Lots of fun, thank you! Broadly comprehensible to me, despite not knowing the Aeneid.
Here’s my understanding (I am typing on a cell phone in a foreign country just now, so I may miff a bit):
Sing, coming from the jutting coasts of Troy of the arms and the man, the first things, escaping out of destiny, having come into Italy and the Lainius promontory, who powerfully suffered inside earth and water by the highest [ones], with Hera being truly upset, and just so and in wars before he founded the town and carried the gods to Latium, from who are the fathers of the Albanians, and [sing of] the great wall of Rome, and the descendants of the Latians. Sing the beginnings to me, Muse, of what impiousness to the divine [ones], of what grief, was the queen of the gods thrust to send a religious man to wander into so many toils? Can such a wrath have existed in the heavenly mind(s)?
Meter comments: I didn’t like all of the hiatus where I expected correption or elison. I don’t know how frequent word-initial Τρ- is that doesn’t prolong the preceding syllable in Epic. Is the first syllable of ὕδωρ ever long? No caesura in the last line, maybe others. All the little oddities made it hard for me to read it metrically the first time through, but it was easy enough on the second.
I didn’t understand Λαΐνιον, though I assume it’s motivated by some Latin name. I didn’t think ὑψίστοις made a tremendous amount of sense hanging out there. ἐνίκειε (not Epic, is it a real form at all?, I assume you mean it to be opt apr from φέρω) would make me think that you mean κτίσσαι optative, with both verbs governed by the πρίν? But optative doesn’t work there for either. κτίσσαι inf. works though, if you mean that. Just hard for me to understand what ἐνίκειε is doing. The construction starts becoming confusing for my little bean starting with ὣς δ’ αὔτως. Did you really mean ὤσθη passive? That σ in it is late, by the way. So is θρῆσκον.
When it comes to the metrical issues, the upsilon in ὕδωρ can sometimes be long for metrical purposes (Od.1.110 οἱ μὲν ἄρ’ οἶνον ἔμισγον ἐνὶ κρητῆρσι καὶ ὕδωρ), and the Τρ can make not the previous long by Correptio Attica. I am not sure if Correptio Attica can be found in Homer, so I may be wrong.
Λαΐνιον is an epithet to ἀκτήν, coming from lavinia litora.
Πρὶν can be constructed with optativus obliquus after a past tense, so ἐνίκειε is an optative form of ἤνικα (not found in Homer, but found in inscriptions as a dialectal form.)
Ὤσθη is constructed thus: βασίλεια ὤσθη πέμψαι ἀνέρα. Perhaps the middle voice would be better here. Ι will agree that it’s a later form, as is θρῆσκον and γέννα and some others too. Unfortunately my greek level is still low enough for me to not be able to reproduce that homeric feeling completely.
Thanks a lot for the comments!
(All information on syntax and vocabulary was taken from lsj.)
So Τρ that doesn’t prolong the preceding does occur in Homer, but I just don’t know how often. I see it at 2.516, and think that it’s in book 3 or 4 somewhere around where the bowman takes a shot at Menelaus. The language changes that made this sort of thing frequent by the Attic period haven’t really happed yet in Homer, afaik.
2.516 τοῖς δὲ τριήκοντα γλαφυραὶ νέες ἐστιχόωντο
The optative can happen when you have a past tense governing, changing the subj + ἄν…, but here with ὣς δ’ αὔτως, it can’t be subordinate to the preceding clause, and the “sing” is present.
Hi Chrestos,
You clearly put a lot of work into this, and you’ve managed to produce something that more or less fits the scheme of the hexameter while at the same time staying remarkably close to the Latin original. I congratulate you on that.
The literary Greek hexameter underwent a succession of refinements after Homer, while you have gone in the opposite direction, indulging in all sorts of unprecedented metrical and linguistic licenses. The result is a bizarre mishmash with many lines scarcely recognizable as hexameters at all. The overall impression is of something far removed from dactylic hexameter–the rhythms are grotesque, with all those forced spondaic endings and neglect of caesurae, and the language is all over the place.
But no doubt you know all this. It’s painful to read, but I’m sure you had fun doing it, and it’s a treat to have someone so boldly attempting a hexameter composition on this site, and one where the Latin still shines through.
LSJ gives data for the quantity of the upsilon at the end of its ὕδωρ entry, a good starting point for anyone interested in the word’s metrical behavior.
In the Odyssey verse that Joel quotes the upsilon is short, as usual.
Yes, I flubbed that. Good catch. I was reading through a few hundred lines quickly. So nominative ὕδωρ is only long at line end, except in the one line in the Iliad (quoted once in the Odyssey).
Michael points out that the LSJ confirms this: “Hom. freq. has ὕ̄δωρ (always at end of line exc. in phrase Στυγὸς ὕδωρ Il.15.37)”. But I counter that if we were to just look everything up as a first resource (everyone on this thread does know that the LSJ exists) we’d just be the “index scholars” that Samuel Johnson disliked.
‘How Index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of science by the tail.’
ὕδωρ with long upsilon also in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, |οὔθ’ ὕδωρ ποταμῶν 381 (very unhomeric), and similarly in Apollonius’ Argonautica; again see LSJ.
The Demeter Hymn and the Argonautica are both fascinating works—as are Callimachus’ Hymns (including one to Demeter). There’s more to Greek hexameter poetry than Homer.
It was very interesting to read your translation attempt. In general, I agree with mwh’s comment. From a linguistic point of view it seems quite a pastiche, with some renditions not very common in standard Attic Greek, let alone epic poetry. From a metrical point of view, as already pointed out by mwh, hexameters are nonstandard, and you seem to have overlooked caesurae and metrical laws completely (e.g. Naeke’s law breached at line 1, Hermann’s law breached at line 9).
Apart from these technicalities, there is a syllabic issue that caught my eye which I don’t think anyone has mentioned so far. I read a long discussion about ὕδατι, which looks fine to me, but what about ἀνέρ’ in line 9? In your hexameter, both syllables are short to fit the fifth dactylic foot but the alpha in ἀνέρ’ should be long. Did you find any example to justify that?
On a final note, I attempted the translation of Aeneid’s proem into ancient Greek myself a few years ago. Happy to share if interested
I glanced at a few hundred lines on TLG and there does not appear to be an ἀνερ* with short α in epic, or any Greek poetry (vocative excepted), at least in the digitalized texts. I gave up scanning towards Sibylline Oracles though. He could change it to θεοῦ and call it correpted synizesis.
Still…has anyone read C.S. Lewis on how the Humanist movement killed vital expression in Latin? If this were flowing and fun and natural, composed by ear rather than by eye, then even major violations of other poets’ regular practice wouldn’t take that away.
EDIT: strike the θεοῦ suggestion, it’s late, and I wasn’t thinking of the context. βασίλεια θεοῦ would be nonsense. βασίλεια θεά?
Thanks Joel for the accurate check on TLG, I had a quick scan of LSJ and couldn’t find any example either. A possible solution might be
εἵνεκα τεῦ λύπης βασίλεια θεῶν βροτὸν ὤσθη
What do you think? As for my translation, double checking the copyright policy of the journal in which it was recently published, I realised I might have copyright issues sharing it on this forum.
βροτὸν θρῆσκον improves on ἀνέρα θρῆσκον as a stronger poetic image, or seems so to me at least.
I’ll be interested in knowing how your version expresses the non-Homeric concept of ὅσιος. Using all-Homeric words, I guess: ἀνήρ δίκαιος περὶ θεῶν. But in the Iliad and Odyssey, instead of an internal quality of a man, it’s always external, expressed in terms of pleasing the gods with sacrifices.
Basically the same question as here, but from Zeus to Hera:
Thanks for the clarification about the forum, if it’s non-commercial and has no social media features, then I should have no problem posting the translation. You hit the nail on the head with the concept of ὅσιος being non-Homeric, which is why, however hard I was trying, I realised I wouldn’t be able to exclusively use Homeric words in my translation and therefore allowed myself some deviations from Homeric language, in the case of Virgil’s pietas and a few more terms. Also, I stopped actively studying ancient Greek texts after the end of high school, so I am no Greek language/philology expert.
Citing from: The Classical Outlook, 98.1, p.31 [for full accountability, the version aforementioned contains two minor deviations from the version published on CO]
Oh wow, this is a lot of fun. It really bounces along and is pleasant and easy to say out loud.
It’s also very readable to me, although I may be cheating since I read PastelKos’s translation earlier.
It would be fun to see this continue.
Things that were harder for me:
The dative feels like it’s being asked to do a lot. Quite possible that it’s just my poor Greek, but I have to think in English a bit to understand αἴσῃ, βουλῇ, πολέμῳ, λώβῃ, εὐσεβίῃ.
φῶτα τοσούσδε πόνους ἀνελέσθαι is acc. + inf. are all meant to depend on ἠνάγκασε? I see that by the end, but it was hard on me reading. Maybe I would have expected a τε or καί or something to signal that it’s a pair with ἐνεῖκαι. Or front the main verb a bit more and signal the construction right away. Maybe I’m the only one who has trouble though.
Thanks for your comments Joel! It was very interesting and insightful to hear the perception of another reader. To briefly give you the rationale behind my choices, 1) ἠνάγκασε at the end mimics the Latin original “tot volvere casus / insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores / impulerit”; 2) for the many datives, some have precedents (κακῇ αἴσῃ, Il.5.209; πολλὰ μόγησα / κύμασι καὶ πολέμῳ, Od. 5.223-24; κοτεσσαμένη τό γε θυμῷ, Il.14.191), ἀθανάτων βουλῇ takes after the Homeric θεῶν ἰότητι (and also justified by the passive πλαζόμενος I would say), τίνι…λώβῃ is dative with verbum affectuum κοτέω, which can be constructive also with the genitive (hence the variatio τίνι…τίνος to parallel the Latin “quo numine…quidve”) and finally εὐσεβίῃ is like the reason/means whereby the man is κυδάλιμος. In general, I used the dative as the simple case that more closely matched the Latin ablative, although this is not always true or accurate (at the end of the day I had to find a balance between linguistic purity, translation of Virgil’s original and Greek hexameter rules).
To anyone who reads this, please feel free to share your opinion. Although a version of this translation was published, I believe there is always some room for improvement!
Wow, Skiasonar, your translation feels very good, very, for a lack of a better expression, homeric. Congratulations! You kinda beat me in this game :D! It was a very interesting read.
