Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation Review

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(More customer reviews)How can a book be a "translation" when the author confesses in the Preface that he can't read ancient Greek? Yet that is the conundrum we are faced with here. This is an execrable book which defaces the beauty of ancient poetry, and it is to be avoided. There are so many better books out there which are faithful, poetic translations of Greek lyric poetry: the first three to come to my mind would be Kenneth Rexroth's "Poems from the Greek Anthology," Willis Barnstone's "Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets," and Burton Raffel's "Pure Pagan." Seek them out rather than this.
It would be so much different if Santos and his publisher were honest with us: that these are paraphrases, not true translations. Or at the very least that they are adaptations of ancient work. Christopher Logue's ongoing "War Music" is my favorite thing ever, and though it works on the same levels that Santos appropriates here, nowhere does Logue claim to be translating Homer. Indeed, his work is subtitled "An Account of Homer's Iliad," and therein lies the difference.
Santos offers a pretentious introduction in which he admits that he cannot read Greek and that he's working off of prior English translations. But yet Santos in his magnitude deems that these previous translations all lack poetic merit. Yes, Santos lays out that old line: the scholars who translated these ancient Greek poems were more concerned with accuracy than with poetry. So now Santos must come to our rescue. And yes, Santos is careful not to mention any of the above authors, all of whom COULD read Greek and all of whom DID retain the poetry in their translations. And what's more, all of whom did so better than Santos.
I'll provide some examples below, but quickly, here is the gameplan Santos employs throughout. He paraphrases a poem, closely following previous translations but "poetrying" them up with ten-dollar words ("talus," "judder," "vireos," "aciculate"...pretension so thick you could choke on it), then he sways way off into left field by changing the endings at his own whim. He also finds it necessary to pad these epigrams up to twice their original length. It would be fine if he was improving upon the originals, but in most cases Santos only manages to undermine and neuter their impact. Seriously, this is a book that made me mad as I read it; I couldn't believe how hamfistedly Santos ruined the majority of these poems.
Let's start with Alkaios, a Greek poet of the 7th Century BCE. Here's how Willis Barnstone translates one of his poems in "Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets:"
Hebros, most beautiful river near Ainos,
you carry a shining bath of Thracian foam
out into the purple sea. And many girls
stand near you,
and with soft hands rub oil on the smooth flesh
of their beautiful thighs. And they pour
your water over themselves like a sooth-
ing unguent.
Strong work from Barnstone the scholar, a poem rife with eroticism and lyrical force. Now let's read in disbelief as Santos mangles it:
Most beautiful of rivers, its icy, stream-fed freshets
start up in the anticlines of Rhodope
and beyond that rocky, headlong fall spill out
into the shallows and holms, the weedy
margins of the wetlands, old groves and haycocks
and rocked-off plots of Thracian land.
Along its way, who can say how many young girls
will enter its waters to wash their hair,
to cool their thighs, or - as if its silvery wetness
somehow held the chrism of their womanhood -
to raise up in their tight-cupped hands
deep draughts of its breathtaking liquors.
Where to start with this drivel? This is the exemplar of Santos's method of "translation." It ruins the original in so many ways. First let's note how he's padded such a brief poem into a Byzantine chunk of run-on sentences and this-should-impress-you vocabulary. I mean, "freshets?" "Haycocks?" "Chrism?" I guess the old saying's true, the Greeks really DO have a word for it. And if you can follow the first sentence of this poem, then you must be a spelunker by trade. It's not just a run-on, it's a train wreck. The entire book suffers from them, even the Preface; Santos seems unable to construct a sensible sentence.

Let's move on to Sappho, that often-translated poet who still kindles our imagination, despite the fact that the majority of her poetry is lost. In his masterful "Poems from the Greek Anthology," Kenneth Rexroth translated one of Sappho's fragments thusly:
...about the cool water
the wind sounds through sprays
of apple, and from the quivering leaves
slumber pours down...
What a beautiful, poetic translation. And, according to Rexroth, a translation he produced when he was fifteen years old! Now let's see how Santos handles the poem:
...drifted over blue lakewater,
a cool wind empties out the apple trees,
a cidery, heavy-eyed drowse
spills from the branches and murmuring leaves
How exactly can wind "empty out the apple trees?" And why bother writing regular old "slumber" when the oh-so-more-poetic "cidery, heavy-eyed drowse" will do? This is the sort of junk you'd expect someone like Jewel to publish, some celebrity wanna-be-poet. Just pretentious dreck.
I'll end with Callimachus, an Alexandrian Greek poet from the 3rd Century CE. A master of epigrams, the majority of his work is lost, but Frank Nisetich collected and translated all of the surviving material in his "Poems of Callimachus," published by Oxford. Now, Nisetich is a scholar, which per Santos's muddled reasoning would mean that he's unqualified to "poetically" translate Callimachus. But yet let's compare how the two translate one of Callimachus's epigrams.

Nisetich translation:
Tell me, is Charidas buried here? "If it's the son
of Arimas of Cyrene you mean, he's here."
Charidas, how is it down there? "Darkness." What of
return?
"A lie." And Pluto? "A myth." We're done for, then.
"I've given you the truth. If you prefer
a pleasantry, beef's a penny a pound in Hades."
A brief epigram with a shock ending; Nisetich has stayed true to Callimachus and yet delivered a worthy poem in the English language. Nisetich the scholar, mind you. Yet here's how Santos the artiste "translates" the poem:
Is it Charidas who rests beneath this stone?
"If it's the son of Arimmas you mean, it is."
And what sort of world surrounds you there?
"A great darkness is all, a darkness beyond imagining."
Is it true what they say, the insensible dead
will be born again? "All lies, lies and superstition."
Then what of Pluto? People say that he returned.
"Pluto is a myth and nothing more. We die forever,
we remain that way, it's a fate that has no end."
If it's true what you say, wouldn't that undo
whatever small hope the living require to drag
ourselves from day to day? "What I say is true.
If it's comforting words you're after, if it's
pipe dreams you'd be guided by, then turn deaf ears
on the voice that speaks beneath this stone
and address your questions to the living."
Again, where to start with my loathing? For one, Santos has destroyed the shock ending of the original, replacing the funny "beef" reference with a pointless despair. Beyond that, he even has to meddle with the reference to Pluto. I mean, when exactly did Pluto "come back?" This is a perfect example of how Santos has destroyed these ancient poems, padding them with his own dimestore whimsy and defacing their charm, sincerity, and impact.
I want to wrap up by showing how such poems can properly be translated, translated in such a way that the final product is faithful to the original and yet a work of poetry in its own right. Here is how Burton Raffel translates this Callimachus epigram in his book "Pure Pagan:"
A: Stone, do you stand on the grave of Charidas?
B: The son of Arimmas of Cyrene?
He lies here.
A: Charidas: what's it like down there?
C: Dark, all dark.
A: And do the dead come back?
C: Lies, all lies.
A: And Pluto?
C: A myth, no more.
A: I've no hope left.
C:I speak the truth.
But I can tell you good news, too:
Meat is cheap, down here.
Now THAT is how it's done. Raffel in just a few lines faithfully renders the snarky whit Callimachus was known for, without resorting to the maudlin tropes Santos employs throughout this loathsome book.

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"A magnificent achievement, better, more animated, buoyant and richly articulated than any other version I know."-Anthony HechtThis collection of classical lyric poems, translated by Sherod Santos, answers Dante Gabriel Rosetti's mandate that "The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation…with one more possession of beauty." And indeed, the reader finds here the plenty of the gods in poems of freshness, vigor, excitement, strength, and tenderness. Arranged into four periods-Classical, Hellenic, Roman, and Early Byzantine-Greek Lyric Poetry features works by such ancient masters as Xenophanes, Callimachus, Plato, Sappho, and Simonides. These translations are addressed to the general reader as well to poets and lovers of poetry who may be curious about the marvelous slips and reconfigurations that occur when a poet in the present communes with poets in the past.

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