Translation
For the past two years, I have been slowly translating my great-grandfather’s memoirs into English, first on the off-chance that my children’s Greek won’t be good enough to read the original, but second as an exercise: I’ve always liked the idea of writing, but since I do not have the time to produce original creative content, translating would at least hone my writing skills.
Translation is hard, and requires more creativity than I had assumed. A translator needs to convey not just the meaning of the original text, but preserve its rhythm, tone and register; ideally, a person reading the translation would experience the same emotions, board the same trains of thought, and make the same links to other cultural elements as a person reading the original. This leads to many agonising decisions: should you translate or transliterate names? Prioritise preserving word order or providing a less jarring translation? Translate an idiom or proverb word for word, or find an equivalent in the target language?
Agonising these decisions may be, but making them is fun. Having got a taste for it, I decided to try to translate a Greek poem into English, and write about the process, explaining the decisions I made. I am not a big reader of poetry, so this exercise is not my playing on my strengths, but a poem is the perfect subject for it: first, the poem I’ve chosen is short, so not as time consuming (either for me, or you (though as it turns out, writing this post has taken several weeks)); second, the issues the translator faces are starker in poetry, language being even more important in this art form than in prose.
I’ve chosen Cavafy’s God Abandons Antony for a few reasons:
- It’s one of my favourite poems;
- It does not feature a particular meter, nor does it rhyme, which makes the task easier;
- It is very famous in Greece, which means all Greek readers will be familiar with it;
- I happen to have two different collections of Cavafy’s poems, one translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou (henceforth E.S.) and one by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (K&S), so I can refer to them for guidance; in addition, you can compare their translations to mine.
Here’s the original:
ΑΠΟΛΕΙΠΕΙΝ Ο ΘΕΟΣ ΑΝΤΩΝΙΟΝ
Σὰν ἔξαφνα, ὥρα μεσάνυχτ’, ἀκουσθεῖ
ἀόρατος θίασος νὰ περνᾶ
μὲ μουσικὲς ἐξαίσιες, μὲ φωνές —
τὴν τύχη σου ποῦ ἐνδίδει πιά, τὰ ἔργα σου
ποῦ ἀπέτυχαν, τὰ σχέδια τῆς ζωῆς σου
ποῦ βγῆκαν ὅλα πλάνες, μὴ ἀνοφέλετα θρηνήσεις.
Σὰν ἕτοιμος ἀπὸ καιρό, σὰ θαρραλέος,
ἀποχαιρέτα την, τὴν Ἀλεξάνδρεια ποῦ φεύγει.
Πρὸ πάντων νὰ μὴ γελασθεῖς, μὴν πεῖς πῶς ἦταν
ἕνα ὄνειρο, πῶς ἀπατήθηκεν ἡ ἀκοή σου·
μάταιες ἐλπίδες τέτοιες μὴν καταδεχθεῖς.
Σὰν ἕτοιμος ἀπὸ καιρό, σὰ θαρραλέος,
σὰν ποῦ ταιριάζει σε ποῦ ἀξιώθηκες μιὰ τέτοια πόλι,
πλησίασε σταθερὰ πρὸς τὸ παράθυρο,
κι ἄκουσε μὲ συγκίνησιν, ἀλλ’ ὄχι
μὲ τῶν δειλῶν τὰ παρακάλια καὶ παράπονα,
ὡς τελευταία ἀπόλαυσι τοὺς ἤχους,
τὰ ἐξαίσια ὄργανα τοῦ μυστικοῦ θιάσου,
κι ἀποχαιρέτα την, τὴν Ἀλεξάνδρεια ποῦ χάνεις.
The poem is inspired by a passage from Plutarch, who recounts that on the eve of Octavian’s attack on Alexandria, a procession of people walked through the city, playing music and singing; as soon as they exited the city, they went silent. This was seen as a sign of Dionysos, Marc Antony’s guardian God, abandoning him. In the poem, the narrator instructs Antony to accept his fate with stoicism and courage.
Here are the two translations I have at home side-by-side:
The two translations are remarkably different. As will become evident, I much prefer the K&S one — E.S. is at times too melodramatic or over-the-top (“forsakes”, “lament”, “with deepest feeling”) and unnatural (“fate’s giving in”?? “as one courageous”??) — but E.S. does translate some passages better.
So, let’s start:
Σὰν ἔξαφνα, ὥρα μεσάνυχτ’, ἀκουσθεῖ
ἀόρατος θίασος νὰ περνᾶ
Literally translated, this reads “when suddenly, at the midnight hour, an invisible troupe is heard passing by”. But these two lines present several difficulties:
First, though “σαν” would be normally translated as “when” in this context, the etymology of the word is the Ancient Greek “ως αν”, which could be used to mean “as if”; indeed, in modern Greek also, “σαν” is often used to express uncertainty or possibility. Hence, one could choose to translate it as “if” instead of “when”. The substance of the poem doesn’t change all that much regardless of which option we choose, but there is a subtle difference between them: “if” is a hypothetical, it refers to a possible outcome out of many. “When” is definite: now we are asking Antony to prepare for the inevitable. Personally, and like both K&S and E.S., I prefer the “when” version: a person may claim to be ready to face disaster, though in their heart of hearts they still think a way out can be found. Removing that possibility forces them to confront the worst with nowhere to hide.
“ὥρα μεσάνυχτ’” translates to “midnight hour”, but I think the word-for-word trasnlation sounds grander, more epic than the colloquial Greek. So I’d rather translate is as plain “midnight”.
“ἀόρατος” means invisible. “θίασος” can be translated as “[musical/theatrical] company” (E.S.’s choice) or “troupe”; a more liberal translation (chosen by K&S) is “procession”. I don’t like “company” — it has too many other connotations and uses; and “troupe” does not seem appropriate — despite its etymology (from the French word for band of soldiers), it has a light-hearted feel to it, and sounds faintly ridiculous. Given that the passage from Plutarch that inspired the poem mentions a crowd of people sining and playing music, as opposed to a band of musicians, I think K&S’s liberal translation works best.
We then have to consider the order of the words, and the voice of the verb “hear”: in the original, the word is in the passive voice (“is heard”), and precedes its subject — so the direct translation would be “when suddenly, at midnight, is heard an invisible procession passing by”. There is no way to preserve both the voice and the order of words in English. So we have to choose between something like “you hear an invisible procession passing by” or “an invisible procession is heard passing by”. There are merits to both choices. The passive voice suggests that the procession is heard by everyone, not just Marc Antony, which I think is closer to the original meaning. But the active voice is less clunky, and I believe it fits the poem better. So I’d rather go with that.
Finally, in the preceding paragraph, I translated “νὰ περνᾶ” as “passing by”, but both K&S and E.S. use “going” instead. I think K&S’s “going by” sounds better than E.S.’s “going past”, I’ll use the same, ending up with:
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
Onto the next line:
μὲ μουσικὲς ἐξαίσιες, μὲ φωνές —
Both E.S. and K&S translate this as “with exquisite music, with voices” (though K&S omit the second “with”). This seems to be a standard translation, so I’m happy to go with it — though I did spend 15 mins googling the etymologies of the words “εξαίσιος” and “exquisite” to see whether they are akin. (They are not — exquisite comes from the Latin “ex” (out) and “quaerere” (to seek), so it means sought out. “Εξαίσιος” is more convoluted: it shares the “εξ”/“ex” with Latin (they both derive from the Proto-Indoeuropean *h₁eǵʰs), but its second component, “αίσιος”, comes from “αἶσα”, “fate”. In Ancient Greek, the word had a range of meanings, including “beyond what is ordained”, “outlaw”, or “extraordinary”. It looks like this last meaning made it into modern Greek, acquiring positive connotations along the way.)
“with exquisite music, with voices” is sensible, though it does lose something: in Greek, as in English, “music” is usually a singular noun; but unlike in English, a Greek speaker can inflect the word to make it plural, something like “musics”. This gives it a more colloquial, casual sound, that “exquisite music” lacks. Sadly, I can’t see a way around this.
τὴν τύχη σου ποῦ ἐνδίδει πιά, τὰ ἔργα σου
ποῦ ἀπέτυχαν, τὰ σχέδια τῆς ζωῆς σου
ποῦ βγῆκαν ὅλα πλάνες, μὴ ἀνοφέλετα θρηνήσεις.
I don’t like either the K&S or the E.S. translation of these lines, especially not E.S.’s: τύχη is luck, not fate; I have never come across the phrase “his fate [or luck for that matter] gave in” (I checked on Google Ngram, and this is indeed an unusual construction (by the by, Google Ngram is amazing. You can now use wildcards, restrict your search of a word to its use as a noun vs verb, search for all possible inflections of a word, etc)); and lament sounds wrong, too old fashioned: it brings to mind women paid to wail at funerals. The one thing he gets right over K&S is “illusions” — I will come to that.
K&S’s translation doesn’t seem right either. First, they made the curious choice of starting the verse with “don’t mourn […]”, which they repeat at the end; the original only has the instruction once, at the end. I am not sure why they did this — my best guess is that in Greek, following the previous clause with the object of the next doesn’t sound as strange as it does in English; perhaps they found the faithful translation too jarring. But even in Greek, the way Cavafy has ordered the words is uncommon, so I don’t think there is a strong argument for changing it.
Second, I don’t like “your plans all proving deceptive”. For me, deceptive has an implication of intent. A move is deceptive if the person who made it intended to trick their opponent. It is hard imagining someone’s plans deceiving them (unless it’s in the “you’re fooling yourself” sense, which we’ll encounter in a moment).
Third, I don’t know why neither translation uses the expression in vain.
I would translate these lines as follows:
your luck that is running out, your work
gone wrong, your life’s plans that were all
proven illusions, do not mourn in vain.
Note that I’ve added your before work gone wrong to respect parallelism.
Σὰν ἕτοιμος ἀπὸ καιρό, σὰ θαρραλέος,
ἀποχαιρέτα την, τὴν Ἀλεξάνδρεια ποῦ φεύγει.
I struggled a lot with these two lines. My first stab was “like one long ready, like one courageous, say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving”. There are a few things wrong with this draft: first of all, no-one likes the word “like”, so I’ll use “as” instead. Second, I used the word “ready” because that’s the standard translation of the word “έτοιμος”, but it’s not right in this context: “long prepared” is far more common in English. Third, I don’t like “as one courageous”, it does not sound natural. K&S’s “and graced with courage” sounds a bit flowery, more ornate than the original. So I’m inclined to go with “as one long prepared, and with courage”. This results in far fewer syllables than the original (nine vs thirteen) — up to this point, I had not been paying attention to the number of syllables per line, but for some reason this stands out. I suppose this is a red flag, but, never having had a good sense of rhythm, I cannot really judge.
The second line is more or less straightforward — “say goodbye to her, to Alexandria that is leaving” — but there are some interesting things to note. First, E.S. chooses not to anthropomorphise Alexandria at all: “bid farewell to the Alexandria that’s leaving”. K&S to refer to Alexandria as a “her”, but then use “that” instead of “who”. In Greek, the question of whether Cavafy is referring to the city as a person does not arise based on grammar — in Greek, cities have genders, and referring to them using those is not in any way bizarre. I think this is why E.S. chooses to avoid humanising the city in English: what looks like normal language in Greek looks like artistic license in English. Except, of course, that Cavafy does write of Alexandria leaving, so he is treating her as a person. So, in my view, K&S’s translation is closer to the mark. The only subtle change I’ve made is repeating the preposition “to” instead of the article “the”. And thus,
As one long prepared, and with courage,
say goodbye to her, to Alexandria that is leaving.
Onwards:
Πρὸ πάντων νὰ μὴ γελασθεῖς, μὴν πεῖς πῶς ἦταν
ἕνα ὄνειρο, πῶς ἀπατήθηκεν ἡ ἀκοή σου·
I found these two lines easy to translate:
Above all, do not fool yourself, do not say
that it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
My translation is almost identical to K&S, except they contract “do not” to “don’t”, and they omit “that”. In my view, my version rolls off the tongue a bit easier. It’s also longer, syllable-wise, which makes it closer to the original.
E.S.’s translation is off the mark in my opinion: he substitutes “do not fool yourself” for “do not be misled”, which obviously changes the meaning (in the original Greek, the poet instructs Antony to not deceive himself, whereas “do not be misled” suggests a third party trying to trick Antony).
K&S’s (and my own) is very close to the original, but there are a couple of minor differences — inconsequential, I think, in the grand scheme of things, but worth noting: first, and less interesting, is that the literal translation of the Greek is “[do not say that] your hearing was deceived” — but given the prevalence of the expressions “your ears deceived you”, I think it’s a sensible substitution. Second, the Greek word I’ve translated as “fool yourself” comes from the word for “laugh”. Obviously, this has a different etymology to the English “fool”, which comes from the Latin “follis” (bellows/windbag), whence it came to describe an empty-headed person. But serendipitously, “fool” also came to mean jester, i.e. a person who makes people laugh — so despite the Greek word in the original not being cognate with the English one I used in the translation, they have similar connotations.
μάταιες ἐλπίδες τέτοιες μὴν καταδεχθεῖς.
“Μάταιες ελπίδες τέτοιες” means “vain hopes such as these”. This construction is too long though, especially considering we need to inject a verb into the line, as we we will see in a minute. Furthermore, I am not too comfortable with the word “vain”: yes, it fits perfectly, but I already used it earlier in the poem. I do not like this repetition, so I’m going to copy K&S and use “empty”.
“Καταδεχθείς” is a nice word, it means accepting something below one’s dignity. I think “deign” matches it very closely in meaning and tone. The issue is that “deign” takes a verb phrase as its object, whereas “καταδεχθείς” can take a noun, as it does in the poem. So to use “deign”, we have to insert a verb that the original Greek lacks — unfortunate, but necessary. The question is, which verb? Unfortunately, I could not find a database with all verbs that can precede “hope” (Google Ngrams can help, as you can have it list the top 10 verbs that can precede a word, but you cannot have it list all such verbs; and most of the top 10 are not suitable in this context — e.g. “have”, “lost”, “are” etc). The ones that I can think of are “entertain”, “foster” and “hold out”. of these, “entertain” is the most common, but I’d rather use “hold out”, because entertain seems more frivolous (plus, it’s too long). And so,
do not deign to hold out empty hopes like these.
The next line is one we have translated already:
Σὰν ἕτοιμος ἀπὸ καιρό, σὰ θαρραλέος,
(“As one long prepared, and with courage,”) and is followed by
σὰν ποῦ ταιριάζει σε ποῦ ἀξιώθηκες μιὰ τέτοια πόλι,
The difficulty here is translating “αξιώθηκες”. The word has several definitions, but in this context it means to deem the word’s obejct (or, if the verb is in the passive voice, as it is here, the word’s subject) worthy of something (in this case, the city of Alexandria). When used in the passive voice, the word strongly suggests that the judgement of worthiness is made by a super-human force, and is close in meaning to “blessed” in English. For example, a common use of the word is in the sentence “αξιώθηκα να δω παιδιά και εγγόνια”, which can be translated as “I was blessed with children and grandchildren”. The problem is, the poet here clearly intends the word to maintain its original meaning, that of worthiness, which “blessed” does not carry.
So how to translate it? I cannot think of a word with both the same meaning & connotations in English (Google translate gets this catastrophically wrong — instead of translating “αξιώθηκα να δω παιδιά” to something like “I was lucky to have children”, it returns “I claimed to see children”). “Granted” or “deemed worthy” have roughly the same meaning, but not the implication of Providence. Still, I can do no better, and so:
As befits you, who were deemed worthy of such a city
πλησίασε σταθερὰ πρὸς τὸ παράθυρο,
κι ἄκουσε μὲ συγκίνησιν, ἀλλ’ ὄχι
μὲ τῶν δειλῶν τὰ παρακάλια καὶ παράπονα,
The first line’s closest translation is “approach steadily the window”, but I’d rather go with “go steadily to the window” — “go” feels stronger, more resolute than “approach”.
The second line is trickier: “συγκίνησιν” is the feeling of being moved or touched by something, and has no direct translation in English. The poet is urging Antony to allow himself to be moved, to experience strong emotions — which, incidentally, is wonderful advice: stoicism is frequently confused for stiff upper lip, limited display of feeling, imperturbability, but the two are not the same. As the poet acknowledges here, there is nothing wrong with experiencing strong emotions. Confusing absence of feeling with stoicism is the same as confusing fearlessness with courage, when in fact the latter has to do with overcoming fear, rather than not feeling it in the first place. Back to translating, in the absence of a good word for “συγκίνησιν”, I’ll go with K&S’s “deep emotion”.
The third line I’ll translate as “without the coward’s pleas and whining”. K&S invert the order of the words, which I don’t think is necessary; they also use “a coward’s”, whereas I prefer “the coward’s”, first because Cavafy also uses a definite article, and second because I think it just looks better: the definite article establishes a 1-to-1 relation between whining and complaining, and being a coward. This makes the message stronger, I think. Finally, I also prefer “without” to “not with”. And so,
go steadily to the window,
and listen with deep emotion, but without
the coward’s pleas and whining,
And for the last three lines, we have
ὡς τελευταία ἀπόλαυσι τοὺς ἤχους,
τὰ ἐξαίσια ὄργανα τοῦ μυστικοῦ θιάσου,
κι ἀποχαιρέτα την, τὴν Ἀλεξάνδρεια ποῦ χάνεις.
The poet is telling Antony to listen to the sounds of the procession as a final pleasure. But, he first interjects the advice to listen with deep feeling, and not with the coward’s pleas, and he then says that this act of listening to the music is Antony’s last pleasure. This sentence is arguably too long in Greek; in English, it’s almost impossible to parse — one reason being that in Greek, the verb for “listen” doesn’t require a preposition; in English, it does (we say “listen to the sound”, not “listen the sound”). Since we we added the clause “with deep emotion […]” after “listen”, we would now need to follow this with “to” — but this doesn’t read well:
go steadily to the window,
and listen with deep emotion, but without
the coward’s pleas and whining,
as a final pleasure, to the sounds
This is why both K&S and E.S. repeat the instruction “listen” in their translations. I’m afraid I have to follow their example here, otherwise the unusual, multi-clause sentence is just too tortured. But I use the words “final pleasure”, instead of E.S.’s “ultimate delight” (which sounds like something you’d hear in an ice cream commercial), or K&S’s “your final delectation” (delectation is an extremely rare word, orders of magnitude less frequent than “pleasure”; “ απόλαυση” is a common word, much closer to the latter).
The next line is made somewhat easier, because the poet repeats two words from earlier in the poem, “εξαίσια” and “θίασος”; similarly, the translator is bound by their previous choice of words. That leaves two words to translate. I’ll start with the easier one, “μυστικού”. In modern Greek, the word is used exclusively to mean secret, but I think the poet here uses a more archaic meaning. The word comes from the Ancient Greek “μύστης”, one who has been initiated into religious teachings; the English “mystic” and “mystical” come from this root too, so I think it makes sense to use this, even if it is a bit exotic.
The only word left is “όργανα”. This is difficult, because the direct translation is “[musical] instruments”. I do not like this very much, as it has too many other meanings in English, and sounds too precise. Unfortunately, there are not many options here: I must either use “instruments”, despite its being unsuitable, or, like K&S, change the wording completely; they opted to repeat the line from earlier in the poem, and talk about the “exquisite music”. I would rather stick to the original as much as possible though, so I will reluctantly use “instruments”.
The final line is similar to the one from above. I will translate it as “say goodbye to her, to Alexandria that you are losing”.
Bringing it all together, I end up with:
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by,
with exquisite music, with voices,
your luck that is running out, your work
gone wrong, your life’s plans that were all
proven illusions, do not mourn in vain.
As one long prepared, and with courage,
say goodbye to her, to Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, do not fool yourself, do not say
that it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not deign to hold out empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and with courage,
As befits you, who were deemed worthy of such a city,
go steadily to the window,
and listen with deep emotion, but without
the coward’s pleas and whining,
listen, as a final pleasure, to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical procession,
and say goodbye to her, to Alexandria that you are losing.
Comments, criticisms and other forms of feedback always welcome.
