Pindar Pindar - The Odes

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Given current presuppositions about the nature, significance, and social functions both of sports and of poetry, it may seem incongruouseven downright bizarrethat the foremost lyric poet of ancient Greece gained much of his renown by composing, on demand and for a fee, poems in praise of victorious athletes. Yet writing victory odes ( epinikia, epinicians), and getting paid for them, is precisely what Pindar did, employing in the processalong with his close contemporary Bacchylidesan elaborate repertoire of poetic and rhetorical conventions in the clear expectation of being understood by an audience well schooled in generic norms. As a living genre, however, the epinician did not long survive its two most distinguished practitioners, and for readers increasingly unfamiliar with its conventions Pindars odes began to pose serious problems of interpretation. Among the Hellenistic scholars whose views are recorded in the marginal commentaries ( scholia ) of medieval manuscripts, one favorite tactic was to resort to biographical hypotheses about Pindars professional antagonisms and political opinions, resulting in flights of unfettered fancy that continued to haunt Pindaric scholarship well into the twentieth century. Then too, since making consecutive sense of an ode often requires an understanding of epinician conventions, Pindar came to be regarded as an impulsively wayward genius, a stereotype reflected in Abraham Cowleys remark that translating him word for word would be like one madman translating another, or in Voltaires burlesquing of a divin Pindare whom no one understands but everyone feels compelled to praise. To Romantic and post-Romantic sensibilities, finally, there was the scandal of a great poet shackling himself to the tyranny not just of patrons but of crudely indigestible facts, an outrageous state of affairs that prompted more than one scholar to divide the odes up into poetic and non-poetic portions for the benefit of unwary readers. In the course of the twentieth century, however, a number of scholarsmost notably E.L. Bundy in his groundbreaking Studia Pindarica (1962)turned their attention to the essentially rhetorical (i.e., persuasive) underpinnings of the genre and affirmed the critical importance of its system of literary and social conventions to the understanding of Pindars occasionally erratic train of thought.

As specimens of a complex and long-vanished genre, then, Pindars forty-five surviving victory odes present considerable challenges to a translator who wishes to make them accessible to contemporary readers while still doing justice to the aesthetic and expressive qualities that have made them admired since antiquity. To meet the goal of accessibility I have provided an ample informational and explanatory apparatus comprising five distinct elements:

1.A substantial introduction with sections on Greek athletics and on various aspects of the epinician genre, including the important concept of the encomiastic persona (the I of the ode).

2.Notes to the individual odes, clarifying names and references, highlighting formal features (with cross-references to relevant sections of the introduction and appendix), and, as needed, briefly elucidating the train of thought, particularly in complex transitional passages where generic norms and expectations make it possible for Pindar to express a good deal with comparatively few words.

3.An appendix containing more detailed treatment of recurrent conventions, motifs, and rhetorical devices.

4.A pronouncing glossary of all proper names in the odes, supplying pertinent information and briefly summarizing stories to which frequent reference is made.

5.Three maps locating the various regions, cities, and geographical features mentioned in the odes or referred to in the notes.

Also included, although addressed only to specialists, is a conspectus of places in Pindars Greek where my translation assumes readings different from those printed in the Teubner edition of B. Snell and H. Maehler (1987), which otherwise has served as the basis of my work.

In my translation of the odes themselves I have sought to give an adequate account not only of their propositional content but also of the artistic means through which that content is presented. With those ends in view, I have been guided throughout by five basic principles:

1.First and foremost, to render verse as verse by making consistent use of the iambic rhythm that has for centuries been the mainstay of traditional English verse (while also availing myself of such well-established licenses as reversed feet and occasional anapaestic substitutions). Any attempt at a closer approximation of Pindars complex metrical forms would be doomed from the outset; on the other hand, his mastery of those forms is so complete and their rhythmical power so integral a part of his aesthetic achievement that it seemed to me important to do more than simply to write prose and lineate it as verse. Then again, I have not held myself to fixed line-lengths within the stanzaic structure, fearing that the resultant need for compression or expansion might lead to distortions of meaning. In all but one or two instances I have followed the typographical layout of the Snell-Maehler text, which divides longer lines colometrically and indents the second segment; I have, however, found it advantageous to treat such indented lines as metrically independent entities (while retaining the S-M line numbers for ease of reference).

2.To strive for stylistically appropriate diction, steering a middle course between excessive archaism on the one hand and the flatly prosaic or colloquial on the other. Though praised since antiquity for its grandeur and exuberance, Pindars style is in fact equally characterized by effects of great simplicity, either stark or poignant according to context, and a translation needs to accommodate both ends of the spectrum.

3.To preserve, as much as possible, the vigor and vividness of metaphor so pervasive in Pindars handling of language, including the kinds of implicit metaphor that can inhere in (e.g.) the derivation or etymology of words and the literal meaning of compound verbs.

4.To reproduce (when possible) the general disposition of semantic content within the stanzaic structure, particularly in regard to such matters as end-stopping vs. enjambment, the placement of logical signposts and thematically significant words, and the emphatic advancement or postponement of key syntactical elements. Given the great freedom of Greek word order, which (for example) readily separates adjectives from their nouns and can withhold a grammatical subject to the very end of its sentence, achieving this goal may often require a wholesale recasting of syntax.