What marks poetry as poetry? Different features of language make poetry what it is in different cultures, though in traditional cultures all features of poetry serve at least this purpose - to make a text memorable. For translators of poetry into English, the degree of difficulty rises from French (fairly easy, with identical verse forms) to Chinese (fiendishly hard, with verse forms that cannot be replicated in non-tonal languages). Greek is somewhere in between.
If you asked contemporaries of Sophocles about the difference between poetry and prose, they would probably have spoken first of rhythm - of the use of complex repeatable metrical structures. This is the most prominent formal feature of lyric poetry from the period. But modern readers should notice the powerful use of juxtaposed concrete images that runs through the entire tradition, from Homer to Callimachus.
Verse in English traditionally marks line breaks with capital letters at the beginning of each line. Ancient Greek needed no such convention, owing to the clarity of its metrical forms. Old-fashioned translators followed the English convention; most recent ones have not done so. But well-placed line breaks are an essential part of ancient Greek poetry, and it is wise to mark these well in a translation that aims at saving the poetry of the original. Words at the beginnings or ends of lines have special emphasis owing to their positions. Enjambment, moreover, is part of the poetry, and not merely a convenience. Sometimes this puts an important word in a prominent position, sometimes it helps bring across the breathless enthusiasm of the speaker.
Verse in English is usually marked by rhyme, and this has been true from Chaucer to the latest rap lyrics. If you want your readers to recognize your text as verse, therefore, you will be tempted to use rhyme. Some translators have carried this off with success. Richard Wilbur’s translations of Moliere are wonderfully like the original, and Gilbert Murray’s rhyming versions of Greek plays (see below) had a great success in the early years of the twentieth century. But the Greeks did not use rhyme at the ends of lines, and so the impression this gives has seemed false to most purists. Internal rhyming, however - repeating the sounds of vowels or consonants - is an important feature of Greek tragic poetry, and this is easily translated.
Meter is essential to ancient Greek poetry, and it is tempting to try to reproduce this in English, or at least to use comparable metrical forms. Greek meter is based on quantities, however; that requires attention to the length of each vowel sound and syllable. English meter, which is based on emphasis, is oblivious to quantity. Fair approximations of Greek meters can be achieved in English for the iambics of the speeches, and for certain other meters (such as anapests) that occur in tragedy. But complex lyric meters, such as those used in the choral odes, are almost impossible to render.
Translators who serve either rhyme or meter will have a hard time serving other beauties of the text. To make the rhymes come out right, or to fill in the meter to perfection, translators usually have to alter meanings or introduce language that is not required for translating the meaning of the text. Even if the new language leaves the old meaning unscathed, the new verbosity kills one beauty of the original - concision. The choral odes of tragic plays are splendidly concise, in the works of all three playwrights, and this concision allows them to juxtapose images with startling directness and simplicity:
To dance the long night!
Shall I ever set my white foot so, to worship Bacchus?
Toss my neck to the dewy skies as a young fawn frisks in green delight of pasture?
(Euripides, Bacchae 863-67; Woodruff 1998, 35)
Anything the translator did to separate these images with excess verbiage would weaken the peculiar poetry of these lines, the play of white against green, the evocative leap from human dance to an animal frisking, the transfer of the epithet ‘‘green’’ from ‘‘pasture’’ to ‘‘delight.’’ Gilbert Murray’s version has a different loveliness, a kind of word music aided by repetitions:
Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long long dances,
On through the dark till the dawn-stars wane? Shall I feel the dew on my throat, and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam In the dim expanses?
Oh, feet of a fawn to the greenwood fled,
Alone in the grass and the loveliness.
(Murray 1904, 51)
Most readers would find the Murray version more poetic, because it conforms to the rules of traditional English poetry. Murray was writing in 1904, and his translations made Greek plays accessible to a generation of ordinary readers and playgoers. But the style seems antique to a reader of twenty-first-century poetry, and Euripides was anything but antique. His style was fresh, even startlingly new. In our time, now, we see that the last few generations of poets have given us examples of lyricism that may be closer to that of the ancient Greeks. Consider this famous poem:
So much depends upon
A red wheel barrow
Glazed with rain water
Beside the white chickens.
(Williams 1985, 36)
If this is great poetry, as many critics agree it is, it opens new ways for other poets and translators alike to follow their art. A translator who wishes to save as much of the poetry of the original as possible needs to be well read in English and American poetry. Murray knew the poetry of his day very well, and his knowledge shows in the gracious verse that he turns. Times change, however, and call for new translators. Poetry in 2004 looks very different from poetry in 1904.
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