greek lyric poetry, translation
Campbell, David A. 1982–1993. Greek Lyric. 5 vols. Cambridge Mass.
Carson, Anne. 1986. Eros the bittersweet. Princeton.
——. 1999. Economy of the unlost: Reading Simonides of Ceos
with Paul Celan. Princeton.
——. 2002. If not, winter: fragments of Sappho. New York.
Chandler, Robert. 1998. Sappho. London.
Constantine, David. 1983. Watching for dolphins. Newcastle
upon Tyne.
Davenport, Guy. 1995. Seven Greeks. New York.
Dent, R. J. 2012. Alcaeus: poems and fragments. Hastings.
Fagles, Robert. 1961. Bacchylides: Complete poems. New
Haven – London.
Fowler, Barbara H. 1992. Archaic Greek poetry: an anthology.
Madison, Wisconsin.
Gerber, Douglas E. 1997. A companion to the Greek lyric poets.
Leiden.
——. 1999. Greek elegiac poetry: from the seventh the fifth
centuries B.C. Cambridge Mass. – London.
——. 1999. Greek iambic poetry from the seventh to the fifth
centuries B.C. Cambridge Mass. – London.
Groden, Suzy Q. 1966. The poems of Sappho. Indianapolis.
Hutchinson, G. O. 2001. Greek lyric poetry: a commentary on
selected larger pieces. Oxford.
Jay, Peter. 1981. The Greek anthology and other ancient epigrams. Harmondsworth.
Jebb, Richard C. 1905. Bacchylides: the poems and fragments.
Cambridge.
Lattimore, Richard. 1960. Greek lyrics: translated in close
approximation of the original meter. Chicago.
Lobel, Edgar and Denys Page. 1955. Poetarum Lesbiorum
fragmenta. Oxford. Supplemented In: Page 1974.
McDevitt, Arthur. 2009. Bacchylides: the victory poems.
Bristol.
Miller, Andrew M. 1996. Greek lyric: an anthology in translation. Indianapolis.
Mulroy, David. 1992. Early Greek lyric poetry. Ann Arbor.
Page, Denys L. 1974. Supplementum lyricis Graecis: poetarum
lyricorum Graecorum fragmenta quae recens innotuerunt.
Oxford.
Perrotta, Gennaro. 2007. Polinnia: poesia greca arcaica, 3rd
edition, ed. by Bruno Gentili and Carmine Catenacci.
Messina.
Poole, Adrian and Jeremy Maule. 1995. The Oxford book of
classical verse in translation. Oxford.
Powell, Jim. 2007. The poetry of Sappho. Oxford.
Race, William H. 1997. Pindar. 2 vols. Cambridge Mass. –
London.
Rayor, Diane. 1991. Sappho’s lyre: archaic lyric and women
poets of ancient Greece. Berkeley.
Rutherford, Ian. 2011. Greek poetry: elegiac and lyric: Oxford
bibliographies online research guide. Oxford.
Verity, Anthony. 2007. Pindar: the complete odes. Oxford.
Voigt, Eva-Maria. 1971. Sappho et Alcaeus: fragmenta.
Amsterdam.
West, Martin L. 1993. Greek lyric poetry: the poems and fragments of the Greek iambic, elegiac, and melic poets (excluding Pindar and Bacchylides) down to 450 B.C. Oxford.
Wharton, Henry T. 1885. Sappho: memoir, text, selected renderings and a literal translation. London.
Margaret Reynolds
129
Greek Novel, Translation
Hellenistic and Roman Imperial fiction sprang
from the ashes of the Achaemenid Empire
(c. 550–330 BCE). The autonomy that Iranian
regents afforded their subject peoples laid the
groundwork for social policy under Alexander,
the Diadokhoi, and Roman governance of the
Near East. As literary fiction developed over the
course of the ‘long’ Hellenistic period, the diversity of languages and cultures not only shaped
the kinds of narratives produced: polyglossia became a subject of representation in and
of itself, as did the possibilities of translation
between tongues.
Apollonius of Rhodes provides a useful point
of departure: in his Argonautiká, published in
Ptolemaic Alexandria around 250 BCE, Medea
converses in Kartvelian (Kholkhída ĝrun hieîsa
[4.731]) with her aunt Circe midway en route
from Colchis back to Argos, where her partner
Jason’s voyage began. Against the backdrop of
Apollonius’ Homeric and Classical Greek diction,
this reported exchange impresses the reader as
something of a clever joke, although no Kartvelian appears in the poem per se. Beyond the
episode’s general validation of the Hellenistic
world’s polyglot horizons, the → code switching
here also registers in a displaced way the official
diglossia – Koine Greek and Demotic Egyptian –
that, following Achaemenid precedent, the Ptolemaic regime supported, thereby allowing rulers
to fulfill two roles simultaneously, Macedonian
king (basileús) and Egyptian pharaoh (nsw), just
as it also authorized two different legal systems,
one in each of the official languages, which operated side-by-side without notable interference
(→ Greek and Egyptian; → Bilingualism in Hellenistic Egypt). Extant archives attest to a high
level of bilingualism throughout the population,
as well as a significant degree of trilingualism,
taking into account the Nubians, Libyans, Jews,
and Persians resident within the country from at
least the Third Intermediate Period on (post-1070
BCE). Overall, then, Medea’s ability to switch
between Greek and Kartvelian remains embedded in a thick culture of translation which,
within a decade or so, will produce the Decree of
Kanōpos, a bilingual/triscriptural stele – hieroglyphs and Demotic, alongside Greek – which
Ptolemy III erected largely to commemorate the
cooperation between the Macedonian court and
130
greek novel, translation
the indigenous Egyptian priesthood. Often said
to be translations of one another, the three texts
on the stone actually vary to a significant degree.
Medea’s aside with Circe in Kartvelian, however,
rekindles the suspicion that we may not fully
understand what they have been saying about us
(→ Ancient Bidialectalism and Bilingualism).
Like Apollonius, Petronius not only weaves
linguistic gags into the text of the Satyrika
(ca. 50 CE): the narration also thematizes translation directly. Accordingly, at his lavishly satiric
banquet, Trimalchio – a rich freedman originally
from Asia, part of the great influx of Orientals
then resident along the Bay of Naples – boasts
to his guests that he owns three [sic] libraries: one Greek, the other Latin [48.4]. Shortly
thereafter, he ushers in a troop of Homeristae who, in their unwonted way (ut insolenter
solent), converse with one another in Greek,
while Trimalchio himself, perched upon a pillow, reads the text aloud to them in Latin [59.3].
In place of the conversational code switching,
then, that we find in Apollonius, what Trimalchio engineers here is diglossial cacophony, as
if the scene were a realization of the antinomian hypogram insolenter solent, intentionally
jamming the Homeric poems’ referential function altogether. As always, however, there is
method to Trimalchio’s madness: a displaced
Anatolian transplanted to Italy, Trimalchio’s
biography mimics Aeneas’ voyage from Troy to
Latium, which – at least within the compass of
Vergil’s Aeneid – remains allegorically isomorphic with the Republican and early Imperial
influx of Greek literature and culture into Rome.
Ironically, then, Trimalchio’s performance of the
Homeric text simultaneously in Greek and Latin
both points up the protocols of translatio studii
and at the same time undermines them. As such,
the scene not only confirms Trimalchio as a type
of anti-Aenean counter-hero within the compass
of Petronius’ Satyrika as a whole: it effectively
makes him a literary and – by extension – a cultural as well as political sabateur, an adversarial
position for which “decadence” proves to be an
entirely misguided term.
The most complex of Hellenistic and Imperial translation scenes is also chronologically the
latest. In Heliodorus of Emessa’s Aithiopiká
(c. 275 CE), just short of halfway through what
ranks as among the most convoluted of all literary
plots, the Egyptian priest Kalisiris reads a ribbon
from Persinna, Queen of Meroē, embroidered
in Ethiopic letters [4.8.1], left for her unwitting
daughter Charikleia, who – raised in Delphi –
speaks only Greek. Far from marginal, however,
or simply one gag in a string of others, this
seminal act of translation (methermēneûsai)
marks the climactic turning point of Heliodorus’
narrative, the crucial scene of reading around
which the whole of the labyrinthine fiction comes
to turn: through Kalisiris’ translation, Charikleia
first learns that, despite her fair complexion
and Hellenic disposition, she is not ethnically
Greek but actually the daughter of the dusky King
and Queen of Meroē, to whom – in a harrowing
journey through Egypt’s topsy-turvy hall of mirrors – she now resolves to return. At its navel,
then, the narrative revolves around a double displacement where the substitution of one linguistic code for another both figures and facilitates
Charikleia’s exchange of identities, her radical
self-repositioning from a white Hellenic priestess to a black Nubian princess. No longer simply
a way of negotiating a polyglot world, or a means
for (dis)establishing a new literary culture, translation has come to lodge here at the root of
personal identity, as basic to the construction
and the understanding of the self, which Heliodorus portrays as an effect of mythos and of logos
combined. Born looking like the painting of the
Greek heroine Andromeda at which Persinna
happened to glance at the exact moment of
her child’s conception, Charikleia not only has
from birth no identity proper to herself: as the
novel progresses she deploys a series of different personae tailored to fit each new personal,
social, and political conjuncture. For Heliodorus,
moreover, it is not only the self that is always
already a factor of translation: in late antiquity,
Aithiopia / ’Ītyōṗṗyā had itself become a mobile
term. In the 5th c. BCE – the putative date of the
events related in the Aithiopiká – the toponym
referred to Nubia, but by the lifetime of Heliodorus, Axum had co-opted the descriptor to refer
to its own Empire, which now included Meroē
as a vassal state. This translatio imperii, then,
requires of the reader a type of double vision
whereby what the narrative predicates of Meroē
in the Classical period turns out to in the end to
reference the cultural climate in Axum. Insofar
as personal as well as public identity proves
here to be effected by translation, it is with some
unease that Heliodorus concludes his narrative
with the future participle: telesthēsoménōn – yet
‘to be completed’.
greek novel, translation
The role that Kalisiris’ decipherment of Persinna’s embroidery plays in Heliodorus forces readers to distinguish between the representation of
translation and the translation of representation.
In the constitution of Hellenistic and Imperial
prose fiction translation played a defining role,
considered within the larger socio-political preoccupations of the period. In fact, with regard to
translation, ancient fiction has survived in texts
of two fundamentally different, yet also dialectically related, types.
Best known, and most widely appreciated
today, are the five Greek prose narratives
(diēgḗmata) that have come down to us complete:
Chariton of Aphrodisias’ Kallirhoē, Xenophon
of Ephesus’ Ephesiaká, Achilles Tatius’ Leukippē
and Kleitophōn, Longus’ Daphnis and Khloē, and
Heliodorus of Emessa’s Aithiopiká. Composed in
the Imperial East – in the Roman provinces of
Asia, Syria, and Egypt, according to such Byzantine sources as the Suda – between roughly
50–250 CE, their storylines are unequivocally
cognate: where they differ narratologically is in
the relative complexity of their emplotment.
Each tale, moreover, deploys the same core set
of narrative devices (court trials, ecphrases, or
the so-called Scheintod), which assume diegetic
value – in Ferdinand de Saussure’s sense of that
term – solely through the standing that they
bear to one another, both within the literary
organization of the compositions themselves,
and across the corpus of Late Antique fiction as
a whole. No motif has any intrinsic meaning in
and of itself, but rather acquires its significance
negatively in relation to the others. As Mikhail
Bakhtin has stressed, one narrative differs from
another only in the number of such motifs, their
relative weight within the diegesis, and the manner in which the scriptor has combined them.
Hence the heuristic value of his distillation of
these stories into a single master plot which
could potentially generate an infinite number
of such fictions. The interest of any one particular phenotext, as Julia Kristeva puts it, resides
largely in the differential way that it elaborates
their common genotext:
There is a boy and a girl of marriageable age. Their
lineage is unknown, mysterious (but not always: there
is, for example, no such instance in Tatius). They
are remarkable for their exceptional beauty. They are
also exceptionally chaste. They meet each other
unexpectedly, usually during some festive holiday. A sudden and instantaneous passion flares
131
up between that is as irresistible as fate, like an
incurable disease. However, the marriage cannot
take place straightaway. They are confronted with
obstacles that retard and delay their union. The
lovers are parted, they seek one another, find one
another; again they lose each other, again they
find each other. There are the usual obstacles and
adventures of lovers: the abduction of the bride on
the eve of the wedding, the absence of parental consent (if parents exist), a different bridegroom and
bride intended for either of the lovers ( false couples), the flight of the lovers, their journey, a storm
at sea, a shipwreck, a miraculous rescue, an attack
by pirates, captivity, and prison, an attempt on the
innocence of the hero and heroine, the offering up
of the heroine as a purifying sacrifice, wars, battles,
being sold into slavery, presumed deaths, disguising
ones identity, recognition, and failures of recognition, presumed betrayals, attempts on chastity and
fidelity, false accusations of crimes, court trials,
court inquiries into the chastity and fidelity of the
lovers. The heroes find their parents (if unknown).
Meetings with unexpected friends or enemies play
an important role, as do fortune-telling, prophecy, prophetic dreams, premonitions, and sleeping
potions. The novel ends happily with the lovers
united in marriage.
The action of the plot unfolds against a very
broad and varied geographical background, usually in three to five countries separated by seas
(Greece, Persia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Babylon, Ethiopia, and elsewhere). There are descriptions, often
very detailed, of specific features of the countries,
cities, structures of various kinds, works of art
(pictures, for example), the habits and customs
of the population, various exotic and marvelous
animals and other wonders and rarities. The novel
also contains fairly wide ranging discussion on
various religious, philosophical, political, and scientific topics (on fate, omens, the power of eros,
human passions, tears, and so forth. Large portions
of these novels are taken up with speeches of the
characters – relevant or otherwise – constructed
in accordance with all the rules of a later rhetoric.
Compositionally, therefore, the Greek romances
strive for a certain encyclopedic quality. (Bakhtin
1981:87–88)
The chronotope that Bakhtin attributes to Imperial Greek fiction superimposes the vicissitudes
that the characters have to suffer over time upon
their geographical errancy through extended,
abstract space. Hence, just as the metonym of
hagneia (‘chastity’) figures the lovers’ ability to
withstand the “slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune”, so too their nostos (‘return’) – with
which the narration invariably concludes – seals
132
greek novel, translation
the protagonists’ ability to retain their identities
intact, even in what Greek writers traditionally
imagined as the most remote of climes (Thulē)
and most exotic of places (Egypt, India).
That none of these five extant narratives,
then, circulated in antiquity in any language
other than Greek turns out to be no accident, but
rather follows from the texts’ own sense of integrity and closure, as epitomized by the leitmotifs
of hagneia and nostos. Thematically, the corpus
shuns any adaptation of Graecitas to foreign contexts, much less the protagonists’ adulteration by
non-Hellenic ways: to Egyptianize (aigyptiázein)
or to follow Persian custom (personomeîsthai)
constitutes nothing more than a pragmatic ruse
adapted to the moment, anticipating an eventual
return to – or, in the case of the Aithiopika, the
imposition of – Hellenism at the end. Intrinsically, then, these texts lack any set (Einstellung)
towards translation, emphasizing instead the
maintenance of Greek thought and culture over
and against the assaults and seductions of foreign peoples, places, customs, and ideas. Hence,
one of the most common motifs that recurs
throughout the corpus involves the heroine’s
pursuit by barbaroi from the East Mediterranean
or Levant, couplings or marriages that she repeatedly postpones or refuses outright, in view of her
final reunion with her Greek spouse or fiancé,
thereby ensuring that she will not become the
future vessel of some bastard offspring. Purity
of bloodline here thus constitutes a trope for
purity of text which, considering the rhetorical
complexity of the Greek prose – particularly in
Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Heliodorus – makes
anything like a faithful rendering into another
language a virtual impossibility, as if Benedetto
Croce’s famous dictum traduttore-traditore had
been promoted here to the level of a literary
device (Croce 1993:215–220).
All told, the five “ideal novels” constitute a
small and largely unrepresentative sample of
the veritable ocean of narrative fiction that deluged the late antique Levantine-Mediterranean
world, for which there currently exists no comprehensive conspectus, much less authoritative
listing. Some of the better-known works include:
The Life of Aesop, Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, Barlaam
and Joasaph, the Alexander Romance, and ’Estēr.
To take a characteristic example, the so-called
Asenethroman (“Joseph and Aseneth”) discursively expands the curt Biblical notice: “And
Pharaoh gave Iōsēph Asenneth, the daughter of
Pentephrē, priest of On, for his wife”. What the
story supplies are the details regarding the marriage about which Genesis remains silent: most
importantly, (1) Aseneth’s spiritual conversion
from a devotee of the goddess Nēith to an adherent of the God of Jacob, and (2) the harrowing
adventures that finally lead up to her marriage
with Iōsēph.
Indicatively, the sixteen manuscripts of the
Asenethroman extant in Greek offer sixteen different titles for the work, each devoid of any
authorial attribution. These range from the succinct (Story of Aseneth) to the exorbitant (The
Life and Manner of Living and Confession of
Aseneth, Daughter of Pentephrē, Priest and Satrap
of Hēlioupolis and the Narrative of How the AllRighteous Iōsēph took her to Wife). This titular
mutability, in which even the names of the principal characters remain in flux – e.g., Pentephrēs,
Pentephrē, Pentephri – constitutes an index to
one of the Asenethroman’s most characteristic
literary devices: the corpus not only circulated in
two major recensions – one relatively short, the
other considerably longer – beyond the margin
of scribal error, no two ‘copies’ of the work turn
out to be even approximately the same. Consider, for example, three different introductions of
Aseneth’s father Pentephrēs into the narration
as they appear at the outset of three of the better
manuscripts, none of which can claim priority:
And there was a man in that city, a satrap of
Pharaō. [E]
There was a certain man in Egypt, the satrap of
Pharaō. [F]
And there was a man in that city by the name of
Pentephrēs, who was priest of Hēlioupolis and
among the satraps of Pharaō. [R]
Only the opening and closing phrases of this passage remain fixed: ̂n anḕr . . . toû Pharaṓ (“There
was a man . . . of Pharaoh”), as if these were the
termini that set this linguistic unit (lexia) apart
from its discursive context. Between these syntactic anchor points, however, the adverbial and
nominal qualifiers that ‘fill in’ the diegetic information differ by concatenating various details
that characterize either the man or his relationship to Pharaoh. These differences in detail,
moreover, inevitably lead the story to diverge:
does the action take place centered in a single
polity or does the story assume as its horizon
Egypt as a whole? Is Pentephrēs “the governor
greek novel, translation
of Pharaoh” or just one of many local nomarchs
positioned variously throughout Egypt – “a satrap
of Pharaoh”? Similarly, in terms of the emplotment, what difference does it make whether
the text introduces Pentephrēs immediately as
“priest of Hēlioupolis”, rather than withhold that
information until a later point? However minor
these variants may seem, none of them is ultimately trivial insofar as each affects the circle of
hermeneutic understanding.
In contrast, then, to the five ‘ideal novels’,
whose texts remain relatively stable, variance
informs all aspects of the Asenethroman, from
its phonetic and morphemic values up through
the larger structural design of the diegesis as a
whole. The mutability that informs each lexia
also informs each of that lexia’s component
parts. It informs every larger discursive unit in
which that lexia finds itself embedded, just as
it informs the sum of all the discursive units
that make up the narrative as a whole. Here, for
example, are two versions of an equivalent passage that, remarkably enough, stand diametrically opposed:
ms. D (16.1)
And the man said to
her: “Come, bring me
a honeycomb”. And
Aseneth said: “I shall
send, lord, to the field
of my patrimony and
will bring you a
honeycomb”.
ms. E (16.1–2)
And the man said to
her: “Come, bring me
a honeycomb”. And
Aseneth stood there
and grieved because
she had no honeycomb
in her storeroom.
Other witnesses supply other variants. Accordingly, Christoph Burchard stresses that scribes
not only copied the Asenethroman sometimes
with more, sometimes with less precision: they
also shortened, lengthened, and rewrote the
narrative extensively. Which of the two passages at issue here reworked the other proves
impossible to determine either on internal or
external grounds, but clearly neither text presents itself as definitive or authoritative. Rather,
the Asenethroman constitutes a multiform composition, collectively produced over centuries
which entirely resists the editorial methods of
Karl Lachmann or Giorgio Pasquali, requiring
instead a complete rethinking of the protocols of
textual criticism, since at no time does the text
here ever seem to have been stable. To ignore
133
this mutability or to attempt to reduce it to a
uniform edition fundamentally betrays the historicity of the work, which manifestly developed
through a poetics of what Paul Zumthor termed
mouvance. Any attempt to ‘reconstruct’ a homogeneous Greek text thus remains only a modern,
readerly convenience of the last resort.
To complicate matters further, the pervasive
variance of the Greek Asenethroman finds itself
compounded by other versions of the narrative
extant in some seventeen languages in addition to Koine Greek: Syriac (2 mss.), Armenian
(50 mss.), Latin (2 recensions, 15 mss.), Old
Church Slavonic (2 mss.), Early Modern Greek
(2 mss.), Rumanian (4 mss.), and Ge’ez (ms. lost)
(→ Greek and Syriac; → Greek and Armenian).
These also include renderings into: Old Norse,
Old Swedish, Old Czech, Middle English, Middle
Dutch, Middle French, Middle Lower German,
Middle High German, Danish, and Russian. Not
only, then, do the non-Greek versions of the Asenethroman outnumber the Greek by a ratio of
over five to one: their distribution shows a geographic spread from Armenia to France and Ethiopia to Iceland, which makes Iosif şi Asinetha one
of the most popular and widely-disseminated
literary works of the ‘long’ Hellenistic period – in
contrast, say, to Achilles Tatius who before the
Early Modern period circulated exclusively in
the Greek-speaking world. Even if → Koine Greek
was the original language of the Asenethroman’s
composition, the corpus as it evolved was certainly not Hellenocentric. In fact, to judge by
the number of surviving manuscripts, scribal
production of the work was concentrated in
Armenia where Patmuti̒ wn Asaneta̒ y frequently
figured among the canonical books of the Armenian Apostolic Bible. None of these reworkings
aimed at fidelity of reproduction; rather, just as
with the Greek manuscripts, scribes working in
other languages emplotted the Asenethroman as
they saw fit – though always within certain fixed
coordinates that the surrounding culture and
the storyline which they inherited imposed. We
see this, for example, in two different openings
of the Hystoria Asenech as they appear in two
related manuscripts. Although both belong to
the L2 recension, the way in which each frames
the core of the narrative turns out to be completely different:
134
ms. 435
In the first year of the
seven years of abundance, in the second
month, on the fifth day
Pharao sent Joseph to
circle the entire land
of Egypt. In the fourth
month of the first year,
on the twenty-second
day of the month, he
reached the borders of
the City of the sun to
collect the wheat of
that region which was
like the sand of the sea.
greek novel, translation
ms. 436
The son of Pharao said
to his father, “Request
for me in marriage the
daughter of Putiphare
the priest of Elyopolis”.
And Pharao his father
said to him: “Why
do you seek a wife of
such low station, you
who are the king of
every land”? And his
father the king said to
him, “Look, is not the
daughter of the king of
Moab engaged to you,
and she is a queen”?
The first of these texts (ms. 435) opens with a
pastiche of the Latin Vulgate (Gen. 41:45–50):
just as from the outset the narrative focuses on
Ioseph and his administrative tour of Egypt, so
the narrative will close with his coronation of
the next Pharaō: post hec restituit Ioseph regnum
nepoti Pharaonis, qui erat ad mammillam, cum
occisus esset filius Pharaonis in Egypto [28.8] –
as if Aseneth’s conversion to the God of Jacob
and her marriage to Ioseph were simply way
stages en route to orderly dynastic succession
in Egypt. By contrast, the second Latin scriptor
(ms. 436) has refigured the plot entirely: here
the story opens with Pharaō chastising his eldest
son for requesting to marry so base a woman as
“the daughter of Putipharē” when the prince is
in fact already affianced to the daughter of the
king of Moab. However, through an astonishing narrative transformation, the tale concludes
not only with the king’s belated recognition of
Asenec’s perfections: more remarkably, Pharaō
personally presides over Ioseph’s marriage to
his newly converted Hebrew bride. Narratologically, then, the two Latin versions here revolve
around two entirely different foci: the first centers immediately on Ioseph and his shepherding
of Egypt, while the second traces Asenec’s rise
from humility to her incorporation in the royal
circle.
T. S. Eliot famously observed that the whole
of literature “has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order”, and that is –
from a synchronic perspective – how the various
reworkings of the Asenethroman stand mutu-
ally disposed. Rather than pursuing the mirage
of a Greek (or Hebrew) Urtext here, it would
perhaps be more profitable to reconceptualize
the manuscripts that make up the corpus of
the Asenethroman – Greek, Syriac, Armenian,
Slavic, Latin, Old Swedish, what have you – as a
text network of extensive geographical diffusion:
that is, an autopoietic body of related compositions that have neither an authoritative source
nor develop teleologically toward some definitive end, but rather evolve independently and of
their own accord. Thus, even if one aims primarily to determine how and where the dissemination of the Asenethroman intersects with the
more restricted body of Classical Greek prose
fiction, many crucial witnesses needed to fill
out and make sense of the Greek manuscripts
themselves occur only in the Levantine or Slavic
recensions of the work. If, for example, as Burchard has proposed, the Syriac and Armenian
versions attest in general to the oldest recuperable state of the Greek text, then knowledge of
Syriac and Armenian becomes a sine qua non for
any reconstruction, appreciation, or discussion
of the Greek witnesses themselves.
In relation to the question of translation, then,
we can distinguish broadly between two types of
ancient fiction – the five Greek ‘ideal’ novels
and the late antique multilingual text network
of which the Asenethroman constitutes only
one example among hundreds that circulated in
the Hellenistic era and throughout the Roman
Empire at large. These include not only the five
lives of Iēsous that survive complete, but also
the multiple translations of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek: in addition to the → Septuagint,
Eusebius refers to “the well-known translations
of Akylos, Symmakhos, and Theodotiōnos”, as
well as to three other editions known today
as quinta (ε´), sexta (ζ´), and septima, all now
for the most part lost. Again, the degree of
variance between them is often as great as in
the Asenethroman, and many scholars feel that
the Septuagint is best described as a Greek targum. “Targumism”, as Natalio Fernández Marcos
explains it,
makes the text more comprehensible to a particular audience; hence the addition of a subject, a
complement, a pronoun or even a change of person
in a verb in order to make the narrative more lively.
This tendency also gives rise to a penchant for
glosses. These explanations are often made with
the help of parallel passages . . . There is a tendency
greek novel, translation
to bring the proper names of places and peoples
up to date, even identifying anonymous or littleknown persons with famous figures from biblical
history. As an indication of popular mentality it
increases the miraculous element in the narratives . . . It is midrash, but at the level of first contact
with the text. (Fernández Marcos 2000:101–102)
Within this text milieu, moreover, a different
voweling to a consonantal text (Hebrew/Syriac)
or the addition of an article can make a world
of difference. For example, the received text
of Genesis begins: br’šyt br’ ’lhym ()ברא אלהים,
which depending on the vowel under the first
letter ( בqāmeṣ or šəwā´) could mean either: “In
the beginning God created” or “In a beginning
he created” – there is considerable debate about
the point in Genesis Rābbāh, which comes to
no secure conclusion. Latin does not distinguish
between definite and indefinite nouns, so the
Vulgate preserves this ambiguity with In principio, which leaves the reader free to understand
the phrase as he sees fit. In Coptic, however, the
distinction between definite and indefinite is
mandatory, and the Bohairic Pentateuch reads
unequivocally hen ouarkhē, which can only
mean “in a beginning”, thereby leaving open the
possibility that there were multiple creations
and hence multiple worlds.
As two available modes of prose, then, uniform
composition and the multiform text network not
only stand mutually opposed: each constitutes
the dialectical negation of the other. The difference is not only that Kallirhoē – to take what
appears to be the earliest of the ‘ideal’ Greek
prose fictions (ca. 50 CE) – remains a unique
composition, whose text proved relatively stable
under its attribution to a writer whom the narrative calls Kharitōn, while the Asenethroman,
if originally Greek, or the lives of Iēsous, circulated anonymously in as many different versions
and foreign languages as scribes chose to adopt.
More importantly, each mode of composition
takes up a radically different stance vis-à-vis the
Hellenistic and Imperial Levantine-Mediterranean cultures that constitute their common Sitz
im Leben. On the one hand, Kallirhoē remains
thematically invested in preserving ethnic purity:
emphatically, the plot thwarts along the way all
non-Greeks who have designs upon the heroine
so that in the end Kallirhoē can return – her
“Hellenicity” intact (hagneia) – to her native
Syracuse whence her peregrinations started out
(nostos). On the other, the Asenethroman, trans-
135
forms Pentephrēs’ daughter, who as an Egyptian
lived alone and isolated in her private tower,
into a figure of ecumenical inclusion who not
only marries a foreigner – and here the choice
of allogenḗs over bárbaros as the word for “alien”
epitomizes the difference between the two different sets of texts – but also welcomes the
whole of humanity to her as a safe haven under
the name “City of Refuge”, which the divine
intercessor accorded her in the conversion
scene. If the operative term in Kallirhoē is hagneia, then, its counterpart in the Asenethroman
is metanoia – that is, ‘conversion’, ‘repentance’,
or ‘change of mind’. This notion of ‘crossing’
(meta-) in the Asenethroman – which stands
decoupled entirely from any notion of return
(nostos) – indicates thematically the set (Einstellung) of the entire corpus toward translation.
In the polyethnic world of the long Hellenistic
period, then, the Asenethroman’s universalism
constitutes a dialectical negation of the centripetal and largely xenophobic impulses that
fuel Kallirhoē: each only acquires its full sense
in contradistinction to the other. The likelihood
that Aseneth first circulated as a Greek tale about
Egyptians and Jews thus turns out to be only
part and parcel of its overall cosmopolitanism,
which has nothing to do with the promotion of
one ethnic group over another. Emblematically,
in this regard, it is not Jacob the Patriarch who
presides over Aseneth the Egyptian’s marriage
to Iōsēph the Israelite in the end, but rather the
Pharaoh of Egypt.
Bibliography
Aptowitzer, V. 1924. “Asenath, the wife of Joseph: a Haggadic
literary-historical study”, HUC 1:239–306.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The dialogic imagination. Austin,
Texas.
Batiffol, P. 1889–1890. “Le Livre de la Prière d’Aseneth”, Studia Patristica I–II:1–115.
Bohak, G. 1996. Joseph and Aseneth and the Jewish Temple in
Heliopolis. Atlanta.
Bolyki, J. 2003. “‘Never repay evil with evil’: ethical interaction between the Joseph story, the novel of Joseph and
Aseneth, the New Testament and the Apocryphal Acts”.
In: Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Rome, ed. by Gracía García
Martínez, F. and G. P. Luttikhuizen, 41–53. Leiden.
Bolyki, J. 2005. “Egypt as the setting for Joseph and Aseneth:
accidental or deliberate”? In: Hilhorst and van Kooten
2005:81–96.
Braginskaya, N. 2013. “Joseph and Aseneth in Greek literary
history: the case of the ‘First Novel’ ”. In: The ancient novel
and the early Christian and Jewish narrative, ed. by Marília
P. Futre Pinheiro et al. Eelde.
Burchard, C. 1965. Untersuchungen zu Joseph und Aseneth.
Tübingen.
136
greek novel,translation
——. 1985. “Joseph and Aseneth”. In: The Old Testament
Pseudepigrapha, ed. by J. H. Charlesworth. 2 vols. Garden
City.
——. 1987. “Der jüdische Asenethroman und seine Nachwirkung. Von Egeria zu Anna Katharine Emmerick
oder von Moses aus Aggel zu Karl Kerényi”, ANRW
II.20.1:543–667.
——. 1996. Gesammelt Studien zu Joseph und Aseneth.
Leiden.
——. 2003. Joseph und Aseneth. Leiden.
——. 2010. A minor edition of the Armenian version of Joseph
and Aseneth. Leuven.
Croce, B. 1993. La teoria della traduzione nella storia, ed. by
S. Nergaard. Milan.
Delling, G. 1978. “Einwirkungen der Sprache der Septuaginta
in ‘Joseph und Aseneth’”, JSJ 9:29–56.
Fernández Marcos, N. 2000. The Septuagint in context.
Leiden.
Fink, U. B. 2008. Joseph und Aseneth: Revision des griechischen Textes und Edition der zweiten lateinischen Übersetzung. Berlin.
Humphrey, E. M. 2000. Joseph and Aseneth. Sheffield.
Istrin, V. M. 1898. “Apokriph ob Josiphje i Asenephje”. In:
Trudy Slvjanskoj Komissii pri Imperat. Moskovskom Archelogiceskom Obscestvje, 146–199. Moscow.
Karla, G. A. 2009. Fiction on the fringe. Leiden.
Kraemer, R. S. 1998. When Joseph met Aseneth. New York.
Lipsett, B. D. 2011. Desiring conversion: Hermas, Thecla,
Aseneth. Oxford.
Munday, J. 2012. Introducing translation studies. New York.
Nir, R. 2012. Joseph and Aseneth: a Christian book. Sheffield.
Oppenheimer, G. 1886. Fabula Joseph et Asenethae apocrypa
e libro Syriaco. Berlin.
Philonenko, M. 1968. Joseph et Aséneth. Leiden.
Pym, A. 2010. Exploring translation theories. New York.
Reinmuth, E., ed. 2009. Joseph und Aseneth. Tübingen.
Riessler, P. 1922. “Joseph und Asenath. Eine altjüdische
Erzählung”, TQ 103:1–22, 145–83.
Schmeling, G., ed. 2003. The novel in the ancient world. 2nd
ed. Leiden.
Standhartiger, A. 1994. Das Frauenbild im Judentum der
Hellenistischen Zeit: Ein Beitrag anhand von ‛Joseph &
Aseneth’. Leiden.
Venuti, L. 2004. The translation studies reader. New York.
Daniel Selden
Greek Philosophy, Translation
1. Introductory Remarks/Lexical
Equivalence
My focus in this article is not the history of translation, but rather the nature of translation and
its consequences for Greek philosophy. Because
‘translation theory’ encompasses linguistics, analytical and continental philosophies of language,
and the broader context of semiotics (→ Ancient
Philosophers on Language), it raises possibilities
of enormous diversity and complexity. In the following I merely provide a preliminary survey.
At the most naïve level we might formulate
the aim of translating as “saying the same thing
in the target language as the source text says
in Greek”. We may then ask at what level one
should “say the same”: should one seek equivalences word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, or with
greater latitude? Lexical equivalence raises obvious problems. First, the target language often
lacks parts of speech present in Greek (Word
Classes (mérē toû lógou), Ancient Theories of ).
For example, Latin lacks articles, and English
is short on → particles. (The problem would be
enormously greater in a polysynthetic language
like Navajo). Second, even where grammatical
forms coincide, it is frequently impossible to find
a word with the same connotation as the Greek
word to be translated. For example, the Cyrenaic philosophers designate pónos as the greatest intrinsic evil. Pónos refers primarily to bodily
exertion and the discomfort associated with it. It
is usually translated in English as ‘pain,’ but this
English term does not connote exactly the same
thing as the Greek original: most importantly,
‘pain’ is only very weakly associated with exertion. Moreover, as Jakobson famously argues,
relations among words affect their meanings
(1990:115–133). For example, on the one hand, in
Cyrenaic sources pónos is sometimes replaced
by semantically similar terms such as kámnein,
mokhtheîn, and páthēma. Each of these has its
own connotation, which the network of substitutes in English for ‘pain’ is unlikely to match
exactly. On the other, pónos is contextually associated with a second series of words. Thus in
the two most canonical texts of Greek culture,
pónos is tightly bound to quarreling: in Homer
pónos is closely associated with mákhē (LSJ
s.v. pónos); in Hesiod, ‘hateful Strife gave birth
to grievous Pónos, Forgetfulness, Hunger, tearful
Sufferings, Fights, Battles, Murders, Man-Slayings, Arguments, Deceptions, Disputes, Disorder
and Delusion, which dwell close to one another’
(Th. 226–230). It is impossible to capture these
associative resonances of pónos with any single
English word.
For a different way of thinking about lexical equivalence it is worth glancing at Heidegger’s translations, the idiosyncrasy of which will
highlight further questions. Heidegger famously
claims that “Speech speaks” (1971:124), and that
human beings think most thoughtfully and exist
most authentically when they listen to Speech
and say what it presents to them. In other words,