CLAS 532
April 14, 2025
Greek Didactic Poetry (Hesiod)

1. EXERCISE #3 (due April 21) GUIDELINES

2. Damrosch, “Translation and World Literature: Love in the Necropolis”: close readings of “The sweet sayings found in a scroll composed by the scribe of the necropolis, Nakht-Sobek” (12th century lyric poetry, papyrus sans transmission history) – exemplary of local/national literature’s circulation globally through translation (i.e. as world literature), not study of canon of world “bests” (BA in World Literature at UA)

Why do you dispute with your heart—
“To embrace her is all my desire”?
As Amun lives, it is I who come to you,
my clothing on my arm. (version of quatrain with woman speaking – translation issues of speaker(s), grammar, punctuation, hieroglyphs, lexical choices, genre, context, gender, etc.)

• framing translation strategy to find imaginative space between between source & target worlds for texts in world literature: productive balance between scholarly foreignization & “anything goes” domestication, avoiding extremes of specialist “thick translation” (Nabakov) or easy assimilation (ethnocentrism), bridging tensions (distance in culture, time, geography, etc.) of national vs. global literature, universal vs. particular, general vs. personal resonances & appeal:
  
  “The Egyptian poem operates for us today on three registers: of likeness, of unlikeness, and of a shifting like-but-unlike relation to our own world” (p. 421)
  
  “The poems . . . achieve their full force as world literature when we translate them in such a way as to preserve their immediacy and distance from us, both their universality and their temporal and cultural specificity . . . The work of world literature exists on two planes at once: present in our world, it also brings us into a world very different from ours, and its particular power comes from our doubled experience of both registers together.” (p. 424)
  
  
• translation’s ideal of nuancing, navigating & mediating sameness and difference in world literature:
  
  “Of course, one may or may not share this preference for ‘minoritizing’ or ‘foreignizing’; translations. Their popularity today clearly accords with the rise of multiculturalism and our new attention to ethnic difference; just as the melting pot has lost favor as a model for immigrant experience, so too assimilative translation is increasingly disfavored. ‘Foreignizing’ efforts are the translational correlate of the contemporary championing of ethnic identity. A proponent of a more universalist view of world literature could well object that foreignness can be overdone, not only in producing potentially unreadable texts but also by creating a separatist mode of translation that undermines the reader’s sense of connection to a common human experience. Yet even a reader with universalist principles should also object to a translation that simply assimilates the foreign work entirely to contemporary American values, a process that gets us to no common ground beyond our own local cultural position.” (p. 427)
  
  
  Monnus Mosaic, Trier (late 3rd century CE)

3. BMCR reviews of Hesiod’s Works & Days (BMCR Guidelines for Reviewers; Statement on Publication Ethics)

• Shaw on Lombardo (1994): guiding interpretant of Lombardo’s “plain, rural voice” – Hesiod’s strong personal voice made generic rural American (e.g Pandora’s “cheating heart” for ἐπίκλοπον ἦθος); judgments with specific illustrations & comparisons, some general criticisms (e.g. dearth of notes)
  
  
• Schroeder on Schlegel & Weinfeld (2007): focus on “dated” iambic heptameter couplets with slant-rhyming (“drowns out Hesiod’s voice . . . best read in small quantities”) without examples, sketch of introduction & notes (critiques idiosyncratic interpretations, e.g. feminist reading of Hope in Pandora’s jar, “one bizarre error” on catalexis); vague consideration of skopos – appeal to bifurcated English & Classics audience “with enough learning . . . to appreciate Hesiod rendered in a meter novel for translations of his poetry”, some “pleasurable” lines but doubts overall usefulness for undergraduates
  
  
• Holoka on Tandy & Neale (subtitled A Translation and Commentary for the Social Sciences, 1997): identifies narrow socioeconomic & social-historical skopos (prose study of emerging trade & markets, not for freshmen classics survey, others translations for “aesthetically pleasant English”) in keeping with editors’ scholarly interests (facing page translation & substantial commentary; untranslated concepts, e.g. dike, polis, basilees)
  
  
• Janko on Most’s Loeb (2007): Loeb skopos as prose translations “accurate and reliable while at the same time serving as a crutch for students”, brief remarks on “fluent and accurate” prose, not “too archaic nor too modern”; passive-aggressive polemics (initial praise, outrage at specific mistakes or omissions, e.g. Hesiod’s orality, relative dating of Homer & Hesiod, presentation of testimonia) – not Loeb edition he’d have produced (neglect of his own work on statistical study of Hesiod’s & Homer’s diction affirming Homer’s priority, n. 7)
  
  
  (Hesiod, Works & Days 503)