Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns

Hesiod, Daryl Hine

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780226329673
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

Winner of the 2005 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.In Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, highly acclaimed poet and translator Daryl Hine brings to life the words of Hesiod and the world of Archaic Greece. While most available versions of these early Greek writings are rendered in prose, Hine's illuminating translations represent these early classics as they originally appeared, in verse. Since prose was not invented as a literary medium until well after Hesiod's time, presenting these works as poems more closely approximates not only the mechanics but also the melody of the originals.This volume includes Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony, two of the oldest non-Homeric poems to survive from antiquity. Works and Days is in part a farmer's almanac—filled with cautionary tales and advice for managing harvests and maintaining a good work ethic—and Theogony is the earliest comprehensive account of classical mythology—including the names and genealogies of the gods (and giants and monsters) of Olympus, the sea, and the underworld. Hine brings out Hesiod's unmistakable personality; Hesiod's tales of his escapades and his gritty and persuasive voice not only give us a sense of the author's own character but also offer up a rare glimpse of the everyday life of ordinary people in the eighth century BCE.In contrast, the Homeric Hymns are more distant in that they depict aristocratic life in a polished tone that reveals nothing of the narrators' personalities. These hymns (so named because they address the deities in short invocations at the beginning and end of each) are some of the earliest examples of epyllia, or short stories in the epic manner in Greek.This volume unites Hine's skillful translations of the Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns—along with Hine's rendering of the mock-Homeric epic The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice —in a stunning pairing of these masterful classics.

THE BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND THE MICE

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

In this version of what might be called the “Rhapsodies and Prefaces of the Sons of Homer,” I have imitated the meter and diction of the original, in an attempt to give some taste of the peculiar flavor of these hymns, which seem at once solemn and facetious, gay and grand. My dactylic hexameters I allow to contain more undiluted dactyls than the Greek; the lines are, with few exceptions, purely dactylic through the fifth foot; the sixth foot is more often trochaic than spondaic, as the rules of classical scansion would approve. The reason for the predominance of dactyls lies in the accentual character of the English language, where spondees are few and three stressed syllables (as must arise in the case of a spondee followed by a dactyl), almost unheard of. The effect here, though more monotonous, is lighter than that of the original and at least avoids those confusing hiatuses that result from any attempt to write true classical hexameters in English. So powerful has the dactylic rhythm proved, in fact, that I have taken liberties with the accents of certain words for prosodic reasons, much as a composer might set the occasional syllable in such a way as to outrage its spoken pattern while preserving his tune. Thus, while “immortal” and “undying” are accented on the penult, both seem to me defensibly to scan as dactyls because of the audible length of the first foot. Readers are not to quibble at syllables if they hear throughout the steady measure of the hexameter.

The diction of the Homeric Hymns presents as many problems in English as it does in Greek. Composed, at a most conservative estimate, over a period of a thousand years—from 600 BC to AD 400—these lays and invocations in the Homeric style are, like all classical poetry, often deliberately archaic and almost invariably precious. Of great lexicographical interest, they present many odd and out of the way usages and abound, as their frequent citations in Liddell and Scott’s Greek dictionary show, in hapax legomena. My rule has been to follow the sense, and sometimes the sound, of the Greek as closely as possible, letting archaisms and colloquialisms equally intrude when they seemed called for or inevitable, but avoiding an unduly up-to-date contemporary style. The bards who composed these songs for recitation were, despite their beards and their beggary, no Beats; they are, rather, our—as they were Chapman’s and Shelley’s and the Greeks’—chief instructors in classical language and literature.

I have not invariably reproduced in position the celebrated formulary...