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GTAGE: The Tsipras Edition Part #2
Among the reactions I saw on Facebook to the Tsipras meme in GTAGE: The Tsipras Edition Part #1 was this by Aineias Kapouranis:
So Donald, to say the figs figs and the tub tub, and because I ate the whole world to find you I believe that it is better to say them at a taverna or if that is not possible, do you have weather for a coffee?
- to say the figs figs and the tub tub
-
This being GTAGE, of course we have to start with a comically robotic translation: the verb being dodged here is to call.
The phrase alluded to is λέω τα σύκα σύκα και τη σκάφη σκάφη, “I call figs figs and troughs troughs”, which is taken from Ancient Greek (Lucian: τὰ σῦκα σῦκα, τὴν σκάφην δὲ σκάφην ὀνομάσων) is the Greek original underlying the English expression “to call a spade a spade”, thanks to Erasmus’ mistranslation of σκάφη “trough, basin” (something you dig out) as σκαφεῖον “hoe, spade” (something you dig with). On the Greek expression see Wikipedia, Sarantakos, and Matt Colvin.
The original makes sense because “figs” were what female genitals were called in Ancient Greek; and one would have to presume that “trough” had a similarly taboo meaning. Sarantakos hesitates and says that’s his opinion only, but Colvin has dug up an account of the phrase in those terms from 1828 by Karl Christian Gottlieb Kessler. Both Kessler and Sarantakos speculate it refers to one of the meanings of the diminutive σκάφιον, “chamber pot”. With enough imagination, I’m sure it can be brought back to anatomy too.
I’ve just discovered that the expression is now avoided in America, because of the racist meaning that spade has developed. I’ve already posted on Quora on Is the use of the word “niggardly” acceptable and politically correct?. I’ll only add that the secondary use of spade is unknown in Australia, and I’m going to continue calling a spade a bloody shovel.
- I ate the whole world to find you
- GTAGE loves figurative usage of verbs, and Modern Greek does do a lot with the verb “eat”. Here’s the listing from Triantafyllidis’ dictionary:
- (To eat)
- I1. To eat.
- I2. (pass) to be edible (these cherries are not [to be] eaten)
- I3. (of animals) to bite (watch out that the dog doesn’t eat you; the mosquitoes have eaten me)
- (To eat away)
- II1a. to corrode something (rust eats iron)
- II1b. (metaphorical) to garble words (he eats his words)
- II1c. to subtract part of something to give it a desired shape (I’ll eat the wood beams so they fit better)
- (To consume)
- IIa. to spend, to waste (he ate his fortune on gambling; he ate his youth in exile)
- IIb. to use up materials (that car eats a lot of petrol)
- IIc. to use up space or time (reading that book won’t eat more than a week of your time; that huge table eats the whole room)
- (To harm by injury)
- III1a. to cause someone bodily or psychological harm (illness ate him; dampness has eaten me in this basement)
- III1b. to do someone in, to kill someone (they ate him so he wouldn’t talk; the sea ate him)
- III1c1. to suffer from something falling on one (he ate a flowerpot on the head; he ate a kick)
- III1c2. to suffer from a punishment (he ate ten years jail; he ate wood = he was beaten; he ate noodles = he was romantically rejected)
- (To harm otherwise)
- III2a. to steal or appropriate (he ate my wallet; he ate a million euros from me; he ate his girlfriend = he stole his girlfriend; you won’t eat my spot in the queue; he ate me at the scales = he tricked me through faulty scales)
- III2b. to trick, to deceive (don’t give me that kind of talk: I won’t eat it; he ate the fairy tale; I don’t eat hay/stupid-grass = I am not easily fooled)
- III2c. to endure (I ate that insult too, and didn’t say a word)
- (To defeat)
- III3. to defeat in a contest, to best someone (we ate them! their team ate two goals from ours; he eats them all in maths; he ate it in the exams)
- (To wear down with words)
- III4a. to pursue or request something insistently and pressuring someone (he ate me to buy him a bike; he ate himself to go on an excursion; he is eating himself for a fight; he ate my ears for us to buy a car; I ate the world to find you)
- III4b. to argue continuously (the two brothers are eating each other with no good reason)
- III4c. to grumble (don’t keep eating yourself, say “thank God” once in a while)
- (To itch)
- III5. To itch (my head eats me; your nose eats you = you will get a beating; my palm eats me = I am about to get or give money; his tongue eats him = he is dying to say something)
Phew. I hope you can see the semantic transitions at work there.
The GTAGE rendering here is of III4a: “I ate the world to find you”, which the Triantafyllidis lexicographers interpret as “I nagged everyone in the world looking for you”, grouping it with other expressions for nagging or insisting. The mental image I get is instead is IIb: to go through the world one nook and cranny at a time, using it up in the process of looking for you.
- (To eat)
- to say them at a taverna
- GTAGE likes dummy objects, as we saw in the previous post with “it breaks her to me”. Here’s another: “to say them” is to say things, of course; and when it is use with a plural subject, it means by default having a discussion, where a variety of things are uttered.
(The question να τα πούμε; “may we say them?”, on the other hand, is Christmas carollers requesting permission to sing—vernacular Greek says songs, as well as singing them.)
- When “say them” is used with a singular subject, it still means saying things; but the connotation becomes saying everything that you have to say, purposefully: τα είπα και ξαλάφρωσα “I said what was on my mind and I was relieved”, τα είπα και έφυγα “I said what I had to say and I left”, καλά τα είπα; “was I convincing in saying what I had to say?”
- do you have weather for a coffee?
- Students of Ancient Greek, and particularly students of Koine, pay a lot of attention to the distinction between χρόνος and καιρός, since Ancient Greek uses both, and English usually just uses time for both. The distinction the pair makes is between time in general, and the time for something, the right time to do something. English has ways of expressing the latter that don’t involve the word time, though it’s not as consistent about it as Greek: opportunity, for example, or occasion. Or in archaic English, season.
The distinction persists in Modern Greek, although χρόνος is now learnèd, and fixed expressions tend instead to use ώρα “hour” as a mass noun. So there is a subtle distinction made in the two ways of saying “I don’t have time to see you:
- δεν έχω ώρα να σε δω “I don’t have hour to see you = I don’t have enough free time to see you”
- δεν έχω καιρό να σε δω “I don’t have occasion to see you = There isn’t a right time for me to see you”
Similarly,
- έχεις ώρα για καφέ; “Do you have any free time for a coffee?”
- έχεις καιρό για καφέ; “Is any time good for you to have a coffee?”
In a traditional agrarian society, the right time to do something will immediately bring to mind the right time to do agrarian work. Hence season in English turns from the proper occasion for something (To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven), to the season of the year: spring is the season for sowing, autumn is the season for harvesting.
Greek underwent a similar transition, but at a more granular level: it permitted the right time for agrarian work to vary day by day. καιρός thus acquired the meaning “weather”: a sunny day is the occasion/season for working outdoors, a rainy day is the occasion/season not to.
Hence, “do you have weather (= season = the right time) for a coffee?”
GTAGE: The Tsipras Edition Part #1
Before I stopped posing on this blog six years ago, I’d inaugurated GTAGE, a series on comically literal translations of Greek into English, motivated by slang.gr’s Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions. I think these are useful in teaching Greek, because they help illustrate some at times unexpected discrepancies between Greek and English.
In his recent trip to the US, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras gave a talk to the Brookings Institute, during which he mangled a Greek proverb. I’ve linked to Nikos Sarantakos’ blog account of it; as a Greek language blog, Sarantakos is obligated to comment on it, although there has been some controversy over whether Sarantakos’ commentary was more benign than it has been for malapropisms by politicians he doesn’t support. Since εδώ λεξιλογούμε δεν πολιτικολογούμε (“we talk lexicography here not politics”), as Sarantakos’ blog used to say 😉 , I’m going to pass by whether Tsipras’ English has improved or not since he made PM, whether he should have availed himself of an interpreter, and whether he is a cooler PM than his predecessor.
The proverb he inexplicably mangled was Φάγαμε τον γάιδαρο και μας απόμεινε η ουρά, “we’ve eaten the donkey—and the tail has been left over for us.” The version I’m more familiar with may be a little less opaque: Εδώ φάγαμε τον γάιδαρο, στην ουρά θα κολλήσουμε; “We’ve gone and eaten a donkey; are we to get stuck on the tail?” In case that was still opaque: if we are to undertake something large and distasteful (like, for example, eating a donkey), we should not hesitate and get stuck on minor details towards the end (like, for example, eating the donkey tail).
The point of the proverb, of course, is that eating a donkey is gross. For some reason, Tsipras avoided mentioning the donkey at all. The proverb does have a variant with an ox, and he didn’t mention oxen either. He decided to mention camels instead.
(If he thought Americans would consider eating camels less gross than eating camels, he didn’t know his audience well. If he was avoiding the word ass for donkey, we’ve been able to do that in English for the past four centuries. If he’d forgotten the English for “donkey”… well, at least that’s somewhat more plausible.)
The other thing Tsipras seems to have forgotten is the word for “tail”. He didn’t say “tail”. He said “queue”.
Now, in Greek, and for that matter in French, where queue comes from, a queue is a tail. Still, queue is clearly the more marked sense compared to tail; it’s a decidedly odd thing to mistranslate. (Unless Tsipras’ French is much better than his English.)
Hence:
There is an expression in Greece, “We have already eaten the camel, now we have the queue.”
… As it so often does nowadays, social media went bananas, coining new Tsipras-isms, many of them on Twitter with the hashtags #tsipranslate or #tsipras_proverbs. The GTAGE thread in slang.gr shows that this kind of thing has been going on for a while. And as I did with GTAGE, I’m claiming these for paedagogy.
I start with the Facebook meme. In the next post, I’ll graduate to someone’s continuation of it on Facebook. And then I’ll go through a listicle of them.
- Years and Zamania I have to come to America.
- Greek has plenty of loans from Turkish, but it has a lot less of them than it used to. Because of the campaign to get rid of Turkish and Italian loans in Greek, many loanwords are now forgotten entirely. A few of them survive only in a single formulaic expression; and if people understand them at all, it is only by context.
φελέκι is such an instance. People say γαμώ το φελέκι μου “fuck my felek!” still, and if they don’t say it, they’ve certainly heard it. But that’s the only time they’ll use felek, and they’ll have no idea what it actually means: in fact the first four Google hits I get for φελέκι are the Wiktionary definition (hit #3), and no less than three articles explaining “what is the felek that we all keep fucking?” (It’s the Turkish for “misfortune”, from Arabic falak “globe, wheel of fortune”; and the hellenised variant γαμώ την ατυχία μου also circulates.)
zaman is also such a word. In Turkish it means “time, period”, and it derives from Persian zamān. If you google, you’ll see that it used to be used somewhat more widely; e.g. μια φορά κι ένα ζαμάνι “at one time and one zaman” = “once upon a time” (the only expression now is μια φορά κι έναν καιρό “at one time and one season”); or the Cretan folk song ζαμάνια το ’χα να σε δω “it’s been zamans since I’ve seen you.” (2:06 of the recording by Nikos Xilouris.)
Even when it was used more widely, it would be paired with a Greek word: μια φορά κι ένα ζαμάνι, where ζαμάνι has been replaced by καιρός; and in Xilouris’ folk song, it’s paired with καιρός itself:
Ζαμάνια το ’χα να σε ιδώ καιρούς να σε ανταμώσω,
και αγρίεψες μου σαν μουρλή και πώς να σε ημερώσω
It’s been zamans since I’ve seen you, seasons since I’ve met you;
you’ve gone wild on me like a madwoman. How am I to tame you now?Now zaman survives in only one fixed expression, which again pairs it with an equivalent Greek word: χρόνια και ζαμάνια έχω να Χ, “I have years and zamans to X” = “it’s been ages since I’ve X.” The object years and zamans has been fronted before the verb, for emphasis; it adds to the emphasis already provided by the repetition in “years and zamans”.
If the meme writer doesn’t know exactly what a zaman is in Greek, he’s hardly going to know what it is in English either. And after Tsipras’ GTAGE torrent, that’s the word the hapless Trump gets stuck on.
You’ll notice another oddity in the phrase though. Greek can express the notion of “it’s has been [duration] since I have [done X]” with an impersonal predicate, close to English: Έχει πολλά χρόνια που δεν επισκέπτονται τα χωριά μας Βούλγαροι και λοιποί Βαλκάνιοι “it has many years (= it has been many years) that Bulgarians and other Balkan peoples don’t visit our villages.” Greek also allows the construction to be personalised, raising the embedded subject: Έχω πολλά χρόνια που δεν ασχολούμαι πλέον με την κριτική του κινηματογράφου “I have many years that I am no longer involved in film criticism.”
Those constructions use relative clauses and the present indicative tense in the negative, as you would expect for a description of what has in actuality not been happening in that time. But Greek also permits the perfective subjunctive to be used instead in the affirmative: that expresses what could or might have happened in that time, but still hasn’t: Έχω πολλά χρόνια να ψηφίσω με την καρδιά μου “I have many years that I (could but haven’t) voted enthusiastically.” The perfective (aorist) subjunctive is how you would express an intent, a goal: θέλω να ψηφίσω με την καρδιά μου “I want to vote enthusiastically (but I can’t).” In this context then, “I have zamans that I should have seen you” (ζαμάνια το ’χα να σε ιδώ) expresses an unrealised goal, not just the fact that the event hasn’t happened.
If you’re being subtle in linguistic explication, you translate this subjunctive with a modal verb, “that I should have seen you”. But GTAGE does not rely on subtle linguistic explication. The default translation of the Greek subjunctive is the English infinitive, and that’s what the meme puts in Tsipras’ mouth, with the fronted object likewise left in place.
So, to re-English the expression in stages:
- Years and zamans I have to come to America
- I have absolute years and zamans to come to America (the fronting was for emphasis)
- The true English equivalent of the fronting would have been a cleft: It’s years and zamans that I have to come to America. But that’s going to clash with the impersonal predicate I introduce back in later.
- I have absolute years and zamans that I have not come to America (recast the prospective subjunctive into the retrospective indicative)
- It has been absolute years and zamans that I have not come to America (un-raise the personal subject)
- It has been absolute years and zamans since I last came to America (using the actual idiomatic English for duration of inaction)
- It has been absolute ages since I last came to America (using the actual idiomatic English for long periods)
Phew. The rest of these are going to be a lot easier.
- Last time I was here I saw the Christ soldier.
- We have actually already seen this proverbial expression in GTAGE, “he saw G.I. Christ”:
.
Again, GTAGE levels syntactic subtlety for comic expediency: είδα το Χριστό φαντάρο is actually “I saw Christ as a conscript”, where the low-ranking conscript is an Everyman figure. As I commented back in 2010, seeing Christ as a lowly Everyman is very sound theology, but nonsense as far as the folk understanding of Christianity goes, which only gets the God part of Christ:
For someone to see with their mind’s eye Christ voided, as a lowly Everyman (and as a contemporary Everyman at that), they must be pretty far gone. Accordingly, the phrase is used to indicate that someone has been driven to extremes, that he has been pressed or worked so hard, that he is hallucinating, and seeing manifest absurdities.
- I come back like the unfair curse
- Some deliberate mistranslation here: “come back” is one of the meanings of γυρίζω, but the original meaning, and the one intended in the proverbial expression γυρίζω σαν την άδικη κατάρα, is “to go around, to wander”. The expression refers to someone wandering ceaselessly and pointlessly, without any rest, as if haunted by a curse—and an unjust curse at that. (We couldn’t very well sympathise with the person if the curse was deserved.)
So Tsipras is complaining that he is stuck wandering the globe, as if for a kind of undeserved penance.
Not so far from the truth, you might say.
- because it breaks her to me
- GTAGE is obscurantist enough without spelling mistakes: μου τη σπάει is “it breaks her to me”, not “it brakes her to me”.
The expression means “it pisses me off, it shits me, it upsets me”, and it joins of others: μου τη δίνει “it gives her to me”, μου τη χαλάει “it ruins her to me.” There’s a dummy subject here, “it”; it usually refers to a situation we find unpleasant, although slang.gr does have an example with a personal subject instead: Και πάντα χαμογελάει από πάνω και παίρνει και το μέρος του μπόση έτσι χωρίς λόγο απλά και μόνο για να μου τη σπάσει! “And he keeps smiling and taking the boss’ side, for no particular reason, just to shit me.”
GTAGE of course delights in this kind of expression because of its dummy indirect object, which is feminine. Such feminine indirect and direct objects occur far and wide in Greek expressions, where they refer to someone’s good mood: cf. έλα να τη βρούμε “come let us find her” = “let’s have a good time”, and/or “let’s have sex”. In fact you will see it sometimes elaborated as τη ζαχαρένια μου “my sugary one” μη μου χαλάς τη ζαχαρένια μου “don’t ruin my sugary good mood.” The missing feminine noun could be anything from χαρά “joy” to καλοπέραση “having a good time” to ησυχία “peace”. (I’m reluctant to admit διάθεση “mood”, as not vernacular enough.)
The indirect object is another misalignment between Greek and English: μη μου χαλάς τη διάθεση “don’t ruin to me the mood” (“don’t ruin the mood for me”) maps onto “don’t ruin my mood”, with the indirect object used where English would use a possessor, to indicate the person affected. μη μου χαλάς τη ζαχαρένια μου of course uses both possessor and indirect object; but if you use an indirect object, it’s easier to drop the object: “don’t ruin the mood for me” > “don’t ruin it for me” vs “don’t ruin my mood” > ??“don’t ruin mine.”
Of course, the indirect object is more benefactive than recipient, and “don’t ruin it for me” would be more comprehensible than “don’t break it to me”. But where would the fun in that be?
- We owe our horns to the banks
- Way before the alt-right revived it, the English language used to be preoccupied with cuckoldry as an insult, and Shakespeare used to be full of references to horns as veiled digs at people around infidelity. Greek hasn’t moved on from “horns” the way English had; and κέρατο “horn” is still used to refer to cuckoldry.
It also refers by extension to something or someone that we find infuriating; that corresponds to English fucker or fuck. The example from Wiktionary is: μου ’βαλε αυτό το κέρατο στο χολ και έκλεισε όλο το διάδρομο “she put that fucker in the hallway and blocked the corridor”.
Wiktionary also notes the usage here: τα κέρατά μου “my horns = my cuckoldries” refers to a very large quantity of something—and given the negative connotation of “horn”, the large quantity is a bad thing. The example given there is από την ώρα που ήρθε έχει πιει τα κέρατά του “since he got here he’s drunk his cuckoldries” = “he’s drunk to monstrous excess”. In the meme, Tsipras complains that Greece owes the banks “its horns = its cuckoldries”, i.e. a monstrous amount of money.
- but we make three-blanket parties
- Like zaman, the adjective τρικούβερτος is limited to fixed expressions; this time, two of them. The only two things that can be τρικούβερτος are fights (καβγάς), and parties (γλέντι).
The words for fight and party are Turkish, but τρικούβερτος is Venetian: having three covertas. The only sense of coverta that survives in Greek now is “blanket”, so unless you’ve gone to a dictionary, the only possible explanation of τρικούβερτος is “having three blankets”. Which makes no sense either for fights or for parties.
As explained in Wiktionary (and, again, in any number of helpful online articles—as with “what is the felek that we all keep fucking?”), a coverta was also the deck of a sailship, and warships up until the 19th century were typically three-deckers. So if either a fight or a party was a three-decker (τρικούβερτο), it involved all three decks of a ship—meaning its full crew, both sailors and officers.
No, the meme creator likely didn’t know that. I didn’t either! Even if he did, he’d have pretended not to: three-blanket parties sound better.
- Catch the egg and give it a haircut, you know.
- It wouldn’t be GTAGE if it didn’t have a slight mistranslation: in πιάσ’ το αυγό και κούρευ’ το, the first verb could be “catch”, but it can also be just “take”. The proverb refers to something being a waste of time—as pointless as trying to give an egg a haircut. The proverb does not also need to conjure up ideas of breaking eggs mid-air. Unless this is GTAGE.
Meme Tsipras looks incoherent in English (“… Zamania?”), and not that much more coherent in Greek. But, even if the meme author was grabbing for hard-to-translate proverbial expressions hither and thither, there is a narrative there:
- I haven’t been to the US in a very long time.
- Last time was very unpleasant. (He is after all a committed Eurocommunist; and his embrace of Trump has been seen as enough of a betrayal by the Greek Left to have earned him this cartoon by Arkas, with a communist partisan from the Greek Civil War holding up a red banner of capitulation.)
- He has come back to the US like someone condemned by an unfair curse to wander the world—pointlessly.
- He has come back to US under duress—the situation in Greece is pissing him off.
- Greece is massively in debt.
- But Greece parties like Nelson’s crew after Trafalgar.
- It’s all as pointless as giving an egg a haircut. (Where “all” includes Tsipras’ visit.)
You know something? I think the meme author has made Tsipras come across as more self-aware than they intended…
The Three Friars, in Greek
My friend from Quora Vangelis Lolos pointed out to me on Facebook that the Modern Greek version of the Old Irish joke about the three friars doesn’t sound as awesome as the others.
Challenge Accepted.
Τρεις καλόγεροι αναχωρούν από τον κόσμο.
Καταφεύγουν στην ερημιά, για να τους δώσει ο Κύριος άφεση των αμαρτιών τους.
Για ένα χρόνο δε λένε κουβέντα.
Στο τέλος της χρονιάς λέει ο πρώτους τους, «καλά περνάμε.»
Περνάει έτσι κι ο δεύτερος χρόνος.
«Καλά λες,» λέει κι ο δεύτερος.
Περνάει κι ο τρίτος χρόνος.
«Μα το πουκάμισο που φορώ!» λέει ο τρίτος. «Αν δεν πάψετε οι δυο σας, σας παρατώ εδώ στην ερημιά!»
The Three Friars, in Klingon
I mentioned to long-time reader John Cowan, in comments, the joke of the three Finns. (“Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to drink?”) John in turn pointed me to the Old Irish joke of the three friars.
Which, as a result, you can now read in Klingon—and you can now hear me read in Klingon, too.
They already have an Ancient Greek version, btw.
And a Koine one.
Two Ancient Greek Gettysburg Addresses: II
I posted a commentary on the first of two translations that I found online of the Gettysburg Address into Ancient Greek, emulating the style of Gorgias. That find has prompted me to join the Textkit forum for people learning and writing in Latin and Ancient Greek—with the hilarity of a Modern Greek speaker trying to write in Ancient Greek that I have documented.
(There will likely be more. It’s an instructive process. As I’ve just said there—)
εἴθ’ ἐνταῦθα, μεθ’ ὑμῶν συνδιαλεγομένου μου, βελτοιωθείη ἡ ἐμὴ ἀρχαιοελληνική, ἵνα μὴ ἀεὶ καθαρεύουσαν νεοελληνικὴν χρῶμαι, ἀρχαιοπρεπὴν δοκῶν με ἑλληνικὴν κεχρῆσθαι!
I hope that by talking with you guys here, my Ancient Greek improves, so that I don’t keep thinking that I’ve used archaically correct Greek when I’m actually using Puristic Modern Greek!
The second translation I discovered is more liberal, and I suspect much more in the tradition of how Greek Composition actually works—if for no other reason, because Thucydides is a more usual target for writers to emulate than Gorgias.
That translation is by Tom Keeline, now Assistant Professor of Classics at Washington University in St Louis (where he’s teaching comparative Greek and Latin grammar, the lucky sod.) The translation is tucked away on a Harvard server, where he did his PhD.
We all know, do we not my good readers, that when monks in the mediaeval West came across Greek in their manuscripts, they would decline to copy it and comment, Graecum est, non legitur. “It’s Greek, can’t read it.”
Keeline’s translation is surtitled Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address more Thucydideo.
Θουκυδίδης είναι, δε διαβάζεται! Or, if you prefer, Θουκυδίδου ἐστι, οὐκ ἀναγνώσιμον!
- Some might grimace at the Latinate way of saying “Thucydides-style”, by the way.
Inasmuch as I used Klingon numerals for the reader count of my old blog site, and surtitled them more klingonico—I will not be one of their number.
So. More Thucydideo. Let’s gird our loins.
Now, it has certainly already been fifty years since our fathers, fighting at sea in Salamis for all of Greece, saved the city for us through their virtue in warding off the barbarians—the which city we have received through continuous succession from old, declared through an equal and lawful state from our ancestors who made liberty for themselves to the utmost.
Oh God. It truly is more Thucydideo. I have no earthly idea if that’s what it’s saying, and I welcome corrections.
Yet now we ourselves are fighting in a war even greater than those, whether in some way this city or another such furnished with a similar democracy is capable of prevailing over the envy of tyrants. So in this day we stand together on land where those fighting have just come to blows; a part of which we have come to dedicate, that we might create a tomb and decently bury those who were worthy of dying, in order for the city to prevail. For how is it anything but just and seemly to do so? But in fact, we ourselves are not the kind of people either to dedicate or to consecrate this place; for already those who dared struggle here, living and deceasing, have dedicated more than what we would end up either adding or subtracting. So those after us will barely remember whatever we might say here; but there will never be any danger that what these men have achieved will become faded and then forgotten.
And truly it is necessary for us, who are still living, focusing our mind and applying our body, to fulfil the battle which these men nobly and virtuously attempted, and carried forward to such a degree of success. Therefore, vying with them, let us do the same, leaving behind no lesser pains still. Let it indeed seem to us that we have received from those who have died bravely eagerness for all things which they were willing to give even their lives labouring for; so that they may not have died in vain, but rather that through dying, like a woman in labour, they might give birth to a state declared in liberty with renewed vigour, so that people may never have democracy taken away from them.
…
I’m not even going to annotate this, because I have no idea what’s just hit me. Θουκυδίδου ἐστι, οὐκ ἀναγνώσιμον.
Bless Tom, who’s forgotten more Thucydides than I’ll ever decipher; but I think I liked Damoetas’ more Gorgiano rendering better.
Hippolytus: Commentary on Daniel and Chronicon
Gorgias Press has just published a translation by Tom Schmidt of the Commentary on Daniel, by Hippolytus of Rome, and the world chronicle (Chronicon) also attributed to him. The latter incorporates the text of the Stadiasmus Maris Magni, a Roman guidebook to the ports of the Mediterranean. (It’s not a portolan, but it’s as close to a portolan as that age had.)
You may well recognise a name on the front cover:
Tom approached me in 2009, for help in the translation of the chronicle that he was working on; if I reconstruct correctly, it was via Roger Pearse’s blog. I wrote about the project here seven years ago. I ended up providing substantial contributions to the translation, including reviewing the literature on the geographical identifications of the places in the Stadiasmus, and revising the translation for style and accuracy. It’s been a long time coming, as Tom tried to find an appropriate publisher for the work, and the translation is finally available to the scholarly public.
So what are these texts, and why should you care?
Hippolytus wrote in the third century AD, which makes him extremely early in the history of Christian writing. Both works represented are firsts in the Christian tradition—though by no means the last. The Commentary on Daniel is likely the first of a long line of Christian commentaries on Scripture, and it features the highly allegorical style of interpreting scripture that was to be a mainstay of the Church Fathers that followed.
As for the Chronicon, whose translation I contributed to, its importance in how history was written for the next thousand years cannot be overstated: it provided the template for chronicle writing in Christendom. As I wrote way back then,
Hippolytus’ Chronicle was written in 235 AD. Chronicles as we know them are informal bits of history, assembled around the scaffolding of reigns of kings, and plot synopses of the narrative from Genesis up to the Roman Empire. Hippolytus provides some of that scaffolding, from the Biblical side, as one of the first Christian forays into writing history: lists of high priests, judges, the begats of Adam and Abraham, and the list of the 70 peoples dispersed at Babel (with some post-Genesis interpretations of who those peoples had ended up as).
The list is garbled from the Septuagint in places: in fact the second redaction of the chronicle, written a century later, corrects some of the garblings. But the chronicle (in its slightly corrected variant) was enormously influential: its lists turn up at the beginning of tens of chronicles, in Greek, Latin, and Armenian. In fact these later copies help us reconstruct the original text, since the surviving text closest to Hippolytus’ original, the Madrid manuscript, still has gaps in it.
My thanks to Tom for persevering with this over the past eight years!
We don’t speak mediaeval round here…
I recently reported on a translation of the Gettysburg Address into Ancient Greek, that I found on the Textkit forum. As a show of my new-found liberality with my time online (now that I am no longer on Quora), I have joined Textkit; and as part of my sign up, I’ve said hello to people there in Ancient Greek.
Now, as I occasionally confess sotto voce, I may have styled myself a world expert on the history of the Greek language, but I have never actually formally studied Ancient Greek. Which means that when I do try to write in Ancient Greek, the results are strongly coloured by what Modern Greek speakers know of Ancient Greek. In other words, what comes out is Puristic, which in turn is often enough Byzantine. When I wrote to Michael Masiello in Ancient Greek on Quora, he worked out that was what was going on in comments.
Oh, the comments on Quora don’t export, but I’m still not linking direct to Quora.
So what happens when I unwittingly introduce a whole bunch of mediaevalisms in my Ancient Greek? What happens is the exchange in Νικόλαος Νικολαόυ, Τεξτκὶτ θαμῶσι εὐ πράττειν, where site moderator Jeidsath says “huh?” a fair bit.
I thought it interesting to relay my missteps. This is what I wrote:
Νικόλαος Νικολαόυ, Τεξτκὶτ θαμῶσι εὐ πράττειν.
Τοὺς τῆς ἑλληνικῆς γλώττης ἐνθάδε φίλους χαιρετῶ. Νικόλαος μὲν ἐμοὶ τὸ ὄνομα, γλωττολόγος δὲ ἐμοὶ ἡ παιδεία. Εἰς τὸν Θησαυρὸν τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς Γλώττης (TLG) ἐπὶ δεκαεπτὰ ἔτη ἠργασάμην, τὸν δὲ αὐτόματον ἐκείνου τῶν λέξεων ἀναλυτὴν ἀνέπτυσσον. Ἱστολόγιον περὶ τῶν ἑλληνικῶν καὶ περὶ τῆς γλωττολογίας γράφω, ἄλλ’ οὐκ ἔξεστί μοι ἔτι ἐνθάδε τὸν σύνδεσμον κοινοποιεῖν, καθότι καινός εἰμι. Ἐκεῖ πρότινος τὴν τοῦ Δαμοίτα ὑμῶν ἐσχολίακα μετάφρασιν τῆς εἰς Γεττισβοῦργον ὁμιλίας.
And this is what I thought I said in Ancient Greek:
Nick Nicholas, to the regulars of Textkit, salutations.
I greet the friends of the Hellenic tongue here. My name is Nicholas, and my education is linguistics. I worked at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for seventeen years, and I developed its automated word analyser. I write a blog on Greek and Linguistics, but I am not yet allowed to publish the link here, as I am new. [The forum has fire and brimstone about publishing links when you first arrive.] I commented there recently on a translation by your Damoetas of the Gettysburg Address.
And this is where I confused Jeidsath:
- θαμῶσι
- As every Greek blogger knows, a θαμώνας is the cutely archaising term for a customer of a café, bar, taverna, and other such places; and by extension, it’s applied to regulars at online cafés—that is, fora and blogs.
Jeidsath has excellent reasons not to know that word. It’s not just because he doesn’t hang out in Modern Greek cafés. As the Triantafyllidis Institute’s dictionary notes,[λόγ. θαμ(ών) -ώνας < αρχ. επίρρ. θαμ(ά) `συχνά΄ -ών σφαλερή δημιουργία αντί π.χ. θαμιστής, συχναστής (επίρρ. και αρχ. επίθημα -ων, που παράγει ουσ., δεν μπορούν να συνδυαστούν) μτφρδ. γαλλ. fréquantant (les cafés)]
Learnèd θαμών (modernised to θαμώνας) < Ancient adverb θαμά “often” + -ών, an erroneous formation instead of e.g. θαμιστής, συχναστής “frequenter”: the ancient suffix -ών, which produces nouns, cannot combine with an adverb. Calque of French fréquantant (les cafés)
So the word did not exist in Ancient Greek, and it couldn’t have. θαμιστής has not been recorded either, whether for Ancient or Mediaeval Greek; but it least it would have been regularly generated from the verb θαμίζω “to frequent”.
- γλωττολόγος δὲ ἐμοὶ ἡ παιδεία
-
Yes, yes, I know that’s horridly awkward.
- αὐτόματον τῶν λέξεων ἀναλυτὴν
-
“automated analyser of words” seems to have thrown Jeidsath (“you don’t mean a relaxer who lets something loose, so what do you mean”); yes, our modern notions of “analyse” are a metaphorical extension from the original meaning of the verb, “to unloose, undo”; but meanings like “resolve into its elements” and “investigate analytically” are clearly old. Yet, checking LSJ, not quite old enough: Pseudo-Phocylides, Aristotle, Archimedes. In other words, Koine, not Attic. Plato would not have understood my talk of parsing.
… Of course, Plato would not have understood any talk of parsing: morphology as we know it was a creation of Roman times, and its language was Herodian’s Koine.
- πρότινος
-
Mediaeval Greek has a habit of running words together, which modern editors of Ancient Greek (and usually Mediaeval Greek) texts print separately. Even to the extent of printing “whatever” as ὅ τι, where Mediaeval and Modern Greek write ὅ,τι (using the hypodiastole, which corresponds to the Modern English use of dash to link words together). In fact, the cleanup of words run in together in modern editions of the Classics reminds me of the scrubbing of Ancient statuary clean of ancient colouring.
Editors of Mediaeval texts separate out the more egregious instances of run-in words; but there’s still a healthy tradition of it in Modern Greek, and I succumbed to it: πρότινος is πρό τινος “before-something”, meaning “a short while ago”. In fact, in my response to Jeidsath, I ended up committing two more instances: καὶ οὕτω καθεξῆς (καθ’ ἑξῆς) “and thus according-to-what-follows” = “and so forth”, and τουτέστιν (τοῦτ’ ἐστιν) “this-is” = “namely”.
All of these are my fault, not Jeidsath’s; he’s under no obligation to know anything about Mediaeval Greek—let alone the fantasies of Modern Greek calquers of French.
I wish I could guarantee that I won’t do the same kind of thing again…
What T’Kuvma actually said in the trailer
Following up What is T’Kuvma saying in the trailer?, a transcript of the Klingon of Episode 1 of Star Trek: Discovery is now up. (I’m a little surprised it’s up as a Facebook document, but I guess the world has moved on.)
So how did I do?
Me: Donatu vaghDaq DIvI’ wIlulpu’, ’a qaSpa’ (?) veS poHvetlh …
Correct: Do’natu vaghDaq DIvI’ wIlulpu’ ‘a qaStaHvIS poH veb mayonchoHchu’pu’.
We have become complacent in the time since we last battled the Federation at Donatu V.
Me, Literal: We battled the Federation at Donatu V, but before the time of that war…
Correct, Literal: We battled the Federation at Donatu V, but while the following time was occurring (= during the ensuing time) we have started to become completely contented…Me: mapIm neH (?) maH ’e’ luQaw’meH ghoS chaHCorrect: mapIm ngIq maH ’e’ luQaw’meH ghoS chaHThey come to destroy our individuality.Me, Literal: They come to destroy the fact that we, we are just (?) different.Correct, Literal: They come to destroy the fact that we individually are different.
DevwI’’a’pu’ Hov tIbejchoHGreat leaders, look to the stars.
pawpu’ SanmajOur destiny has arrived.
baHFire!
Me: may’ luqolthbogh wInobmeH, matay’taHvIS maQamrup’’a’?Correct: may’ luqolthbogh DInobmeH, matay’taHvIS maQamrup’’a’?Shall we rise up together, and give the fight they deserve?Me, Literal: In order to give the fight they deserve, are we prepared to stand while being together?Correct, Literal: In order to give them the fight they deserve, are we prepared to stand while being together?
… Fricking prosthetic teeth…
Two Ancient Greek Gettysburg Addresses: I
The classicists among you know—as the rest of you may well not—that Ancient Greek Composition is a thing. Advanced students of Ancient Greek have traditionally been set exercises of translating Modern English text into Ancient Greek. The idea is that by working out the means of expressing yourself idiomatically in Ancient Greek, students get a better understanding of how idiomatic Ancient Greek works. In particular, Composition is an effective means of teaching what is traditionally called Syntax in Classics—and what modern linguists might chalk up instead to the semantics of the various available inflections, of case and mood and tense.
The exercise of Composition is an exercise in cultural translation, and not just semantic translation. In that, it is no different from any other act of translation. It is a more tenuous act of cultural translation, perhaps—in that the target culture is dead, and reconstructed and learned piecemeal from exposure to texts, rather than lived in and taken for granted by the translators.
In that wise, of course, it has not a little in common with the activity of translation into Klingon.
Of course I went there.
The extent of cultural translation is going to vary, even if the target culture is as shadowy as a learner’s understanding of Ancient Greece, or a scriptwriter’s construal of Qo’noS. The translator can choose to immerse themselves in the target culture, and embrace all its preconceptions—its prejudices say, its polytheism, its moral code. Or it can put some distance from the target culture: it can render the text into Ancient Greek or Klingon as spoken by contemporary members of the Anglosphere. Or anywhere in between. I made one set of choices for rendering Hamlet into Klingon, adopting the mythos that Hamlet was originally written in Klingon. I made a quite different set of choices for rendering the Gospel according to Mark into Klingon: that was for my own scholarly interest, and I made a point of culturally transmogrifying as little of Mark’s Greek as possible. (I took particular delight in having people lie down to eat, just like the original says.)
And of course it’s not only a treacherous pathway, but a noisy one as well. There are multiple receptions of the target culture you can end up aligning to. Any attempt at using Ancient Greek in a modern context, for example, ends up rubbing up against Modern Greek, and Modern Greek often ends up a donor language to such enterprises (though of course more via the friendlier garb of Puristic Greek). I’ve written elsewhere of my surprise at finding a modern Ancient Greek text use <Bagdad> for Baghdad, instead of the <Bagdatē> of Modern Greek. And of the fact that my surprise was anachronistic: <Bagdad> is a lot closer to how the Byzantines who first encountered Baghdad rendered it. Likewise, any rendering of modern text into Klingon contends with variations in Klingon mythos: is Klingonaase with its Komerex and Khesterex to be referred to? Is there a single story now about which Klingons had smooth foreheads when? Do Klingons even have goatees any more?
Greek Composition is about cultural translation, because part of the paedagogical point of it is to immerse students into Ancient Greek culture. People make a point of writing their translations as if they were Thucydides, because they’re trying to work out Thucydides. And the translation guides push them down that path: the translation might be of an account of the English Civil War, but students are instructed to refer to Corcyra or Tissaphernes instead of Cromwell or Naseby. And as suffused as the source texts to be translated might be in Christianity, the oaths students are instructed to produce are not Christian: they aren’t trying to work out the style of Michael Psellus or John Cantacuzene. It’s all Zeus this and By The Gods that.
But the texts being translated aren’t texts by Thucydides or Xenophon; and whatever the translator does, you can still tell as much. Which makes the artefacts cross-culturally fascinating.
I was convinced there would be venerable 19th century instances rendering the Gettysburg Address into Ancient Greek; that kind of thing was popular back then, after all. I found that Edward Everett toyed with rendering his own, two hour long Gettysburg Oration into Ancient Greek—the one that got all the limelight on the day. But I haven’t found any old instances of rendering Lincoln’s text into Ancient Greek.
I have found two contemporary instances, though. And reading them as artefacts is interesting. Reading them as a speaker of Modern Greek, with the noise that introduces, even more so.
The first instance dates from 2010, by user Damoetas on the Textkit forum. Textkit includes a space for composition exercises in Latin and Ancient Greek, and Damoetas’ effort is one such. Damoetas actually explains a lot of his choices of wording in the thread to user Markos; his stated aim was:
To be honest, I was mainly just trying to make the assignment entertaining for myself, because these kinds of composition exercises usually involve a lot of tedious poring over dictionaries. So to do that, I decided to make the rhetoric as overblown as possible, using every possible trope or figure I could think of, in the style of Gorgias – have you read the Encomium of Helen? If not, check it out, and you’ll see what I was aiming for. His speech ends by saying, ἐβουλήθην γράψαι τὸν λόγον Ἑλένης μὲν ἐγκώμιον, ἐμὸν δὲ παίγνον, which I echo in my last line as a sort of “interpretive key.”
Note Markos’ first comment to Damoetas, by the way (in Ancient Greek). No, Damoetas did not make a mistake in having his Lincoln say “with the Gods helping” instead of “with God helping” for “under God”. It’s a cultural translation; one in which Lincoln is wearing a chlamys and echoing Gorgias. Whether you’re comfortable with Lincoln echoing Gorgias, and alluding to the birth of Athena, is a litmus test.
One I think I fail.
Here’s my back-translation.
On the one hand, this state, O American Men, conceived in a new earth, and born in freedom, and proposed in a proposal—that everyone has been begotten as worthy of equal law, in equal honour—sprang from the head of our fathers, as it reached the prime of youth and flowered. This is already the eighty seventh year since these things happened. But now a most great war and a most hateful deluge of a blood-drenched insurrection has been poured out upon us; out of which it shall be made apparent and not hidden whether that state, or indeed any other which has come to be in that way, will be able to persist for long. But in this field we have assembled—they to fight, and we to remember. They, dying through all of the field so that the state may live for all time; and we, consecrating a portion of the field so that the dead may rest forever. It is not only not unseemly, but very seemly that we should do this.
But it would be more just if I would say that we cannot consecrate, nor purify, nor sanctify this field. For what brave men have sanctified through struggling, we would hardly make more glorious by praising it, or on the contrary make less glorious by censuring it. And truly the world will neither understand much nor remember long our words; but it will never forget their deeds. So what should we do, O American Men? I say, we the living should complete the work which those who fought here, though they struggled bravely, have left incomplete to us; all should concentrate their mind eagerly on the proposition which lies before us; so that we may strive to live worthy and to die worthy of those honoured friends; that we may deem their death to be neither in vain nor useless, but serviceable and useful for the state; so that this new state, the gods helping, be newly born in a new liberty; so that democracy may remain from the people, for the people, towards the people; so that neither this state may perish from the earth, nor my game.
- O American Men: ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀμερικήσιοι
- Of course, this is an equivalent of “O Athenian Men”, which peppers all public orations recorded from Athens. As cultural translation, it is the obvious choice: if Lincoln was wearing a chlamys in the Athens agora, that’s what he’d say; he’d be addressing the other men who were the decision-makers of the Athenian democracy. If you’re addressing contemporary Americans despite the fact that you’re using Ancient Greek, the reference to men is jarring, since it’s no longer just men that enjoy the suffrage. Of course, Ancient Greek does not offer a model for appealing to female voters. That makes a Modern Greek speaker look sideways at what their recent history offers: Karamanlis’ Ελληνίδες, Έλληνες “Greek women, Greek men”, or Papandreou’s much-parodied Λαέ της Ελλάδας, λαέ της Αθήνας “People of Greece, people of Athens”.
- O American Men: <ō andres Amerikēsioi>
- A red rag to any Modern Greek speaker, of course, for whom Americans are <Amerikanoi>. It’s a plausible Ancient Greek form for “American”, of course, and composition is not obligated to use the Modern Greek forms—especially when they are borrowed from Latin. Still… why wouldn’t you?
- sprang from the head of our fathers
- Damoetas is of course alluding to Athena, as he explains:
It’s a conscious allusion to the Athena story. When I wrote my opening sentence, I felt like it was building toward something, so it needed some kind of dramatic and arresting conclusion; I hoped the Athena allusion would be suitably out of place, even grotesque! From searching on Perseus, I found that the verb normally used for Athena’s “leaping forth” was ἀνέθορεν, but this didn’t have a nice metrical shape to end a line (four short syllables), so I switched to the heavier ἐξεπήδησε. (It occurs humorously in Lysias 3.)
Grotesque it is, and the comparison of the Founding Fathers to Zeus himself is jarring even on its own cultural terms, making them into gods above the very concept of wisdom. The sentence needs to go somewhere. I’m not convinced that’s where it needed to end up.
- as it reached the prime of youth and flowered
- That gilds the lily, I’d say; and it’s distracting by introducing puberty (ἡβῶσα) into the ethnogenesis of America. America is meant to be a new nation; I’m not sure it needed to be a teenage nation.
- eighty seventh year
- Translations of the Gettysburg Address either come with a similar archaism to four score and seven—I’ve seen a Latin version come up with the lustrum—or give up with a prosaic number 87. Allusions can’t always match at the phrase level; and if you can’t come up with an archaic 87 here, well, better luck further down.
- a most great war and a most hateful deluge of a blood-drenched insurrection has been poured out upon us
- Again, that’s a lot of words to put against “now we are engaged in a great civil war”. But the metaphor works for me.
- it shall be made apparent and not hidden
- The verb “make apparent” (δηλόω) has come to mean just “declare”; but the antithesis is deliberate, and is what Greek stylists did: “I was trying to create an antithesis that was as balanced as possible, even if that meant adding something to one part that was not in the original.” Damoetas says that about the next antithesis: “they to fight, and we to remember”, and that antithesis is glorious and idiomatic, more so than this one.
- dying through all of (ἐν παντὶ) the field so that the state may live for all (διὰ παντὸς) time
- By now we’ve travelled very far from Lincoln’s words, but despite some occasional missteps there are some very nice figures of speech here.
- consecrating: <temenizontes>
- There’s an unfortunate piece of noise from Modern Greek: the Ancient Greek word for consecrated land, temenos, has ended up as the modern term for a mosque. That aside, there seems to be some music missing in the second phrase, even if it repeats the διὰ παντὸς of the foregoing. Somehow the μόριον τοῦ πεδίου “portion of the field” does not contrast right with “all of the field.” (Damoetas explicitly points out he intended them to contrast; and he did not intend what Markos read in here, that Lincoln should also be alluding to the bits of the battlefield where Southerners died.)
- But it would be more just if I would say that
- The injection of the first person, here and in “I say, we the living should”, is presumably unremarkable in an Attic oration, but it is jarring in the Gettysburg Address, and in Lincoln’s oratory in general, which draws its loftiness from being impersonal.
- we would hardly make more glorious
- Once more, beautifully poised sentence, and only one thing spoils it for me: I’d move that μόγις ἂν “would hardly” out of the way: it’s meant to build on the antithesis by contrasting with ἧττον δ᾽ αὖ “but less, by contrast” (again, avowedly so), but they don’t quite match.
- strive to live worthy and to die worthy of those honoured friends
- The noise from Modern Greek this time helps: φιλοτιμῶμεθα survives as the verb for filotimo, the Modern Greek notion of amour propre, of honour as social obligation. To φιλοτιμιέμαι in Modern Greek is to have the decency to do something righteous. And the verb, literally “to have love of honour”, echoes the “honoured friends” of the battlefield. And again, Damoetas points out that was deliberate.
- neither in vain nor useless, but serviceable and useful for the state
- Here I think the antitheses have gone back to being too heavy-handed. The contrast of an adverb and adjective pair (μάτην οὐδ᾽ ἀνωφέλιμον ἀλλὰ προὔργου καὶ χρήσιμον) should be neat, but it strikes me as too convoluted by half.
- this new state, the gods helping, be newly born in a new liberty
- For “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom”, this is more jangly, and it’s not quite accurate for rendering “under God”. But jangling has its place.
- towards the people (εἰς τὸν δῆμον)
- Greek prepositions are infamously flexible in their meaning, and there is a suitable sense of εἰς: LSJ IV, “towards, in regard to”. I’d have gone with πρό “in favour of”, myself.
- nor my game (τὸ ἐμὸν παίγνιον)
- It’s an explicit allusion to Gorgias, as Damoetas has already said: “I wished to write a speech which would be an encomium of Helen and a diversion to myself.” The translator was well pleased to put this little allusive reference in there. I still wish he hadn’t.