The Song of Achilles in ancient greek

Greek Learning Greek
1

Hello! I had a jab at translating the first chapter of Madeline Miller’s “Song of Achilles” into ancient greek:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nAud-yaFjyEXZ7J9zGe0bMFIxIjVtYfn/view?usp=sharing

Any corrections/suggestions are more than welcome!

2

Comprehensible to me, and a lot of fun, though I don’t know the original.

A few notes of things that made me stumble:

Ἄχρι δὲ τοῦ γάμου οὐκ ἐγνώκει ἐκείνην εὐήθη, ὁ γὰρ πατὴρ αὐτῆς ἐπιμελείᾳ πολλῇ εἶχε ταύτην ἐγκεκαλυμμένην ἕως τῆς τελετῆς, ὁ δ’ ἐμὸς πατὴρ ἐκεχάριστ’ αὐτῷ, ἐπεὶ αἰσχρῆς οὔσης παιδίσκαι δὴ καὶ νεανίσκοι ὑπηρέτ’ αἰέν εἰσι.
That ἐπεὶ… at the end is confusing, especially with the εἰσι. It’s not connected to the the ἐκεχάριστ’ αὐτῷ, but to the οὐκ ἐγνώκει way before. It would be nice if this read more clearly.

Does a χείρ really αἰσθανομένη a βλέμμα? I expect that he’s the one doing the perceiving, not his hand.

πάρα, not παρά, if it’s standing in for παρεῖναι.

Ἑκατὸ is demotic. ἑκατόν

καθῆραι αὐτὸ λίθους - Cleanse it of stones? I think you may want a genitive

ἔχετο - did you mean to augment this?

βάλλω ἐκείνῃ λίθους - the clearest sense I got from this was “at her”, but I think you that you mean “with her”. I’d suggest σὺν ἐκείνῃ.

3

Thank you very much for reading it!

  1. I am not sure how to fix this, here is the original text:

He did not find out until the wedding that she was simple. Her father had been scrupulous about keeping her veiled until the ceremony, and my father had humored him. If she was ugly, there were always slave girls and serving boys.

  1. It’s in the original and I guess we can allow a hand the liberty of feeling that stare :stuck_out_tongue:

  2. It was supposed to read παρά με, but the με got deleted somehow.

  3. Yes, thank you, my modern greek is showing.

  4. Thanks again, I misread the lsj entry.

  5. It is supposed to be ἔχεται, but perhaps it is not so clear and I should remove the apostrophe.

  6. In the original it is “for her”, yet I fully agree that in the context of βάλλω a bare dative is very misleading. I will amend it to ὑπὲρ ἐκείνης.