David Constantine

Translations from the Greek Anthology

An anthology is a “gathering of flowers.” The Greek Anthology, marvellous salvage from the vast shipwreck of the Ancient World, is a collection of about 4500 poems composed over more than fifteen hundred years by about three hundred authors, a colossal continuity and variety from pre-classical times through Roman into Byzantine.

I’ve been reading and translating these poems on and off for half a century. I got my Greek from teach-yourself books, dictionaries, cribs and from copying out page upon page of  the lovely script. With the Anthology I read the quaint translations by W. R. Paton (in the Loeb edition), moved from them to the facing originals and with an idiot patience and labour and my massive and beloved Liddell & Scott worked out an exactly word-for-word literal version. Then began to cast that into verse of my own.

GA VII, 260; Loeb II, p. 144
Carphyllides

Wayfarer passing by our tomb, think of us in death
As fortunate mortals, content. Man and wife we lived
As one flesh aging together on the good earth and left
Children’s children. Girls and boys continued the line
Of our good fortune, we sang them to sleep in our laps
No mortal sickness befalling any one of them, no grief
Befell us. But on this our grave they poured libations
And sent us to sleep among the lucky in love and life.

GA VII, 739; Loeb II, p. 392
Phaedimus

Here the young wife Aristagora housed the dust
Of her young husband Antheus
Whom the savage Aegean drowned off Skiathos.
A fisherman caught him drifting deep among the lost
Hauled him alongside and roping his ankles tight
Towed him to harbour in Torone at first light.
Stranger, passer-by, think of them all three:
The dust, the widow and that good charioteer of the sea.   

GA VII, 365; Loeb II, p. 194
Zonas of Sardis, also called Diodorus

Dour ferryman, coming for the child Euphorion
When you hush your prow through the reeds and touch the shore
Be kind. His father, standing in the muddy shallows
Will hand him up the plank. Reach down, Charon
Bring him carefully on board. Those are his first sandals
His pride and joy. But his footing in them is still unsure.

GA VII, 744; Loeb II, p. 394
Diogenes Laertius

They say the astronomer Eudoxus, teaching in Memphis
The eternal lives of the spheres, learned his own fate from Apis 
The young bull who between his golden horns bore the full moon.
Not that Nature suddenly gave this beast the power to speak
But standing slant on, he put out his feeling tongue
And licked and licked at the travelling scholar’s cloak.
Which was his way of telling him, Thinker, you are on the wane.
Lover of the earth and the heavens, you don’t have long.

Back to Issue IX…