Domhnall

I owned this rather dated seeming volume for many years - decades - without having opened it until this month, when it became relevant while reading modern poems by H.D., the so called Imagist, who extensively mined these fragments in her own work. Although the poems are emminently readable as presented, a crucial key for me was found in a blog which discusses the challenge of translating the work of Sappho.

https://briefpoems.wordpress.com/2017/02/25/windfalls-fragments-of-sappho/

Working through the examples in that blog, it became obvious that work in translation will always reflect the values and style of the translator to the extent that it may be hard to recognise the same source in two modern interpretations of even the most fragmentary line of ancient writing. In this book, more than usual, we can take permission to imagine how we might have said the same thing differently. We will find no better model for this approach to reading than H.D. Meanwhile, as I write I happen to be listening to George Michael sing "You must have been kissing a fool" and wondering which fragment of ancient Greek poetry comes nearest to anticipating this whimsy; it would be worth searching for the answer.

The volume includes an excellent introduction to Greek poetry by C.M.Bowra. "Throughout its history Greek poetry shows the marks of tradition and of discipline, and the marvel is that with these limitations it did what it did. ... The Greeks regarded poetry as a craft, comparable not merely with painting and sculpture, but with carpentry and horsemanship. They were extremely interested in its technicalities, and their poetry bears the marks of careful thought in its construction... The Greek poets did not, like the romantics, follow wherever the creative whim led them. They had an excellent sense of what was and what was not real. Behind careering fancies and driving emotions there lay minds which marked the facts and stated them rightly. It was this which enables men so emotional as Archilochus to be perfectly frank and accurate about their feelings, and even in their most powerful rages to state their views just as they held them... The wildest fantasies of Aristophanes are built out of extremely local and topical elements; and the learned men of Alexandria stated truly and correctly just the particular experience which they wanted to record... The poetry of Homer or of Aescylus is all the more insistent and memorable because it is the creation of a mind which is not easily deceived and reached its conclusions by a prolonged exercise of serious thought." This introduction is filled with delights - someone should place the full text on the net.