The Old Men of Argos Huddle in Terror

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From Aeschylus tragedy Agamemnon, Line 1020.

Over the weekend there were two football grand finals on television. On the Saturday Geelong and Collingwood struggled in a close run thing for three quarters until the Cats skipped away and won the game. On the Sunday Manly defeated the Warriors. On the Sunday night, for reasons which had nothing to do with football, I was unable to sleep. Having not much else to do, I read the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. More exciting than football, the creative spark forced me from my bed. I am not fluent in my translations, one could compare my technique to a person attempting to solve a cryptic crossword. My lack of skill or fluency does not stop me, for my main goal is to learn and to gain fluency. In this instance the only way to learn is to read.

This piece is from Agamemnon, the first part of the Oresteia. A wonderful, brutal, strange and powerful work. Agamemnon has just returned home from the long war against Troy. Home to Argos and to his wife Klutaimnestra, who has set herself on killing him. She feels she is in the right, as he sacrificed (murdered) their daughter Iphigeneia. She was sacrificed to allow the Greeks to launch their campaign against Troy. For ten years the war dragged on, and for ten years Klutaimnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and mother of Iphigeneia, nurtured her hatred and desire for vengeance. Who could blame her? Even the old men of Argos agree 'blame is present against blame, difficult it is to judge. He endures who is enduring, the killer has to pay.'

Using flattering words, a warm bath, and a krater of drugged wine, wielding her sword and a net, Klutaimnestra rolled out the wine dark carpet for the returning hero. She stabbed him twice and killed him. Splattered with blood she plunged the sword a third thrust to convince herself that the deed had been done.

This passage is from one of the songs of the Chorus of Old Men. The old men sense that something is amiss, but unlike the audience they do not know what is to come to pass. They are fearful for Agamemnon as he strides across the barbaric carpets. He seems to be taking on the manners of the East, of the Trojan king Priam. Klutaimnestra appeals to his vanity by telling him that the feet of a hero should not touch the dirt. The old men see this an affront. The red carpets flow from the palace doors and across the stage. The Phoenician carpets call to mind the wine dark blood which has flowed across generations of the House of Atreus and which will soon flow again. The old men are scared and they sing a long passage, of which I cut out a bit to make a (hopefully) nice little poem. In ripping fifteen or so lines out of a much larger poem I can only do violence to the original, but I have endeavoured to minimise the harm.

Robert Browning is not much spoken abut these days, but he was insightful in many ways. I agree with him in the spellings that he uses, for instance I much prefer Klutaimnestra to Clytaemnestra, Kassandra to Cassandra. He did some very literal translations from the Greek. He did this in opposition to current ideas about the beauty of the Greek language. In this he showed ancient Greek to be a highly flexible, and at the same time sparse language. This sparseness, which is increased by the heightened language of the tragic form, is a peg that allows the translator to hang any garment desired, be it gaudy or plain. I think this was the point that Browning tried to make in his, even to this day, despised translation of Agamemnon.

As a example let us look at the last line of this passage (line 1034), in Greek it reads, Zopuroumenas frenos. From the dictionary we find out that Zopuroumenas means kindle into flame and frenos meaning midriff, or breast and by extension heart, mind, sense etc. (As an aside Zopuroumenas can also mean kindle into life, as in the quickening of the embryo.) In Browning we get 'the enkindling mind.' From E. D. A. Morshead we get 'my soul is prophecy and flame' which Robert Fagles in turn translates as '...and the brain is swarming, burning.' Which is best? Which is most correct? Which is nearest to the mind of Aeschylus?

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The Old Men of Argos Huddle in Terror.

Once upon the earth
One's life blood black.
Can anyone with charms
Sing it back?

Once there was one who rightly knew
How to call back the dead.
Fearful Zeus struck him
Thunderbolt dead.

Had not the deathless
Arrayed our portion
Against another,
Bright laughter
Would burst forth.
Outracing
My heart.

Now
However
The lower gloom
Beneath the darkness.
Sick at heart,
I murmur and grumble.
Unable to hope
For that opportune day
To unravel, and so
Bring to an end.

Kindled my heart leaps into flame!

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The pic is from http://www.theoi.com/image/F6.1Artemis.jpg

Erida - Goddess of Strife

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A couple of paragraphs from the Iliad. Two sections where we see the external nature of war. Of how the feelings of soldier are manipulated by larger forces. In this case the will of Zeus, but let us see it as a metaphor for our society, where War seems natural and opposing your neighbour passes for society. I used more words in these translations, as it was important to create some context for the passages, as we are only dealing with a few lines out of over 15,000 in the epic.

Book IV of the Iliad, Strife and Fear and panic stricken rout arise with Strife and discord. A love of the sound of battle of the clots of blood. She spreads discord and strife among Charming Ilios and the Danaoi. Strife starts off little and then grows; until, with feet striding the land her head is in the heavens. And I am reminded of the blood lust of my fellows and the generals and politicians and the perverters of language, and the mockers of democracy and how we must honour our dead by keeping the wars going. So strife feeds on strife and storms the very gates of heaven, suffocating in blind remorseless fury, the children of the poor.

I am sure one who is smarter than I am will find a deep misogynist strain in Homer, and his feminising of discord. As for myself, I struggle with simple translations.

Book 4 starting line 439

Some are called forth by Ares, some by iron eyed
Athena. So arises Fear and panic stricken
Terror. And Strife who desires cruelty,
Sister and concubine of Ares destroyer of men.
Small she is, to start, armed, but soon
Her head rises to the heavens. Across the land
She strides. She spews strife to all sides
Equal, as she goes among the tumult,
Increasing the lamentations of men.

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Book XI of the Iliad. Those who feel that history is made by great men, and that history appears as a series of wars and violence will find much to hardened their positions by reading this epic. It seems to me wrong to discuss the Iliad with modern eyes, as the poem seems to me to be denying modernist ideas of free will. In the beginning of book eleven the Achaeans have suffered badly at the hands of the Trojans, and many are dejected. It is the plan of Zeus that the war continue. He sends Strife down to the encampment and she screams and fills the hearts of the army with hatred, with love of battle, sweeter even then the thought of going home.

Book XI starting line 14

And then Erida rose to her full height -
Eyes dripping blood. She called out great
And terrible. Penetrating into the hearts
Of the Achaeans. At once war become
Sweeter than going back in the hollow
Ships to the beloved land of their families.

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Can we see our own throwness in the works of Homer? Torn asunder from our beloved land we are captivated by our supposed freedom. The power of Capital toys with our lives, in a similar way to how Zeus toyed with warring Greeks and the Trojans. He set them to strife and even goaded them to second effort when they began to falter. This was his plan, Zeus wanted to depopulate the Earth. War was his answer, and it was only too easy for him to find willing accomplices in their own extinction. As it is only too easy to find today many who wish for war, and forsake multilateral solutions and worship at the cenotaph. Empty tombs of the empty lives of our dead, honoured by old men. Or as Lenin said there was no crisis from which the bourgeoisie could not escape provided the working class was prepared to pay the price.

We are not as superstitions as the ancients, but we still sacrifice our children on hard stone altars, praying for a wind that will blow an invisible hand onto our scales, allowing us to fight our enemies, and to gain great wealth. It is, of course, wrong to see Capital as a supernatural power. Yet for the vast herd that roams the land having no understanding of what drives them, no grasp of simple history, of how the world became this way, having nothing but disdain for the workings of the scientific method, knowing nothing of the intricate web of interconnected wealth which builds up the foundations of everyday life, and of thought itself, they act and move as if controlled by far off gods who drink and love and mock the tiny ones who live not a true human life, but rather a shadowy passing of time. Lacking above all curiosity and imagination.

And yet both the Gods of the old days, and the Wealth of our modern age, are nothing if not our creation, the common structure and therefore the common inheritance of countless hands and hearts and minds.

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The image is Achilles getting new armour from his mother. He is going back to war Why? His friend was killed, and the only way to honour his death is to add to the pile of death.

War and Anti War

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I was reading an only moderately interesting book about the Trojan War. Among the cliches of a conflict of cultures and the battles of East and West, I came across some good quotes from out of Homer.

So like a good little geek, I had no choice to look up the original, and make a stab at translation. Mucking around a bit with what I ended up with, lead me to this two little pretend imagist works posted here.

These lines are Odysseus speaking to Agamemnon. Things are not going well for the Greeks. Odysseus lets his captain know that this is the lot of soldiers, and they will have to fight until they die. He seems to be pointing to the cruelty of the gods and their callous disregard for human life. Maybe we can see the gods as standing in for the historic and economic forces in our lives, and how it can seem to the unexplored mind that war is natural and a normal part of life.

When in fact we all know that it is possible to end war.

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(Iliad Book 14.86)

This Zeus has assigned.

We are to endure,
From insolence
Into grey age,
Painful war,

Until we perish.
Everyone.


In this second quote, Odysseus is even more clear as to who should wear the blame for the war. It is clearly the work of the gods, and Zeus in particular. He seems to see the war as a toy of the gods, and the death of the many as being of no importance to the deathless ones.

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(Odyssey 14.235)

Along this hateful path
Far sounding Zeus
Led many
Knee bent men
To their death.

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The image depicts the battle about the body of Patroclus, and is from a greek vase. More can be found here
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Images/BattlePatroclus.jpg

Potnia Theron

photo from http://www.utexas.edu/courses/larrymyth/images/2E-Artemis-Actaeon.jpg

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Hymn 9 to Artemis


Sing Muse, of Artemis,
Sister of the far worker.
Virgin spitter of arrows,
Fed at the same table as Apollo.

She refreshes her horses
The waters of reedy thick Meletos.

Swiftly through Smyrna
She drives her golden chariot
To Klaros rich in vines while
Apollo of the silver bow awaits
The arrow-pourer.

Hail Goddess! At the same time
Embroider lyrics. Of you I sing.
And now I shall pass over
Into another mournful song.

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this one from http://albertis-window.blogspot.com/2011/02/diana-of-ephesus-keeping-abreast-with.html


some words on Artemis

Artemis has many different guises, she seemed to start as a fertility goddess, as in Artemis of Ephusus and later takes the role of the virgin mistress of wild animals. She is quite cruel in her protection of her sacred animals, and in the protection of her virginity.

When I read of Artemis and Apollo and the serenity with which they can torture and kill us mortals I am reminded of Rilke's Angels from the first of his Duino Elegies. (which was written in Trieste while Joyce was writing Ulysses.)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

Ekatos - the far shooter, a name for Apollo, the younger twin brother to Artemis.

Iocheairan - This word is commonly translated as arrow pourer. Ios is the word for arrow as well as the word for venom. I combined the arrow and the venom of the snake and made the image of the mistress of the wild beasts (potnia theron) spitting arrows, as a snake will spit venom.

Bathuschoinoio - combining Bathos; deep, used in many metaphorical ways as well, including the connotation that is still current, profound, and schoinos which means reeds. Coincidently schoinos can be used to mean arrow or javelin.

Meletos a river, which may have been near to city of Smyrna.

Kleros - a site sacred to Apollo, where there was once an oracle.

Humnos - a hymn, but also a word with wider intimations, a simple strain or melody but also a hymn, an ode to the gods, but also a mournful song. As all art has an element of sorrow I used to translation of mournful song.

Again I am no scholar in the classics, but a vain and puny amateur who gains enjoyment trying to make sense of the word about us.

Helios

Hymn 31 - to Helios

Begin your song of radiant Helios,
Muse Calliope, child of Zeus.

Cow eyed Euryphaessa
Glorious child of Gaia
With starry Ouranos.
Married Hyperion
His own sister.

And she brought forth
Beautiful dear ones,
Rosy armed Eos
Fair haired Selene
Tireless Helios.

Resembling the Gods,
He brings to sight both mortals
And the deathless ones,
Mounted his horses.

Terrible the glance
His eyes from out
His golden helmet.
Rays radiate from him,
Radiant, glittering
Hair falls his forehead
Gracefully captivating
His far-shining face.

Beautiful clothes
Delicately made
About his body
Shimmer the breath
Of a breeze.

With his stallions
And his chariot
And golden yolk
He established
From Heaven
To Oceans edge.

Rejoice Lord!
Of your own will
Bestow to me
A life welcome.
Beginning with thou
I celebrate with song
The mortal race of demigods.
Whose deeds the goddesses
To mortals pointed out.

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the photo is from http://www.theequinest.com/horses-of-helios/

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Hymn to Demeter

Hymn 13 - To Demeter

Flaxen haired goddess
Demeter majestic.
You I celebrate in song.
You and your daughter,
Persephoneia, beyond beauty.

Hail and Rejoice Goddess.
Preserve our city.
Attend my song.

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Only three lines, this is basically a small section taken from a much longer hymn of Demeter, which hopefully I will be able to translate as I gain more experience and confidence. Only three lines, but it gave me lots of pause for thought. As people used to say about the Australian cricket, it was the best because of the short and sharp nature of the Sheffield Shield Competition. Each games was important, each innings, each over was important. So with this little three line poem, there is in fact no place to hide.

This translation is as much, if not more so, for me than it is for the general reader. So I go only beg your indulgence in my exercises.

hukomon - fair haired. This seemed a fair enough translation, but after looking deeper into the descriptions of Demeter it seemed best to go with flaxen-haired, as Demeter is a corn goddess.

koure - this means Demeter's daughter, more generally it means daughter. But it has overtones of the young daughter on the cusp of sexual life. A maiden is how we often see it defined in dictionaries from the early 1900's. I will leave it at daughter, but as I understand things, this word; like most words has deeper meanings.

perikallea - peri-kallea simply means very beautiful. Peri means about, around. This is what it means when used in the word peripatetic, where is describes Aristotle teaching his students, as they walk around the grounds of the Lyceum. This word is also defined as simply very, which is a fine word, but is one without much punch, so I decided to use another meaning of peri; beyond. And Koure (Demeter's young bride virgin daughter) is then described as beyond beauty. It seemed to be the correct intensifier.

The final word which I enjoyed was arkhe - this means simply to begin, to lead off. Further investigation gives meanings such as to govern, to lead, to command. After much thinking I went with attend, as this gives a dual meaning of leading, but also of paying attention. Maybe not the most correct translation, but for the poem it seemed the best word.

The image comes from here: http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/K3.2.html

Hymn to Herakles the Lion Hearted

Birth of Herakles

Jean Jacques Francois Le Barbier (1738-1826)

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Homeric Hymn 15 - Herakles the Lion Hearted

Hear me sing of Herakles, divine son, the finest
And bravest of all born from this earthy compost.

In Thebes, of the spacious dancing gardens,
Alcmena mingled with the storm cloud covert
Son of Kronos. Carried and bore him.

Even the gods themselves could not
Conceive his wide roaming across earth and sea.

Bound to the arrogance of King Eurystheus.
Much wickedness he performed, much he endured.

And now fair he sits on snow capped Olympus
Dwelling in delight with Hebe of the well turned ankle.

Rejoice in the son of Lord Zeus
Exult and grant us happiness.

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Afterword

I have no right to inflict my attempts at translations upon the world. Nothing to justify but simple enthusiasm and passion for the ancients and for poetry in general. This I think will have to be sufficient. I understand my faults and weaknesses, mainly in that I can only do this translation like a lazy and ignorant school boy. Painstakingly fighting though lexicons and slowly identifying the inflections and parts of speech and then slopping it all together with a vague hope for inspiration.

I have not tried too hard at creating a word for word translation. I have not tried to capture the rhythms of the original. This is to me a pointless endeavour. The techniques used by the ancient oral song-stitchers are far too alien to fit into modern English poetry. All I have done is to render the Greek into a close approximation of how I understand the poem to flow. Unlike working in chemistry, there is no single right answer as to how a poem should be interpreted. I am banking on this simple fact to be my armour against any errors and flaws I may have planted. As this is not meant to be, as I said, a word for word translation, any errors can be seen as adding elements to the poem, maybe even pointing out new interpretations. Errors are, as Joyce has suggested, portals to discovery. While I gladly admit to not being expert in the nuance of Ancient Greek.,I do feel I am able to work my way through the poem and come up with some words and lines that capture something of the spirit of the original.

I was happy to fracture the standards of English poetry in an attempt to capture some of the strangeness of the distant past. I was more than happy to create lines that seemed to, to quote the often heard complaint raised by the professional academic poet, suffer of poeticism. This seemed to allow for the wide gap that exists between our modern Anglophones, and the world view of the ancients. The Greeks had a musical language and a poetry based on alterations of long and short vowel sounds. A Swinburne would be able to approximate these song lines, but I am not able to do so in a way that I find convincing. So I fell into a simple free verse outline to hang the translation. In the end I felt looseness of technique would be the most useful path to follow. I do not think we can understand fully what life for the ancients felt like, but I am sure that our present worship at the altar of crass stupidity and short term material gain was not in the Ancients program.

To be able to show something of the abyss that stands between us and the long ago past, I had to attempt to recall the dramatic elements from my all but forgotten Catholic teachings. Even with (or maybe because of) the playful sexuality of the work, and the hints of darks acts performed, the simple style of the Bible seemed to me a fitting structure for the work.

There were several words in particular which caught my attention, and seem worthy of brief mention.

leontothymon - leonto-thymon lion hearted - obvious in it's description of Herakles as having no fear, of having the heart of a lion. Also used to describe Achilles in several places, including book 7, 228 of the Iliad, in this instance the word has changed shape and is thymo-leonta, but the idea is the same.

kallikhoros - kalli-khoros. The Greeks liked to mash words up, and so here we have the word for beautiful combined with the word for dancing place, and in this we can see a similarity to our word chorus. This was a common epitaph to describe a wealthy city with wide open spaces. I envisioned this word as describing wide green parks, open spaces that allowed dance and theatre.

michtheisa - To mix or to mingle, properly of fluids. Extended to mean to join battle, as in hand to hand combat, or to have intercourse with. A well rounded patriarchal admixture of violence and sexuality. I liked the images of Zeus and Alcmena mingling to conceive Herakles. Light-bearing, rapacious Zeus concealed himself as a dark storm cloud, and impregnated Alcmena. Hera, the wife of Zeus, was jealous of the many children Zeus had spawned with mortal women. This is the source of the enmity Hera felt towards Herakles, and also explains his name of Hera-kles, glory of Hera. Either this name was given to further enrage Hera, or it describes the power and majesty Hera held over Herakles. Either makes sense, but I do get a certain amusement in the idea of the mortals teasing and enraging the Queen of the Heavens. In the end Hera was reconciled with Herakles, and after his death she adopted him. Herakles crawling out from between her legs in the ceremony of adoption which imitated childbirth.

athesphatos - a-theos-phatos - 'not to be said even by a god', unutterable. A very nice word indeed and one that stands for unutterable, awesome, ineffable, and such connotations. I used a wordy convoluted phrase, because it seemed to be more 'alien' and also because words such as awesome have lost mich of their mysterious qualities.

kallisphyron - kalli-sphyron - beautiful ankle. A common epitaph used to describe the beauty of a goddess. It can also be used to describe foothills, and even the furthermost part of a land. Unlike the Spartan women who wore dresses with a slit up the leg, earning the nickname Phainomerides - the thigh flashers.

My favourite word found in this poem was epichthonion. Epi-chthonion literally it means upon the earth, but in connotation it means something like the life on earth, and is also a phrase used to describe going under. I was quite intrigued with this word, as it expresses the complex and apparent contradiction of being the vegetative life giving force, as well a being the grave, the pit of the dead. This idea allowed me to bring in the word compost. The compost pile where I throw the scraps is alive with potatoes and pumpkins spreading out from the warm rotting mound. A rotting mound that brings forth new life seemed to be a good way to describe 'being upon the earth.'