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,