sappho, fragment 42/ սաֆո , ֆրագմենտ 42
This Sunday, December 7, 2008, will mark the 20th anniversary of the Gyumri earthquake. If I had talent I would come up with an original song on my duduk to commemorate and remember the disaster. Sadly, being tone deaf, I have no such skills. Instead I will share some translations I have been working on.
First let me say this: I am a poor, poor student of Heyerin (Armenian, to everyone who doesn't speak it) so this is a very slow process and I expect I am making many, many mistakes along the way.
There! Having said that I must also admit that perhaps all these translations I am working on have, probably, at some point been worked over countless times from the original Greek into Heyerin by people much more skilled than I … I just don't have any access to that information. I can only imagine that in the National Library of Armenia, in Yerevan, there are countless texts that span back to the 4th century when the Armenian language was first created by Saint Mashtots. Yes, perhaps someday someone will email a copy pointing out all my errors and then all this work will be a mere footnote somewhere but until then I will keep doing this because I love the Heyerin language.
Today I am working on a fragment of Sappho, Սաֆո, the 10th Muse. I won't pretend I suddenly became fluent in Greek overnight. No, since I hardly know any language what I tend to do is read a lot of other translations and figure out what the words (more or less) are trying to say. After all, after a dozen translations of the same poem, a person starts picking up clues as to what it might be about. For example, here is her Fragment 42:
Ἕροσ δαὖτ᾽ ὲτίναξεν ἔμοι φρένασ,
ἄνεμοσ κατ ὄροσ δρύσιν ἐμπέσων.
Here is what other people have rendered those lines into:
Eros seizes and shakes my very soul
like the wind on the mountain
shaking ancient oaks.
(Hamill)
Love shook my heart,
Like the wind on the mountain
Troubling the oak-trees.
(Kline)
Eros shook my
Mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees.
(Carson)
Love shook my heart like wind
on a mountain punishing oak trees.
(Barnstone)
As a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart.
(Barnard)
Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain falling on the oaks.
(Wharton)
Love shook me like the mountain breeze
Rushing down on the forest trees.
(Tennyson)
And here are my English and Heyerin translations of Fragment 42 as well:
Eros shakes my heart – the storm shattering oaks.
Էրոսը ցնցում է իմ սիրտը – Փոթորիկը ցնցում կաղնիներ:
(Chartkoff)
Glossary:
Էրոսը – Eros, the Greek god of Passion (Կիրք) and Desire (Ցանկամոլություն); attendant/ lover/ child (depending on sources) of Aphrodite (Աֆրոթիթի)
Կաղնիներ – Oak trees; there is an Armenian Oak (Quercus pontica) native to the western Caucasus mountains that would fit nicely with the poem, though from what I understand it is being illegally harvested to the point of extinction.