. The use of the verb may not have an exact parallel, but this is the way –άζω verbs behave.
μελῳδήματα αὐτομάτως παρεμβάλλων ἥσυχα as a rendering of “In snatches humming quiet tunes”. The “in snatches” is covered by the prefix of παρεμβάλλων, as anphph points out, aided by αὐτομάτως, which suggests spontaneity, implicit in the English “humming" as well as “snatches.” It’s the image as a whole that corresponds.
Blackie, a 19th-century Scots professor of Greek, would have bought into Ossian.
ἐπικληθήσομαι. You should not be searching for the exact form (which you should recognize as future passive—of ἐπικαλέω, yes) but looking up επικαλέω to see how the verb is used.
How about this:
αὐτομάτως - whatever comes, ie. without putting in the effort of a performance - quietly, without words.
παρεμβάλλων - punctuating, filling in the gaps (between the silence) - In snatches.
μελῳδήματα - tunes, songs (without enough effort to form the words).
Fine, but this particular phrase is unusually impressionistic, as befits Ossianic style perhaps. I think it will be most profitable to read the more ordinary parts of these dialogues, but still focussing on where the Greek translation does not coincide with the English original. That means paying close attention to:
particles;
syntax;
word choice and word order.