Translating from Ancient and Modern Greek

Translating from Ancient and Modern Greek Willis Barnstone To have translated classical and modern Greek should instruct one in the ways of both literatures, in their comparative prosodies and aesthetic conspiracies. Perhaps such is the honor for others. The experience has left me singularly uninstructed. Yet translating from Greek has made me very happy and at least has provided access to a few secrets about writing that have entered other related activities: translating from Latin, writing about some classical and modern Greek poets' obsessions with brief sun and timeless darkness, about their candor in expressing sexuality and society. And by imitation their work has entered my own. But what are these lessons I diffidently and vaguely allude to? Before offering this personal response, I should trace my ventures in Greek translation. From ancient Greek, nearly three decades ago, I did a volume, Greek Lyric Poetry, later expanded, then reprinted (Barnstone 1967). Recently, the volume was combined with another early book, Sappho (1965), in a marriage called Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets (Barnstone 1988). The latter lacks the Greek text but it does contain a new study of Sappho's work, her text sources, and eleven hitherto untranslated fragments of her poetry—untranslated previously as poems, since though beautiful they appeared too fragmentary to be intelligible. From modern Greek, my wife Helle, a native Greek speaker, and I translated Margarita Liberaki's novel The Other Alexander (Liberaki 1959). Over the years, here and there, I did poems of Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis, and Cavafy (Barnstone 1952, 1957, 1959/ 60, 1960). Did the ancient Greek help me in rendering the modern Greek poets? I hardly thought about this when turning to the wonder of modern Greek poetry. Yet to read and translate these four poets— and had I translated him, I would have added Ritsos whom I read and esteem—is to find in every second sentence the rhetoric, the smells, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 317 318 Willis Barnstone the fables, the stone, light, and gloom of the ancient Greeks. Since Sappho is the poet I have spent most time with, whose very small extant canon I once knew almost by heart, she should offer the clearest instructions. And she has done so. In Sappho there is overheard confession, a musing dialogic strain, a personal intervention so candid and strong as to be unequaled in antiquity—all these literary traits are held together in the symmetries of strict and restricting prosodies. After encountering Sappho, to read Cavafy is to read, both in language and obsessions, a poet intrinsically closer to Sappho than Sappho was to any of her known contemporaries. Both outsiders to their sex and societies, they found parallel means of making themselves universal to us. To find a voice for Sappho helped me to create a voice for Cavafy, just as the speech of classical poetry provides a model both for the modern Greek poets as well as for translation of their work in English. To carry these generalizations further, I would suggest that the translations of modern Greek poets, such as those by Edmund Keeley of Ritsos, Seferis, Elytis, Sikelianos, and Cavafy, might serve to instruct a new generation of translators in retranslating the classical lyric and dramatic poets. In keeping with Jorge Luis Borges' notion of authors being fathers of their literary ancestors, as Borges himself affects our reading of his precursor Kafka, so the achievements in rendering modern Greek poets should be applied to an interpretation of the ancients. Before citing specific examples of the affect of ancient on modern Greek translations, I should like to point out where in the process the influence actually occurs. Contrary to general opinion, it is not primarily the reading of the classical text but its translation that instructs the poet translator in doing the modern text. While a reading of the Greek text provides pleasure and understanding for the English version , the English version, not the Greek text, concerns us and establishes a path and affects translation of the modern Greek poem. The English from classical Greek leads to the English from modern Greek. In this self-reflexive labor, using the source poem as the stimulus...