First Simile (2.455-58)

ἠΰτε πῦρ ἀΐδηλον ἐπιφλέγει ἄσπετον ὕλην [455]
οὔρεος ἐν κορυφῇς, ἕκαθεν δέ τε φαίνεται αὐγή,
ὣς τῶν ἐρχομένων ἀπὸ χαλκοῦ θεσπεσίοιο
αἴγλη παμφανόωσα δι' αἰθέρος οὐρανὸν ἷκε.

Translation
And just as when a deadly blaze
will torch a boundless wood that’s spread
across some mountain peak and cast
its awful glare up to the skies,
so then the gleam that flared
from off the wondrous bronze
of soldiers marching forth
reached through the air to heaven’s heights.

Comments
Today I post just a short passage, the first in the famous string of five similes in lines 455-83, preceding the second invocation of the muse. What I’ll try to do is post one simile per day for the next five days, then on the sixth day post a more polished version of all five together (then on the seventh day I’ll rest). I should note that my style is undergoing another shift in response to some of the reading in translation theory that I’ve done over the past week. I’m not sure yet how this shift will play out, but I’m being led back to my earlier approach, which aimed for a minimalist, modernist version, one that is more true to the spirit than the letter of the source text. For a while now I’ve been sticking fairly close to the text, and I think now I’ll begin to allow myself more freedom. I guess I’m in the midst of the struggle “to find a style” as H.A. Mason puts it:

“[T]he task of the translator is almost entirely to find a style, what Milton called an answerable style. For the modern writer’s convinctions must be all embodied in his style. Yet the same consideration makes it clear that the style cannot be Homer’s. For just as there must be mediate terms to recreate the heroic, the answerable style must use the possibilities inherent in English style to convince us.” (127-28)

For today’s short passage, I first made a quick literal crib of the passage, then I returned a few hours later and tried transforming it into an “answerable style” without looking back at the Greek. After coming up with a roughly poetic version, I studied the Greek closely again to get a feel for its distinctive poetic qualities, then returned again to my poetic version and tweaked a few things, mainly changing the line breaks and punctuation to catch the flow of ideas better. It might be of interest to see my initial crib and compare it to the poetic version I ended up with. The crib read:

as when some destructive conflagration consumes a boundless wood
high on some mountain peak, and the glow shines forth from it,
so did the gleam shining from the wondrous armor of the men as they approached
reach up through the air and into the heavens.