Return to the Greek Camp (1.475-92)

ἦμος δ' ἠέλιος κατέδυ καὶ ἐπὶ κνέφας ἦλθε, [475]
δὴ τότε κοιμήσαντο παρὰ πρυμνήσια νηός:
ἦμος δ' ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς,
καὶ τότ' ἔπειτ' ἀνάγοντο μετὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν:
τοῖσιν δ' ἴκμενον οὖρον ἵει ἑκάεργος Ἀπόλλων:
οἳ δ' ἱστὸν στήσαντ' ἀνά θ' ἱστία λευκὰ πέτασσαν, [480]
ἐν δ' ἄνεμος πρῆσεν μέσον ἱστίον, ἀμφὶ δὲ κῦμα
στείρῃ πορφύρεον μεγάλ' ἴαχε νηὸς ἰούσης:
ἣ δ' ἔθεεν κατὰ κῦμα διαπρήσσουσα κέλευθον.
αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ' ἵκοντο κατὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν,
νῆα μὲν οἵ γε μέλαιναν ἐπ' ἠπείροιο ἔρυσσαν [485]
ὑψοῦ ἐπὶ ψαμάθοις, ὑπὸ δ' ἕρματα μακρὰ τάνυσσαν:
αὐτοὶ δ' ἐσκίδναντο κατὰ κλισίας τε νέας τε.
αὐτὰρ ὃ μήνιε νηυσὶ παρήμενος ὠκυπόροισι
διογενὴς Πηλῆος υἱὸς πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς:
οὔτέ ποτ' εἰς ἀγορὴν πωλέσκετο κυδιάνειραν [490]
οὔτέ ποτ' ἐς πόλεμον, ἀλλὰ φθινύθεσκε φίλον κῆρ
αὖθι μένων, ποθέεσκε δ' ἀϋτήν τε πτόλεμόν τε.

My Translation:
When the sun sank down and black night came on,
they bivvied on the beach, hard by their ship.
Then, when rosyfingered Dawn spread out her rays,
they launched the ship and headed back to war,
and Apollo sent a fair returning breeze.
They raised the mast, unfurled the sails, and watched
the wind snap them taut, as purple waves slid past
and hissed and foamed along the keel’s two sides;
so the swift ship coursed her way across the sea.
And when they reached the great Achaean host,
they hauled the black ship high above the shore
and propped her up with blocks on either side.
The men went off among the ships and tents,
but sitting by the swiftsailing ships, he
raged on—Peleus’s son, swiftfooted Achilles.
Neither to council did he go, where men
win great acclaim, nor to war, but his heart
consumed itself: he sat and ached and burned
for war, to hear the hue and cry of war.

Alexander Pope’s Translation:
’Twas night; the chiefs beside their vessel lie,
Till rosy morn had purpled o’er the sky:
Then launch, and hoist the mast: indulgent gales,
Supplied by Phoebus, fill the swelling sails;
The milk-white canvas bellying as they blow,
The parted ocean foams and roars below:
Above the bounding billows swift they flew,
Till now the Grecian camp appear’d in view.
Far on the beach they haul their bark to land,
(The crooked keel divides the yellow sand,)
Then part, where stretch’d along the winding bay,
The ships and tents in mingled prospect lay.
But raging still, amidst his navy sat
The stern Achilles, stedfast in his hate;
Nor mix’d in combat, nor in council join’d;
But wasting cares lay heavy on his mind:
In his black thoughts revenge and slaughter roll,
And scenes of blood rise dreadful in his soul.

Comments:
I feel better about this section than the last few, and I think the difference is that I didn’t stop at translating the Greek into iambic pentameter. After doing that in a rough and ready form, I set it aside for the day, then returned to it with the idea of loosening it up and making it flow better. One thing that’s really helping with that is fully licensing myself to add the occasional extra syllable and let the occasional line end on a trochee. For example, the first three lines presented a challenge in that there is no enjambment—each line contains a complete clause; what’s more, the first and third clauses begin with the same temporal expression (ēmos d’, “And when”). Here I was faced with a common dilemma: the Greek has no qualms about beginning these two proximate lines in the same way, but in English it sounds terribly wooden to do so. Whereas a few weeks ago I would have argued for conveying the repetition, I’m now leaning more and more toward creative adaptation with an emphasis on the aesthetic quality of the translation itself. Thus I decided to vary the beginning by just a little to break things up. This involved adding “then” to the beginning of the third line, which I think gives much better flow, even if it makes this instance of the most famous of all lines (“when rosyfingered Dawn . . .”) into an 11 syllable one. What’s more, to keep this line to just 11 syllables, I had to drop part of Dawn’s traditional epithet, for she is properly “early-born, rosy-fingered dawn.” But I like the phrase I came up with and plan to repeat it throughout the translation (“when rosyfingered Dawn spread out her rays”). It has a certain simple elegance, I think.

Meanwhile, Pope is quite interesting in this passage. He both compresses and expands upon the Greek at will. The whole first line about the sun setting and night coming on gets compressed to the impressively terse “’twas night.” On the other hand, consider the expansions in the last bit on Achilles. What I really admire here though is his translation of lines 480-82, which I struggled with in my own translation for an embarrassing long time. Pope gives: “The milk-white canvas bellying as they blow, / The parted ocean foams and roars below.” That’s just beautiful.