Cut These Words into My Stone: Ancient Greek Epitaphs

Translator’s Note

ix TRANSLATOR’S NOTE T his book offers the reader a chronological selection of ancient Greek epitaphs in new English translations, along with the originals and just enough commentary to appreciate their context. The earliest surviving epitaphs in Greek date to the mid-700s BCE and represent some of Europe’s oldest writing . Those collected here span a period from about 500 BCE to around 600 CE. Greek epitaphs continued to be written long after that, but never again so well. Notable developments in the form occurred over time. The book divides 127 epitaphs into five periods reflecting that evolution . The pieces here come mainly from the Greek Anthology , Book 7, along with certain ones from Books 9 and 11 and a few from other sources. The commentaries of A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page have been useful in finding English equivalents for particular words and lines. Almost all of these versions were submitted over several years to the cautious eye of Andy Gaus, a gifted translator . Thanks are also due to Danilo Piana, for helpful comments in the final stages of preparation. x D Translator’s Note Greek epitaphs have often been translated into other languages, beginning with Classical Latin. In English, their memorable ring is echoed in the works of seventeenthcentury Cavalier poets like Robert Herrick. Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, Shelley, and Byron all tried their hand at the elegiac epigram, knew its main repository, the Greek Anthology, and translated or echoed its distinctive voice. The Greek epitaph’s unique spirit reappears in modern poetry too: A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, Edgar Lee Masters, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Charles Olson, J. V. Cunningham, Robert Duncan , Richard Wilbur, Robert Creeley, Keith Waldrop, and others have employed its tropes and tone. Richard P. Martin’s adventuresome foreword to this volume tracks the epitaph’s origins and development in ways that will engage and inform both general and more specialized readers. Near the back of the book, a brief bibliography lists a few volumes of critical scholarship. They in turn contain more extensive bibliographies. I have included thumbnail biographies of the poets and notes that provide the original source information and add some clarification to certain verses. In some of the Greek epitaphs, readers may notice the use of the dagger symbol (†). In philology, the dagger, also called an obelisk or crux desperationis (cross of despair), is the traditional symbol used by textual critics (philologists) to signal a locus deperditus (irreparably lost place), a passage so corrupted by subsequent mistakes in the transmission of a text as to discourage any attempt at restoration. A few of the translations, sometimes in a slightly dif- Translator’s Note C xi ferent form, originally appeared in the following publications : “Laugh, I Thought I’d Die,” in the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Key Reporter, Fall 2011; Paradise: Reading Notes, Blue Press, 2010; The North Dakota Review, Fall 2007; Uncontained: Writers and Photographers in the Garden and on the Margins, an Anthology, Jennifer Heath, editor. Baksun Books, 2006. This page intentionally left blank ...