Fragmentary texts are fun for readers because of the amount of space they leave the reader to play in. The silent moments can be glimpses of a scene, flashes of light or a breeze creeping in. In the case of Sappho’s fragments, the texts that survive create an experience akin to eavesdropping, as if the phone line to the past is a bit dodgy and only every third word is heard, or as if Sappho is a moody mumbling youth and what remains is all that can be picked out of her drawl. As a translator, Sappho’s fragments are a fun challenge because not only are the remains of the action enticing, but the grammar of what survives has a glitter about it too. Greek is an inflected language; it has cases, numbers, and genders. What words do survive have ghosts of the ones that did not make it upon them, a haunted aspect to their appearance in the sentence. The act of translating is then a bit like trying to tell the demographics of a house party by looking at the shoes piled up at the door. ‘Things That Spooked The Ancient Romans’, first published in Starling 8, is a poem that involved translating ancient fragmented texts and putting those translations together. After reading ‘Things’ in public a few times, I realised that many listeners thought the content of the poem was made up. I created ‘Things’ in 2019 while sharing an office with several fellow postgraduate Classical Studies students at Te Herenga Waka. The poem’s sources are Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (a historical text from between 27-9 BCE), Pliny’s Natural History (c. 77 CE) and the ‘other’ Livy’s Book of Prodigies (c. 4-5th centuries CE). Some omens were only partially recorded. Even in their Latin source text, chunks of the omen and how it was interpreted or what happened afterwards are missing. The syntactical formula of the recorded omens is fairly similar across the surviving texts.¹ To write the poem, I selected my favourite omens and translated them literally along with their interpretation or the event they were said to foreshadow. There was not a lot of room for variation. The texts are fairly direct and concise. Gaps in the record are marked by square brackets and ellipses. The poem became a list with three sections; omens only, omens plus interpretations/foreshadowed events, and finally prodigies and the reactions they elicited. Through the process of selection, I reveal my poetic voice and the things I want to talk about—animal and human behaviour. I also arranged the text so that only the third section of the poem featured fragmentary records. My hope was that readers, then familiar with the structure of the omens as recorded by the ancient Roman writers earlier in the piece, could experience the gaps as chances to let their minds run around for a bit. The content is also darker, and more serious. The gaps might mirror a shocked internal silence, or the slow registering of a tragedy. The third section of ‘Things’ has been performed in several ways. Sometimes I have counted “One, two,” slowly in my head in every gap. At one show, I ripped a piece from the paper I was reading from in every gap and let it float to the floor, aiming to get the microphone to amplify the swift or lengthy sound of the rip. From a literary perspective, the gaps in the accounts of the prodigies could probably be plugged by similar words to what is read in the whole versions. I did not realise, however, how pessimistic this view was until a friend pointed out that the gaps might suggest some of those prodigies escaped the fate of their peers. Read in this way, some listeners had felt hope that the futures of these intersex children were not so bleak.² My motive had been to undermine the common belief in the superiority of the Roman state, then and now. Was an empire really so great and amazing if the birth of intersex children was perceived as such a great threat to the world? There were two harmful myths on my radar: that being intersex is not natural, and that Republican or Imperial Rome was a fair and just society that modern leaders should look to for inspiration. Buoyed by the interest ‘Things’ was met with, I started to exert more influence upon my translations and try out new techniques. ‘Tramping Fragment #2’ from BITER (2023) is constructed from several fragments of poetry attributed to Sappho recast with my own images. What started as a fun way to get the creative cogs in my head turning unexpectedly became something I was content to read aloud in public and publish. My process began in similar fashion to ‘Things’. I put my literal translations of Sappho’s fragments into a document. I imagined a word bank of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and then I began to swap my words in for Sappho’s. Imagine, if you can, a text-based version of an early noughties internet flash game in which you pick an outfit for a character. There are little arrows either side of the avatar and you click through the catalogue, mixing and matching to your heart’s content. Without the pressure to imagine a narrative or context for the poem, crafting the translation felt more like a game. And yet there were gaps in Sappho’s poems. I wondered what to do with them. Leave them be? Hypothesise about what she originally wrote? Delete all traces of the gap? I decided to do a bit of both. A listener at a poetry reading would not know anything was amiss. A reader would notice that some gaps are marked by square brackets and ellipses, and some square brackets have words within them. Guided by Sappho’s voice and content, I searched my mind for a scene from my life that seemed to mirror my reading of the experience that inspired Sappho’s fragments. The sudden emergence of the narrator in the third stanza was the unintentional effect of sticking several fragments together and this feels, to me, very Sappho—like a sudden change of perspective in a film from the landscape of the valley to the rider on the ridge, or realising that someone you care for is standing right behind you. This change in the atmosphere occurs sometimes in the act too, as if the translation of a word from one language to another is not a gap in the mist, but the wiping of fog from the mirror. ¹ I include the word ‘surviving’ because I am referring to texts that have made it to the twenty-first century, and there surely were more that did not make it. Claudia Jardine is the author of BITER (2023) and has an MA in classics from Victoria University of Wellington, where she won the 2020 Alex Scobie Research Prize. Her first chapbook, ‘The Temple of Your Girl', was published in AUP New Poets 7 (2020). Her ancestors are from the British Isles and the Maltese Archipelago, and she lives in Ōtautahi.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |