Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea

I trace the complex combination of chance, changing tastes and wilful editorialisation that led us to the canon of ancient literature that we have today. Many still-extant ancient authors were far more widely read in earlier eras than they are today. This applies to scientific writers such as the medical authority, Galen, who was once regarded as an invaluable source for cutting-edge advice on human antatomy, but whose work is interesting now for the history of science. The same is true for philosophical and conceptual writing: in the twenty-first century, Stoicism is particularly popular, while other ancient ethical schools, such as Epicureanism, are less so. Shifting canons also shape the receptions of more obviously literary texts, which can gain and lose popularity as modern cultural norms and interests change. Early modern readers were far more interested in Euripides’ Hecuba than in his Trojan Women – whereas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, audiences and readers have favoured the theatrical representation of collective grief over the bloody revenge drama. Modern preferences, preoccupations and assumptions affect not only how we read ancient literature, but which elements of the past we choose to read and remember.

This book does not cover every possible extant text, author or period in ancient Greek and Roman literature with encyclopaedic thoroughness – a task that would be challenging even at three times the length. Rather, I aim to provide an engaging and accessible introduction to some central themes within the interpretation and translation of ancient literature and its relationship to modernity. Many of the pieces here began life as reviews, written at various times over the past twenty years. All have been thoroughly revised and reworked, and organised to serve as stand-alone introductions to a number of canonical works of ancient Greek and Roman literature, and to central issues in the reception and translation of ancient culture in the twentyfirst century.

I begin with a case study of the modern translation and reception of the archaic Greek lyric poet, Sappho. This example allows me to lay out two central themes: the challenges of reimagining ancient literary forms for new cultural contexts, and the intersections between modern norms and the receptions of antiquity. I explore the gaps between the musical, choral performance genre of archaic Greek lyric – so different from our textual, digital notions of ‘lyric’ poetry – and between ancient and modern ideas about gender and sexuality. From there, I move to a broader discussion of literary translation, including some consideration of changing norms of translation practices, and the history of translation studies. The third essay moves back to antiquity and charts the central role of translation, showing how Roman literary culture was founded on the translation and creative imitation of the Greeks.

The next two essays explore the relationships between ancient and modern cultural assumptions more broadly. One piece considers ancient political uses of rhetoric, and the uses of stylish, memorable language to distort historical and economic truth. The other focuses on continuities and differences between ancient and modern forms of misogyny, concentrating on the mythical figure of Helen, the cunning, perceptive, half-divine woman whose abduction by Paris precipitated the Trojan War – and who becomes, after antiquity, known primarily for her looks, not her intelligence.

In the next trio of essays, I discuss gender and politics from a different angle, examining how ancient Greek and Roman norms of masculinity, sexuality and the proper uses of power differ from those of modern cultures. This cluster of topics is particularly pressing for translators of ancient comic literature, because it is so often obscene – and yet the boundaries of what is just shocking enough to be funny, but not so horrifying as to be unfunny, are radically different from one culture to another. Ancient humour often hinges on jokes that rely on alien notions of ‘proper’ sexuality or ‘proper’ masculine identity, and on the supposedly humorous potential of violence and humiliation directed against enslaved people – jokes that are less likely to land well with a modern reader or audience. I discuss these issues in three essays on Greek comedy, Roman comedy, and the playful, aggressive, sometimes comic Roman poet Catullus. I suggest that it is particularly challenging for modern translators to find equivalents for texts that are both deliberately indelicate and artfully poetic, and to translate jokes that depend on the normalisation of social structures that modern readers may find bizarre, like the idea that performing oral sex is inherently degrading, or morally abhorrent, like slavery.

Comic genres often profess to offer only entertainment, not instruction. And yet humour frequently does provide a kind of cultural education in what a society finds shocking or acceptable. I turn next to the much more explicitly didactic genre of ancient philosophical teaching, focusing on the writings of the Stoic teacher, Epictetus, with a glance ahead to Marcus Aurelius. I show that the modern popularity of adapted forms of ancient Stoicism speaks to a particular set of parallels between our time and that of the Roman Empire as times of turbulence and uncertainty, including for the most powerful members of society.

I then turn back to ancient Greek literature, to examine how the most elevated and highly valued genres of poetry in antiquity, epic and tragedy, articulate both social and literary values that only partly overlap with those we may find familiar. I consider what the performance poetry of Homer and Aeschylus might have been saying in its own time, and the challenges – for poets as well as translators – in bringing this poetry to life in a new era. I discuss the limitations of ‘literal’ approaches to translating ancient poetics, and what is gained and lost in livelier, more creative modes of interpretation. I interweave my discussion of translation with consideration of how modern attitudes towards gender, violence, poetics, power and truth may impact and limit our abilities to imagine or reimagine these ancient works.

Returning to modernity, I consider the state of popular receptions of ancient literature in the twentieth and twentyfirst century. I discuss the extraordinarily successful and influential work of Edith Hamilton, and of the bestselling modern British and American translations of the Homeric poems. I suggest that the specific values of modern anglophone readers, especially a tendency to idealise ‘greatness’ and an individualistic model of freedom, have had a large impact on modern translations, receptions and perceptions of the ancient world and its literary remains. I argue that the classical scholars, translators, teachers and popularisers of the future need to nurture the skill of writing as well as close reading, and think broadly and deeply about how we might not merely replicate familiar ways of imagining ancient literature, but imagine it anew.

In the final piece, I comb closely through the translatorly choices of several different translators of Homer, showing how each responds differently to the original, or, in some cases, how translators may copy one another, and fail to take the opportunity to rethink the original. I emphasise the need for translators and others to embrace the possibilities afforded by the clash of languages, ancient and modern, and by the rich, confusing conflict between antiquity and our own time. I end with a brief afterword, in which I lay out a set of twenty principles that guide my own practice as a translator of ancient literature.

I hope this book will interest readers who may have no previous familiarity with ancient literature, as well as some who do. Times are always a-changing; but the twenty-firstcentury world is changing at an extraordinarily rapid pace – technologically, politically, culturally, economically and environmentally. Even the past of ten years ago – before Covid, before Brexit, before Trump, before the advent of ChatGPT, before the devastating wars in Ukraine and Gaza – can feel ‘unimaginably different’ from the present moment. It is easy to be swept up in the intense changes and anxieties of each new day. But in an era of so many dizzying transformations, it is more valuable than ever to remember that the world has not always been as it is now, nor as it was ten or even a hundred years ago. A turn back to ancient Greek and Roman cultures reminds us that the crooks and adventurers have always been with us, and also that cultural norms and literary traditions have changed radically, sometimes in ways that are difficult to see without a close reading of both the ancient past and the contemporary present. A turn back to imagine the unimaginable world of antiquity can help us understand and reimagine our own rapidly changing society.

Moreover, now that artificial intelligence threatens to take over our classrooms, our reading, our writing and our minds, it is useful to pay ever-closer attention to language, and to consider the power of words, to persuade, instruct and entertain. The dead are dead, and yet some of their words remain. In reading the few scraps of literature that survive from the ancient past, and in considering the words chosen to translate and retranslate them for each new generation of readers, we see how language shapes and is shaped by shifting human cultures and human choices. The juxtaposition of ancient and modern languages, literatures and lives reminds us that it is through our words that we are remembered and understood, long after our deaths, and that even the most minute differences of language or phrasing may make all the difference. Language writes us, but we, too, have the power to change the world by changing our words.

TONGUE BREAKS

Sometime around the ninth century CE, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the wonderful ‘Ode to Aphrodite’ (Fragment 1), which is quoted in its entirety by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. A few long passages from other poems have been preserved in other authors: the most famous is Fragment 31 (‘He seems to me equal to gods’), quoted at length in On the Sublime (a Greek work of literary criticism of unknown authorship, dating to about the first century CE). Until the end of the nineteenth century, these two poems were practically all that was known from the work of the poet Plato called ‘The Tenth Muse’. Then, in the early 2000s, some scraps of papyrus from an ancient rubbish tip at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt turned out to contain fragments of poetry – including substantial chunks of Sophocles, Euripides and Sappho. In 2004, the broken corpus was augmented by an important new discovery from papyrus: a very substantial passage from a poem about Tithonus and the experience of old age. In 2014, more ‘new Sappho’ came to light, on papyri acquired illegally by the now disgraced papyrologist, Dirk Obbink – at the time, a faculty member at Oxford, who allegedly stole over a hundred papyrus fragments from the Egyptian Exploration Society, and sold several stolen biblical papyri around 2010 for large sums of money. Under these circumstances, the provenance of the second ‘new Sappho’ is morally and legally questionable, and some scholars have even questioned whether the Obbink finds are really Sappho at all. These papyri included a large chunk of the so-called ‘Brothers’ poem, in which the narrator addresses her two named siblings. But even with these additions, we have only a tiny percentage of the poet’s oeuvre. Reconstructing Sappho from what remains is still like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw.

Both scholars and creative writers have made much of Sappho’s fragmentariness. Anne Carson’s translations, with facing Greek text, make effective use of blank space and brackets to convey the feeling of a torn or burned scrap of papyrus. Carson, whose translation was created too soon to include any of the ‘new’ Sappho poems, loves the spaces almost as much as the words: she says in her introduction that ‘brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure’. Here, for instance, is Fragment 24D:

]

]

]

]

]

] in a thin voice

]

The four words of Carson’s poem are a haunting translation of a single word in Greek: leptophon.

Carson provides brief but useful notes to help even the Greekless reader to understand some of the textual problems in Sappho. She tries to translate nothing that is not in the Greek, and to follow the original word order and line breaks as far as possible. Here is her version of Fragment 31:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man

whoever he is who opposite you

sits and listens close

to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing – oh it

puts the heart in my chest on wings

for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking

is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin

fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass

I am and dead – or almost

I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty

And there the text breaks off. The great thing about this translation is its poverty. Unlike other translators, Carson adds no possessive pronouns or definite articles that are not present in the Greek. Sappho’s speaker can no longer recognise her tongue as ‘my’ tongue; her eyes and ears and skin are no longer her own.

Carson is also aware that repetition matters. Sappho’s own inability to speak (‘no speaking’) is mocked by the echo of her beloved’s ‘sweet speaking’. In Carson’s version, as in the Greek, the first line and the penultimate line parallel one another (‘He seems to me ... I seem to me’). The lover disintegrates as she contemplates the beloved object, until she can no longer speak or see or hear. But the controlling perceptions of the poet (the ‘me’ to whom it all ‘seems’) shape the narrative of the poem. The tension between the self who desires and the self who notices, often fudged in translation, has been an essential element in the influence of Sappho’s poem on later writers of lyric.

For Carson, Sappho’s gender and sexual orientation are of relatively little interest. But Sappho’s words themselves are not gender-neutral. Carson’s translation of Fragment 31 does not make clear what is clear in the Greek: that the beloved and the first-person speaker are both female. When it is necessary for the translator to make a choice about gender, Carson chooses to reduce or eliminate the possibilities of same-sex desire in Sappho. For instance, Sappho 102 expresses overwhelming longing for a pais, which could mean either a boy or a girl; Carson makes it ‘boy’.

Carson’s earlier book-length essay about desire, Eros the Bittersweet, figured prominently on the television series The L Word. But this popular vision of a lesbian or lesbian-friendly Carson owes more to projection than to close reading. The ‘queerness’ of Carson’s reimagining of Sappho lies primarily in its quasi-modernist or avant-garde style, with its focus on abstraction and the aestheticisation of the fragmentary – an oddly old-fashioned mode for the early twenty-first century. In a normal scholarly edition of a fragmentary ancient text, the editor provides a wide array of information about the missing elements, including specifying clearly which ‘fragments’ are quotations from other ancient authors, which are from torn pieces of papyrus, which words are illegible or supplied by scholarly conjecture, and what partial words or letters might be legible to provide clues about the missing elements. Carson offers some information about sources in her notes at the back, but in the main text the absences are marked by undifferentiated square brackets. The gaps and omissions in the text are presented as an aesthetic object rather than as evidence of the transmission of the lost originals. After the publication of her Sappho translation, Carson collaborated with her husband, the installation artist Robert Currie, to create a show in which some performers raise their arms into square brackets to mark the typography while others read the translations. The piece is enjoyably silly, and very much in keeping with the aesthetics of the 1960s avant-garde art scene; despite being created in the 2000s, it has a charming air of anachronism. Carson’s range of interests – in visual and performance art as well as poetry – and her artful, mournful, often funny lyrical modes of expression are in tune with several musicians of her generation, including David Byrne and David Bowie. One might think the play with typography takes us a rather long way from the primarily sonic, musical, choral poetry of Sappho herself. But one could also argue that Carson’s piece restores the performative aspects of ancient choral lyric, substituting the visual ornaments of blank space, and moving arms for the lost glories of Sappho’s music, and the lost sound of ancient tapping feet.

Carson’s career has always been about blurring the boundaries between classical scholarship and imaginative practice. Trained in art and design as well as ancient Greek and Latin, Carson is a prolific creator of work that is often difficult or impossible to put into traditional generic boxes. Often, these gaps are the point. Her deep engagement with ancient literature is constantly interwoven with themes and ideas drawn from her own life and experience, and vice versa. She loves to slip between the personal, the historical and the general, and between whimsical humour and dark horror. In her numerous versions of ancient Greek tragedy, Carson frequently inserts anachronistic references and creative riffs on the original, to greater or lesser degrees in different works. Often, these variations and departures will be invisible or inaudible to someone who has not read the original. To take one example, in her Elektra the protagonist is made to say to her loathed mother, ‘You are some sort of punishment cage / locked around my life.’ It’s a striking pair of English lines, but the memorable image of the locked ‘punishment cage’ is Carson’s invention, with no antecedent in Sophocles.

By contrast, Carson’s Sappho translations are much more readily legible as ‘translations’ of the Greek, rather than loose riffs inspired by an ancient original. But all translations are shaped by the interests, training, interpretative frameworks and perspectives of their creators. Carson’s Sappho invokes Aphrodite as the goddess ‘of the spangled mind’ (poikilophron, rather than an alternative ancient reading, poikilothron, which would mean ‘of the spangled throne’), reflecting Carson’s own interest in emotional, artistic and cognitive multiplicity. She has much to say about the intricacies of ‘Sappho’s mind’, but nothing about her complicated status as an aristocrat in an era of political turbulence and revolution, and nothing about her composition of songs to be performed with musical accompaniment by a chorus of women.

The Sappho volume harmonises with Carson’s abiding interest in a minimalist aesthetics, and in absence as a defining feature of experience. A running theme of her work has been the desire to cut words down to the knucklebone, to find the simplest, shortest way of telling the truth. Omissions – even those caused by the accidents of history – are taken to provide access to an inner or higher truth. As Carson’s Canadian compatriot Leonard Cohen sings, ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in’. In her first book, Eros the Bittersweet – whose title is taken from Sappho’s oxymoronic description of desire – Carson characteristically suggests that the experience of painful desire has always been defined by absence. Drawing on a startlingly broad range of texts from across cultural and literary history, Carson constantly flits between three distinct spheres of reality: the historical, the universal and the personal. If her account of desire as absence was clearly articulated as a claim about historical fact, a pedant like me might push back on various generalisations, omissions and distortions. For me personally, Carson’s very abstract, very literary account of eros that often feels a long way from my own specific, complicated experiences of relationships with real-life, embodied human beings. But perhaps this, too, is to miss the point: Carson’s work is best read not as an analysis, either of ancient literature or of human experience, but as a striking kind of performance art on the page: it seeks less to make a philosophical or critical argument, or even to reveal a personal, emotional truth, than to cast a kind of spell, one in which we can be momentarily held captive by a strange and original form of visual and verbal experience.

Lawrence Sterne’s rollicking comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, includes a famous moment where the narrator invites the reader to imagine his own version of a beautiful woman, ‘as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you’, and provides a blank page into which the reader can project his fantasies. The deliberately blank spaces of Carson’s version of Sappho offer some of the same zany invitations to readerly play. Just as Sterne’s narrator suggests no particular pre-existing model for the beautiful woman, so Carson suggests that the reader need not worry too much about what Sappho herself originally composed or sang. Carson’s version of the ancient poet is fascinatingly disembodied, except for her new, infinitely re-inscribable body on the blank page.

But what of real, historical Sappho, a poet who lived in a particular time and place, and whose experiences of desire – and of community, politics, wealth, birth, friendship, music, family and age – presumably informed her poetry? Perhaps such questions are not fully answerable. ‘It seems that she knew and loved women as deeply as she did music’, Carson remarks in her introduction to her Sappho translations. ‘Can we leave the matter there?’ The answer, of course, is no. Sappho is the first surviving female author in the ancient Greek tradition, and most of the critical and imaginative responses to her life and work have treated her gender and sexuality as the most important facts about her – although more recent scholarship has begun to think more expansively about the poet’s cultural milieu.

‘Sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ acquired their modern meanings only very recently. In classical Athens, the island of Lesbos was associated with sexual activity in general, but primarily with blow jobs. In Jeffrey Henderson’s classic study of obscene language in Attic comedy, The Maculate Muse (1975), the index entry for ‘Lesbianism’ reads: ‘See Fellatio’. The Greek verb lesbiazein means ‘to fellate’. The island was known for other things as well, such as sweet wine and sweet music, but not for girl-on-girl action.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, the usual English terms for lesbian practices did not draw on classical literature. Women could be ‘lovers of their own sex’, or, in the more frank Greek loanword, ‘tribades’ (literally ‘rubbers’; the words ‘rubster’ and ‘fricatrice’ were also used in the seventeenth century). The OED cites no usage of ‘lesbianism’ in the modern sense before 1870, when it was used to argue that Swinburne’s obsessive interest in Sapphic love was just as ‘loathsome’ as sodomy.

The words matter. It was through Sappho that female homosexuality came to be understood as a distinct sexual orientation, and as a distinctly sexual set of practices. Sex between women was often not seen as sex, but as harmless touching and kissing. Sappho’s poetry was a reminder that desire between women could be as intense as heterosexual desire. Certainly, pre-nineteenth-century versions of Sappho did not always keep her locked in the closet. Donne’s wonderful verse epistle ‘Sappho to Philaenis’ is the first English poem to describe what Sappho did with her girlfriend. The term ‘lesbian loves’ was used in 1736, in a satirical attack on a group of learned ladies. Yet before the nineteenth century, Sappho’s sexuality was far from clearly defined. Things changed when Théophile Gautier made tribadism a fashionable feature of French decadence, and Baudelaire reminded the world that it had all started on Lesbos. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Baudelaire, through Sappho, invented modern lesbianism, and Swinburne brought it to England. Classicists in the late nineteenth century, protective of Hellenic purity, tried to repress Sappho’s sexual orientation: Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff fantasised that she ran a girls’ school, which helped dispel the whiff of impropriety.

For ancient pundits, the problem with Sappho was her licentiousness, not her sexual orientation. In his Letters to Lucilius, the Roman writer and philosopher Seneca cites the question of ‘whether Sappho was a prostitute’ as an example of familiar time-wasting questions. Those who admired her poetry but disliked the idea of promiscuity found a simple solution: there must have been two Sapphos on the island of Lesbos, one a courtesan and the other a great poet.