01: Mimnermus

The Process of Translation, Songs About Getting Older, Other Media

Recently I have been trying to get better at backgammon. This has been a frustrating project, because just when I think I’m finally improving I play a game that the computer evaluates as filled with blunders and which it rates, cruelly, as “error level: distracted”. If you read the the title of this post you’d be right to ask what backgammon has to do with Mimnermus (or just, “who is Mimnermus?”). To the second question: Mimnermus was an early elegiac poet, likely from Smyrna. If you’re interested in what “Solon of Athens, solar eclipses, and excavations in Turkey,” have to say about the details of Mimnermus’ life, Archibald Allen provides a thorough survey of various evidence concerning Mimnermus in his 1993 book The Fragments of Mimnermus: Text and Commentary.¹ As for the backgammon, as part of my efforts to improve I came across an article which describes winning at backgammon as consisting of a choice between three strategies: racing, attacking, and priming. The tricky part (as I am often reminded by the discrepancy between my choice and the “best” move) is identifying which strategy is the most important to the current state of the board.

When I work on translating poetry I often run into a similar feeling of tension between goals. To dramatically oversimplify the possibilities of translation, I most often find myself caught between faithfulness to philology and attention to empathy. By empathy I mean the attempt to reproduce in english not just the imagery and prose of an original poem but to write a translation that produces the same effect on me when I read it. In the case of this poem by Mimnermus I realized after trying for longer than I’d like to admit to construct a well metered english translation with long lines and clever syntax that I had been going in the wrong direction. The hoops I was making myself jump through turned out english poetry that was too arcane for the witty, bitter, directness of Mimnermus’ poem.

So, I got rid of them, and turned to rhyme for the thumping, plaintive quality I was looking for. All of a sudden a translation which had been going nowhere came together very quickly and much better than any previous versions. I think sometimes translating is just about spending a long time with a poem so that you leave yourself open to the luck of having an idea that lines up right with the original. I could make this waiting about backgammon too, but I’ll spare you for now. Luckily Mimnermus also did not put any boats in his poem, so you are also safe from a long tangent about the technical aspects of ancient Greek shipbuilding at least until I get around to Alcaeus’ ship of state poem.

Ancient boats do provide a good example of the importance I place on the technical accuracy of ancient writing. I’m sure my former professors could tell you how much I like it when an author uses a word for a very specific part of something, especially a boat part, but the same principal applies to translating works on other topics. If poetry is a reaction to the world around us, a way of putting down on paper our accumulated experience, then it must also be important to understand the physical qualities of the world that inspired Mimnermus to gripe so much about old age.

To say the same things in fewer words, spending time with a poem, understanding its effect on you, and understanding the material circumstances of the person who wrote it as best you can, are the key elements of my approach to translation. Of course I also try to make sure I haven’t mistaken one case for another and to match up philological details when I can, but ultimately I think good translation is trying to put yourself in a position that is as close as possible to what inspired the author to write a poem in the first place and to trace their journey from A to B. Obviously impossible (unless you have a time machine, in which case please let me know) but important to translating well anyways. In this case the result is that instead of Ancient Greek you get a short rhyming poem complaining about old age, enjoy!

Associated Media:

As promised, I’ll include some additional content with each poem. By “associated media” and “additional content” I mean that you get to see what this poem caused to pop into my head. Also, I mean the things that I happen to like at the moment which, like a square peg in a round hole, I force to make fit. So here you are:

A Few Songs:

“My Generation” by The Who (angry)

“When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles (nice)

“Always On My Mind” by Willie Nelson (Old Mimnermus to his κρυπταδίη φιλότης)

“Always On My Mind (2003 Remaster)” by Pet Shop Boys (the above, but for dancing in the kitchen)

Speaking of dancing in the kitchen, if old age cannot do much for us according to Mimnermus, it might be nice to see that it does improve at least some things. My mom is an incredible slow-cooker-cook and recently gave me a slow cooker of my own. Slow cookers strike me as a great example of improving things with age. If you are feeling down about the prospects of things getting older, this recipe from the New York Times and letting chicken cook for 6 hours could be the cure. It will probably be good (I’ll let you know if I try it) and might even make you think more positively about the effects of aging!

If that doesn’t work (and especially if you are looking to buy art) Christie’s is in the process of auctioning off Elton John’s collection. In particular one sale, “The Collection of Sir Elton John: Love, Lust and Devotion” is filled with lots of images that allude to what Mimnermus was so worried about losing as he got older. The photo titled “I See a Beautiful Gigantic Swimmer” by Duane Michals is my favorite. The title of the photo might be an homage to this poem by Walt Whitman, which begins “I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea,” although the poem is more tragic than the picture.

I sincerely hope you liked my rambling. In the future I’ll continue to try and take translation seriously and “additional media” not-so-seriously with absolutely no thoughtful curation allowed. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next edition of “exactly what happened to cross my mind while thinking about this poem”.

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1. West ML. Archibald Allen: The Fragments of Mimnermus. Text and Commentary. (Palingenesia, 44.) Pp. 9-19; 1 map. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993. Paper, DM 64. The Classical Review. 1995;45(1):156-157. doi:10.1017/S0009840X0029272X