A New Translation of Orpheus' Argonautika

Minor Criticism of a Critical Edition / A "More Strict" English Rendition

I have been writing for the past few months about the Orphic Argonautica. To do so, I was referencing Alexandra Madeła’s recent critical edition. Interestingly, her commentary in that monograph is not about Orphism as much as it is about the poem’s mimicry of earlier poetry and its use of repetition, phrasing, and archaic or archaizing language.

That is interesting to me because her English translation does not match the format of the original even remotely. By that, I mean that the English reads (when it works) like the prose translation it aims to be, but in its worst passages it comes off as an approximation or adaptation. Indeed, there are even instances where names are mistranslated (e.g. Iphitos in the Greek but Iphiklos in her English).

Now, I understand that it is a tall order to ask every scholar to also be a poet. I am also well aware now that the Orphic poet did not make his work too easy to parse. However, I would think if your primary goal is to study the poetic nature of a work, and especially if your goal in doing so is to present your findings, that you would put some of your project’s resources toward representing the poem to your audience as accurately as possible.

I want to stop for a moment and recognize that this kind of work is as mentally taxing as it is tedious. At any rate, what I am about to present is a far cry from the kind of project that Madeła undertook. I cannot even begin to imagine the amount of work that goes into producing a critical edition, and to be frank, I also have zero experience with publishing, the academic system, or likely worst of all, the academic publishing system. It is also quite possible that the English is less important to the goal of her project, or to its intended audience, and that I’m being unreasonable or strange in my demands.

With that out of the way, the issues I have with the available translations of the poem led me to one (maybe crazy) conclusion: I could always just do it myself.

This is an ambitious goal. I am not an expert by any measure, on language or on poetry. However, I am a man with a handful of dictionaries (plus Google when they fail me) and a bottomless bucket of free time. So I did it, I set out to translate the Orphic Argonautica. I didn’t note the exact date that I started, but it was roughly in the middle of writing Part Two of my ‘exegesis’.

So, I have been plugging away at it slowly, like I do with everything. In the middle of Part Three, I stumbled across the “ἴστε καὶ αὐτοί” link between the poem and the Gold Tablets, which to my eye seems to be a very strong signal (among others) that the poem is overtly or outwardly Orphic in a recognizable way (or at least as much as an Orphic would make it).

At that discovery, which I have not yet seen anyone else point out, I shifted gears and focused my efforts on the translation as my new top priority. I am now well past the point that we’d reached by the end of Part Three, so I decided that I will post my translation (up to that point) here and continue translating it (and then other things) in the background. Going forward, starting with Orpheus’ Argonautika, I will favor my own translations of the Orphika.

My rules in translating were to very strictly follow the line breaks of the original Greek, plus (if it is reasonably possible) to keep the same word order. There is also frequently (though maybe more so in the Hymns than here) a sense of rhythm and alliteration in Orphic poetry, which I’ve tried to carry over into English at least in spirit. All of these rules together result in something which, I hope you’ll agree, is very beautiful but also very clearly “old”. Just as our Orphic author wrote his poem to appear old, so too do my self-imposed rules end up giving the appearance of archaic English.

For a particularly perplexing example, in the original Greek, Madeła has

Δεῖπνα δὲ πορσύνοντο πολυξείνοιο τραπέζης
(234) ἥμενοι ἑξείης· πόθεεν δέ τε ἔργον ἕκαστος.
(233) Αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ σίτοιο ποτοῦ θ’ ἅλις ἔπλετο θυμῷ,
(235) ἀνστάντες δ’ ἅμα πάντες ἀπὸ ψαμάθοιο βαθείης
ἤϊον ἔνθά τ’ ἔμιμνεν ὑπὲρ ψαμάθου ἁλίη νηῦς,
τήν ῥά τοτ’ εἰσορόωντες ἐθάμβεον. […]

Which she translates into English as

They prepared a dinner for a table with many guests and sat down in a row, each of them dying to start their work. Once their appetite for food and drink had been satisfied, (235) they all got up at once from the deep sand and went to where the sea-ship stood on the sands: when they saw it, they gaped at it in wonder.

While there is nothing that stands out as “wrong” to me, I did immediately notice that Madeła chose to rearrange a few lines in the Greek in order to flow better. Having now done the work myself, I can concede that the original Greek (at some parts) is not necessarily what we would consider “great writing”.

However, I think that making a judgement call that one of the scribes messed up, or even worse, that the original poet didn’t know what he was doing, is wrong. Strictly translating the original (unswapped, 233-234-235) line order with my method still preserves a readable-if-clunky verse:

And suppers they prepared for the many-guested table
but when of food and of drink their hearts had enough,
sitting in order, and each man desired the work,
and standing together everyone left the deep sand
and went where remaining upon the sand was the sea-faring ship,
she indeed then they looking at were amazed. […]

So, is it “great writing”? I can’t decide that for you. But is it “wrong”? It seems less-wrong than rearranging the lines and, even then, paraphrasing in places. My goal in doing this is to present a translation that is “better” maybe for studying and for getting a feel for the original, not necessarily one that is “better” for casual reading (which Madeła’s translation still does very well).

Without further delay, here are the first three-hundred-seven (307) lines of the Orphicaeum translation of Orpheus’ Argonautika, using Madeła’s critical edition of the Greek (with 233-235 in the proper order), meant to be as close to the Soul of the original as I could get it. This time next week, we will move forward with the ‘exegesis’ with the rest of our new, more strict edition.