book review:
Pure Pagan:
Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
Edited and translated by Burton Raffel
with an introduction by Guy Davenport
reviewed by Emily Fairey
CUNY Graduate Center
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007. Copyright © 2007 Emily Fairey and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
If translating ancient Greek literature is difficult, translating Greek lyric poetry is truly Sisyphean. Anyone who would render these fraught and fragmentary lines into English while creating a lucid and original poetic effect walks a fine line between twisting the text to a personal agenda on the one hand, and being slavishly literal on the other. Disparate and varied elements such as choice of words, grammatical and metrical sense, and attention to cultural context, are all essential factors. Finally, it is necessary to address issues of reception and accessibility. What is the ultimate purpose of the translation? Is it a student’s first introduction to the genre, a radical re-interpretation designed to shock and amaze, or an exhaustive scholarly aid? These are just some of the questions and problems that beset the would-be interpreter of ancient Greek lyric poetry.
The motive stated in the introduction of this small yet varied selection of Greek poems, edited and translated by Burton Raffel, is a worthy one—to present a representative sample of the large body of Greek lyric poetry that usually goes unnoticed by the average reader. To an extent, this slender, un-intimidating tome does a fine job of selecting Greek poems and making them accessible by means of translations that are poetic in a modern idiom. Yet there are fundamental errors in this book, in the areas of selection, translation, organization, and approach. The organization of the poems is one of the biggest problems, since although it is easy for the untrained reader to cope with, it is misleading.
Arranged in alphabetical order, by poet, each poem is given a title (the addition of the editor). There is no biographic information included in the chapter headings; rather one must consult an extremely brief table at the end of the book to get any contextual information about the time or place of a poem’s creation. The 7th century BCE Alcman, a Lesbian (and possibly Dorian) lyric poet, is followed by Antipater of Sidon, a late 2nd century poet of the near east city of Sidon. Of the latter, we are only told, “nothing is known of his life.” At least this much is said, whereas the context of the Hellenistic “anonymous” works that make up the Greek Anthology of the Alexandrians, of which more is known, is not even mentioned. Although we do get some slight explication of the Anthology in Guy Davenport’s introduction (p. xv), this is stated as in a vacuum, removed from the poems themselves. Clearly, Raffel does not want to disrupt the poetic flow of the book by overburdening it with scholarly apparatus. He says as much in his translator’s preface: “I have not attempted to make historical sense of this largely fragmentary and haphazardly preserved mass of song. When so few people still know, today, what the dates and the sparse fragmented biographical details mean, dates, and biographies seem to me largely irrelevant” (p. xxv). Nevertheless, a small biography of each author could easily have been included at the chapter heading of each poet. When nothing was known of the author’s life, at least some historical context could have been given. Additionally, the inclusion of an occasional footnote would be quite helpful, especially with the a-contextual one-line poems that occur so frequently. Sometimes the context of a Greek lyric poem is much more interesting than the poem itself. Yet this is exactly what Raffel avoids, creating the impression that “seven centuries of Greek poems and fragments” demand as little contextualization as the poetic efforts of a contemporary college literary magazine. I cannot agree with Raffel that the context of the poems is irrelevant; to me it seems that by excising it, he creates a false impression of the integrity of this body of work.
Since Raffel wishes to avoid organizing the poems chronologically, one option might have been to arrange them by subject matter, since he sees fit to tell us the subject of each poem by imposing a title. For example, one of the strongest aspects of the little book is its collection of funeral epitaphs and epigrams, a truly representative literary sample. My favorite of these is a poem from the Greek Anthology, here entitled “Aristo” (p. 20) that tells the story of a young bird hunter, now dead. This is a nice translation, as well as a fine example of the concise, descriptive irony of this Hellenistic genre. Pure Pagan contains many other funeral epitaphs by authors as far ranging as Simonides and Kallimachos. Yet there is barely any recognition that they make up an independent literary type; they are simply bundled in with the rest.
The poems range from works by the 7th century BCE Spartan and Lesbian poets up to those living in far-flung Greek-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire in the 1st century BCE. Although some of the poems are fine choices because of their greater length, standard of preservation, and artistic quality, many extremely brief excerpts, or truncated fragments, are included. These lack poetic as well as historical interest, and Raffel’s reason for including them escapes me. For instance, a selection of Alkaios, the 7th century lyricist of Lesbos, creates a false tone of authority on the subjects of “philosophy” (p. 9). Composed solely of the line “Nothing will come of anything,” this aphorism exudes an artificial sense of modern poetic brevity and existentialism. In fact, this poem is an excerpt of a larger, lost work that may have had absolutely nothing to do with “philosophy” at all. Likewise, a truncated poem of Terpander entitled “to Apollo” (p. 70; Page-Lobel fr. 1.1) that reads here “Sing me, my soul/sing the far ranging lord,” was originally preserved only as an excerpt. If Raffel gave any of the contextual information that is supplied with its gloss in the Suda, the reader would find that the fragment exemplifies a certain type of song that began with the Greek “amphi-aeido,” a formula so often used that it gave rise to a verb amphiaeizein, which simply meant to write a song beginning with that word. As it is rendered in Pure Pagan, one completely misses this formulaic aspect. Even more to the point is the lack of any real poetic interest here.
Other selections are fine poems in the Greek but lose far too much in Raffel’s modern-poetic style of translation. Although in some cases he conveys a poetic sensibility and delicacy that is pleasant and smooth, he does not always give a coherent sense of the impact of the Greek language of the poems. The content of the Greek is clearly subordinate to his goal of subsuming the poems into his personal style and evoking a certain mood of quasi-Hellenic reverie. For instance, in one lovely poem of Alcman, (Poetae melici Graeci fr. 89), here entitled “Sleep” ( p. 17), he returns five times to the refrain “are asleep,” describing a beautiful natural landscape. Raffel has achieved an effect somewhat similar to the original, which also contains an element of hypnotic repetition. He loses, however, the strongly evocative visual and ecstatic impact of the Greek, replacing it with a mere laundry-list description of natural features. “Headlands and cataracts” are omitted from the description. In describing “the creeping things out of the dark earth, and the beasts on the hills” Raffel leaves out the crucial verb “trephei” (nurtures), and thus the earth, so actively alive in the Greek, becomes a mere house for the animals. "Exotic beasts in the deeps of the purple salt” becomes simply “monsters deep in the sea.” Finally, the birds, “the races of long-winged birds” in the Greek, are here no longer long-winged, but simply birds.
Raffel’s primary interest in Pure Pagan is not to give to the general reader a real sense of the color, shading, messy contradiction, and multifarious variety of Greek lyric poetry. This would be too intimidating. Rather, he attempts to make his material accessible and imbue it with simplicity. This approach lies behind the impression of the “modernity” of the language and the monochromatic illusion of the Greek cultural ethos. His approach is reminiscent of that of the 19th century German Romanticists, who used the Greeks to further aims of nationalism and originality, creating the artificial image of the Greeks as unified cultural elite who consistently surpassed Latin efforts over the centuries. Likewise, Raffel here presents the Greeks and their poetry as something easy to digest, with very circumscribed themes that any picnicker trying to get some peace and quiet out of the city can comprehend. Guy Davenport, in his introduction, celebrates paganism as a bucolic ideal by his suggestion that the Greeks considered the country superior to the city and that this idealization of country life was the primary catalyst and subject of Greek lyric. I think this is by no means evident, even in the selections given by Pure Pagan. Consciousness of the polis and the public identity of the citizen were much more of a wellspring of identity in the ancient world than a nebulous worship of nature, in spite of the fact that Samuel Johnson defined pagan as “living in the country” (p. xiii). In fact, the idealization of rural existence was one theme among many in Greek lyrics and was inextricably bound up with the concept of city life as quintessentially human, civilized, and necessary. I feel that Raffel’s selections and translations reflect a modernist ideal for the ancient Greeks, one which almost certainly never existed except in our minds. Nevertheless, if the only way for most readers to approach a body of work so messy and daunting is through simplification and idealization, perhaps this is better than missing it altogether. Ultimately, Pure Pagan is a pleasant read, and a relaxing if unchallenging pleasure-trip into a usually tempestuous, exacting, and mysterious field.
© Emily Fairey—Nietzsche Circle, 2007
(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007)
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