Bambini ancora? Beh, qualcosa del genere. Dalla canzone sembra che canti una bambina che vuole scappare con uno. «Questo è il tempo in cui tutti gli adulti dormono», dice la canzone, quindi presumo si tratti di una bambina o di un bambino, e poi dice di non chiamarla «Giulietta che vuole scappare», quindi dev'essere una bambina. Comunque, la canzone è giapponese, e si chiama Romio to Shinderera, Romeo e Cenerentola (che mescolotto eh…). L'ho incontrata verso l'estate del 2012 e tradotta in Italiano quell'estate. Solo in Italiano, quindi il post è in Italiano. In effetti il testo manca dal file del 18/8/12 alle 21:18 e appare per la prima volta nel file del 17/9/12 17:09, tradotto solo fino a «Nee watashi to ikite kureru», e la traduzione si completa solo nel file del 17/8/13 alle 19:30. Secondo me, però, l'ho finita poco dopo quel 17/9 e non ci sono file per dimostrarlo. Non vedo perché avrei dovuto lasciarla lì a metà per poi riprenderla un anno dopo. Se non che in una mail del 17/3/13 alle 19:31 c'è un allegato che include la traduzione sotto… tranne per la riga «Ma ha significato questo o no?», che è lasciata come "??". In entrambi i file, quel che c'è coincide colla versione sotto, salvo che il 11/4/20 ad un orario imprecisato cambio «In 'sto stato d'animo» -> «Io mi sento così», che poi il 12/4/20 alle 12:39 diventa «Io così mi sento». Andiamo a vedere!
Watashi no koi wo
Higeki no Jūrietto ni shinaide
Koko kara tsuredashite…
Sonna kibun yo
Papa to mama ni oyasumi nasai
Sêzê ii yume wo minasai
Otona wa
Mô neru jikan yo
Musekaeru miwaku no kyarameru
Hajirai no suashi wo karameru
Kon'ya wa doko made ikeru no?
Kamitsukanaide
Yasashiku shite
Nigai mono wa
Mada kiraina no
Mama no tsukuru
Okashi bakari
Tabeta sê ne
Shiranai koto ga
Aru no naraba
Shiritai to omou
Futsuu deshô?
Zebu misete yo
Anata ni naraba
Misete ageru watashi no…
Zutto koishikute Shinderera
Sêfuku dake de kakete yuku wa
Mahô yo jikan wo tomete yo
Warui hito ni jamasarechau wa
Nigedashitai no Jurietto
Demo sono namae de yobanaide
Sô yo ne musubarenakucha ne
Sô ja nai to tanoshiku nai wa
Nee watashi to ikite kureru?
Senobi wo shita nagai masukara
Ii ko ni naru yo kitto asu kara
Ima dake watashi wo yurushite
Kuroi rēsu no kyôkaisen
Mamoru hito wa kyô wa imasen
Koetara doko made ikeru no?
Kamitsuku hodo ni
Itai hodo ni
Suki ni natteta
No wa watashi desho
Papa wa demo ne
Anata no koto
Kirai mitai
Watashi no tame to
Sashidasu te ni
Nigitteru
Sore wa kubiwa desho
Tsuredashite yo
Watashi no Romio
Shikareru hodo tooku e
Kane ga narihibiku Shinderera
Garasu no kutsu wa oite yuku wa
Da kara ne hayaku mitsukete ne
Warui yume ni jirasarechau wa
Ah kitto ano ko mo sô datta
Otoshita nante uso wo tsuita
Sô yo e watashi mo onaji yo
Datte motto aisaretai wa
Hora watashi wa koko i iru yo
Watashi no kokoro
Sotto nozoite mimasen ka
Hoshii mono dake
Afurekaette imasen ka
Mada betsubara yo
Motto motto gyutto tsumekonde
Isso anata no
Ibasho made mo umete shimaô ka
Demo sore ja imi nai yo
Ookina hako yori chiisana
Hako ni shiawase wa aru rashii
Dô shiyô kono mama ja watashi wa
Anata ni kirawarechau wa
Demo watashi yori yokubarina
Papa to mama wa kyô mo kawarazu
Sô yo ne sunao de ii no ne
Otoshita no wa kin no ono deshita
Uso tsukisugita Shinderera
Ookami ni taberareta rashii
Dô shiyô kono mama ja watashi mo
Itsuka ni taberarechau wa
Sono mae ni tasuke ni kite ne
Non finiamo il nostro amor
Come quello di Giulietta della tragedia
Scappa via di qui insieme a me…
Io così mi sento
Al babbo ed alla mamma dico buonanotte
Fate dei sogni che più belli non si possa
È il tempo in cui
Tutti gli adulti dormono
Col caramello che mi attira m’ingozzerò
E incrocerò i miei piedi scalzi ed esitanti
’Sta notte qua dove potrò andare poi?
Non venire a mordermi
Trattami dolcemente
Che le cose amare
Non mi piacciono ancor
Perché mangio soltanto
I dolci che la mamma
Mi prepara
Forse che non è normal
Pensare che se c’è
Qualcosa che non so
Allor lo voglio saper?
Tutto mostrami, su!
Quando io sarò con te
Ti farò vedere il mio…
E la Cenerentola sempre amorosa
Sol col suo vestito scappa via correndo
Magia, su, ferma il tempo ora per lei
Perché da un cattivon sarà ostacolata
E sono la Giulietta che sen vuole fuggir
Ma con un tale nome non chiamarmi mai
Così proprio è noi non siam legati allor
Se è così non è divertente, no
Ma di’ vuoi tu venire a vivere con me?
Ho messo su un poco troppo di mascara
Sarò di certo da doman ’na bimba brava
Adesso almen lasciatemi andare un po’
La linea di confine è questo laccio nero
E quel che fa la guardia oggi è andato vïa
Passatala dove potrò andare mai?
Finché tu mi morderai
Finché mi farai mal
Quella che ami tu
Son proprio io sì o no
Nonostante papà
Cui questa storia qui
Con te non par piacer
Quello che tu tieni là
Nella tua mano che
Allunghi verso me
È una catena o no?
Scappa via con me, su
O mio caro Romeo
Tanto lungi che ci riprenderan
Cenerentola or che la campana suona
Lascia dietro la sua scarpa di cristallo
Per questo or su cercate in fretta costei
Se no gli incubi la verranno a tormentar
Ah certo anche quella bimba ha fatto così
Mentiva nel dir che l’aveva sol perduta
Sì è così io faro lo stesso perché
Voglio solo che tu mi ami ancor di più
Ma guarda un po’ che sono proprio qui con te
Tu forse non vuoi venir
A spiare zitto dentro il mio cuore?
Non è forse pieno sol
Di quelle cose che vuole anche il tuo cuore?
Non sono ancora sazia
Su riempimi sempre sempre più
Fin quando seppellirai
Dentro di me finanche tutto quel che vivi
Ma ha significato questo o no?
Si dice che in una scatola piccola
Si trova più felicità che in una grande
Che devo far? Se andiamo avanti così
Io comincerò anche a non piacerti più
Però mamma e babbo, più avari di me
Perfino oggi non si sono ancor cambiati
Così è un bene è l’onestà
Quello che ho perso era un’ascia d’oro
Ci dicono che dopo troppe bugie
La Cenerentola se l’è mangiata un lupo
Che devo far? Se andiamo avanti così
Pure io sarò divorata un giorno, sì
We kinda keep on the theme of children (more like daughters, I think the children's song post was added later), and we have a Hakka song called Láu-mòi A-fa, Sister A-fa. Oh well, "daughters". Still, "dad also advises that A-fa should marry next year", so there's the "daughters" thing :). Anyways, this is in the Zhang Shaolin variety of Hakka, which is probably Fuiyong (Mandarin 惠阳 | Huìyáng) Hakka. I met with this sometime during my first year of Chinese study, probably between March and Summer 2012, and translated it in the sum… nope, only waaay later on Jan 11 2018 at 8:17 did I make it. And I need to fix the misinterpretation of "Ki-nyin" as "others" aka "the boys" when it's "ki", "she", plus "nyin", "a person". Let's go!
Nga láu-mòi hàm-tsò A-fa
Nyîn háu thien-cin phȧk-piak ya vû-hâ
Yù láu-shıt phín-sìn m tsha
Nyên-kí thiâm-thiâm shıp-pat mâng chut-kà
Nga kè láu-mòi ya tshiòng tó fa
Thiâm-thiâm tsíu-vo siong-sìi Lîm Tshiang-hâ
Nyîn háu kwai kín piàng vuk-ka
Hèu-sang-tsái sióng-òi hì cui vôn ki tá
Kî nyîn háu yìu pong-tet-shíu yìu thang-và
Tshiûng-lôi m hȯk-fài tshiên lò-fa
Kî hiáu yong ngô-ap yìu hiáu yong kai-mâ
Man-san hì hè nyì táu shâ ya mâu kóng phà
Kî hân hiáu thiâu-mú chòng-ko hȯk kit-tha
Thân khîm chui SAXPHONE m vòi tsha
Tsháu táu kak lîn-shà pàn-yà na tau-mâ
Nga pa tu khièn kóng A-fa mîn-nyên háu kà.
My young sis her name's A-fa
So naïve and her beauty has no flaws
Honest and well-tempered too
Though she's almost 18 she has not wed
My younger sis is like a flower
Her sweet dimples are just like Lim Chiang-ha's
She's obedient and does house chores
And there's so many young boys wooing her
And she is helpful and obedient too
Her money she will never waste
She can also raise ducks and geese and hens
She panics not if she comes across a snake
And she can dance and sing and play guitar
And flute and saxphone: not too bad
But the neighbours come with knives at midnight
My pa suggested A-fa next year shall wed
Last time we had Sappho's nostalgia for her daughter, so keeping on the theme of children, we have four children's song today.
The first three, Tingelingelinge tåget går (Ding ding ding the train goes), Mors lilla olle (Mother's little Olle) and Trasiga Trasse (name of a doll, note that "trasig" means "tattered, ragged"), are Swedish, while the last one, 世上只有妈妈好 | Shì shàng zhǐ yǒu māma hǎo (Only mama is the best in the world), is Chinese.
The Chinese one I met sometime in my first year of studying Chinese, that is between Oct 2011 and Sep 2012, and translated shortly afterwards into English. Well, actually, the song first appears in Session 13 from 18/6/12, session 12 being from 3/6, but the mega-intro tells me I only translated it on 28/8/12, so shortly, not really. At any rate, the first version I can find is the one from the 3/9/12 file, which is the below except for the changes discussed in a second.
Then on 30/5/19 around 3:45am I finally got around to making a new translation: Italian. I did most of it, leaving out only like one line. I made a version the following morning around 9:30, then one more past midnight, but I was unsure exactly what was up with the grass (we're talking about l. 6), so I asked on Quora, a couple answers came in, I read the first one, and… FACEPALM. What a blunder, oh my gosh! So the 的s in ll. 2 and 6 are not genitive markers (think English 's), but relative clause markers.
Which means my translations «Havin’ ma’s kid’s like havin’ gold» and «Not havin’ ma’s kid’s like havin’ grass», and the Italian «Bimbo, di mamma sei il tesor» and «È triste lei se con lei non stai» are totally bogus. So between 2:02 and 2:04 I fixed the English and the Italian, and I also had to adjust the «Gioia dove avrai?» to the new rhyme.
Finally, the line «A child with a mom like a treasure is» changed to the below form, for rhyming purposes, on 4/5/12 17:02.
The Swedish ones are a longer story. I met with them in my childhood, on a tape my dad brought back from Sweden. The tape was called Älskade Barnvisor (Beloved Children-Songs), and was a nursery rhyme tape. I never understood a word of them until, when a Danish friend of my brother's came to stay at our place for a week before my brother's concert in the Milan conservatory, the tape came back to my mind, and I searched for and translated all the texts of the songs. That was in Feb 2017 (1 year and 2 months ago approximately), and I chose these three to translate them to Chinese only. By the way, I translated Mors lilla Olle first, then Tingelingelinge, then Trasiga Trasse. «Those translations are found in this Fb note last edited "March 14" (presumably Pi Day 2017), and they were the versions below, modulo typos and the change 他有车把在后面的自行车。 -> 有一辆把在后面的自行车。 in the last one, first recorded in the very first saved draft of this post, from 9/4/18 at 9:00. All the songs were translated to English in a literal non-singable fashion, and it is those translations that I will place in this post», yeah no. We can do much better. First off, that March 14 is bullshit, and 2021. Idk why Fb does that shit with old notes. Anyway:
Mors lilla Olle first appears in the self-chage; specifically:
Verse 4 appears 21/2/17 9:43 with l. 2 «熊来跑走现在结束玩了» (seen fixed in 11:21:08 21/2/17 screenshot from 21/2/17), l. 3 with "ta" spelled 他, and no punctuation;
Verse 1 appears at 10:07 with l. 4 as «我去不该这么孤单的过» and again rather lacking punctuation;
Verse 2 appears at 10:26 with l. 1 as «吱吱吱谁藏在那?» and reduced punctuation;
Verse 3, minus the last line, appears at 11:10;
Then comes the note to complete the job and fix the punctuation, item 3 above, and 孤单的->孤单地; more specifically:
21/2/17 11:10:50 screenshot shows title being spelled as blog; well, it started as 妈妈的欧洲 and is about to get that zhou fixed :);
11:14:17 is presumably just copypasting the messages;
11:14:32, verse 4 gets cut from the start;
11:14:44, verse 1 correctly linebroken;
11:15:03 everything correctly linebroken, <> added for V3L3, verse 4 pasted back in;
11:15:15 first two verses probs about to be modified;
11:19:54 we're back at verse 3 and we see a punctuation change being made, I guess this is when I fixed the punctuation? Verse 4 still all in one line;
11:21:05 verse 4 is getting linebreaks and punctuation, but the last two lines are still untouched; verse 3 is now complete in note form;
11:21:08 the -er of wánrliǎo is being added in;
that's it for this song, so I assume the changes mentioned above were done between 11:15:15 and 11:19:54; as for the ones outside the note, it seems the post was drafted on 9/4/18, and that's when everything was fixed… except for item 1's «with "ta" spelled 他», which is only fixed in a post save from 14/7/19, where I assume I edited the post to fix that and maybe other things; yup, post checkup; but there's one more thing: 14/2/23 16:03, while looking through the screenshots, I think the line 用双小手将熊拍一拍 introduces a bear outta nowhere with no indication that the "dog" is actually a bear, which is the definiteness of the noun in Swedish; so I change it to 用双小那个熊拍, but bears actually use another classifier, which I fix 18:20 4/3/23 as I edit this tweak in at long last; the tweak in question was 用双小手将那只熊拍; 11/3/23 14:11 for some reason I change it to the below, which I now choose to keep because it puts "xiong" (bear) in a stressed position, and the "shuang" is really superfluous, who cares if Olle is petting the bear with one hand or two?
Coming to Tingelingelinge, here's the screenshot history:
21/2/17 11:25:43 we see 叮啊叮啊叮啊火车去 in the note;
11:26:15 叮啊叮啊叮啊火车来 qu jin da shi jie a [suggestion 区仅大世界啊, but of course the intended meaning was 去进大世界啊];
11:26:41 叮啊叮啊叮啊火车来 / 去进大世界啊， / 由医院就可上来; note that l. 2 is an older version;
11:36:45, l. 2 is still 去进大世界啊，, l. 3 is fixed to 有一元就可上来, l. 4 is missing, and we have «看…看…： / 他现在买个车票
11:39:10 changes 个车票 to 张车票;
11:40:52, l. 2 gets edited to hui qu guo wu zhou a [suggestion 回去过梧州啊]; 11:41:00, 会去 guo wu zhou a [suggestion 国五周啊];
11:51:29 & 11:51:32, l. 2 is 会去过五洲啊，, l. 4 is there as 跟我们来旅游啊。, and the end is «他现在买张车票 / 《》 / 《》», so the last two lines are missing;
Note has this in blog form save for a typo in l. 7, which reads 就上如火车里;
It is unknown when I made the last two lines; I would assume that, between the last screenshot for this song and the first for the next one, or rather the 12:20 screenshots just before doing the next translation, I finished this one; the only way to answer, since no screenshots of the note appear until 14/3, would be to examine all the SS up to the 9/4/18 one, because by then the translation is complete and inserted into the post draft;
Finally, Trasiga trasse;
21/2/17 12:30:15 xie po huai [suggestion 些破坏]; i.e. we have the title;
12:30:45: [谢破坏] 曾有个玩偶，ta ming jiao xie po huai [suggestion 他命胶鞋破坏]; i.e. l. 2;
12:35:41, first verse is in blog form, the chorus is missing, and verse 2 is started, with l. 2 «ta you che ba zai hou mian di zi xing che [suggestion 他有车把在后面的自行车];
iv. 12:37:01, the chorus is still missing, but V2L2 is 他有车把在后面的自行车。, l. 3 following as «ta xiang qian qi a [suggestion 他想牵起啊]»; 12:37:07 fixing the suggestion, we're choosing the qi character and the right one is line 2 char 4;
12:39:52, chorus still missing, V2L2 still unchanged, but verse 2 is now complete; 12:40:33 shows from 五分到十点他就来去影院 line to end of verse 2 exactly as above;
12:40:40 wa ba da [suggestion 挖吧嗒]: we're doing the chorus; 12:41:44 & 12:41:46: spelling chosen for 哇吧打，哇吧打，哇帕帕。; verse 2 is blog save for l. 2, as it was before;
12:48:24 shows from V2L3 to V3L2, in blog form save for V3L2 having the classifier 个 in place of 支;
12:48:29 changes precisely that classifier;
12:49:06 adds «you yi ri da feng lai dai zou xiao po huai» to what we previously had, with suggestion 又易日大风来带走小破坏]; that's V3L3, and the screenshot from 12:50:18, last for the note, shows it spelled right;
V3L4 is in the note in blog form; again, I have no screenshots, but I assume it was done between this and switching to math at like 13:17;
As for V2L2, «the change 他有车把在后面的自行车。 -> 有一辆把在后面的自行车。 in the last one, first recorded in the very first saved draft of this post, from 9/4/18 at 9:00», as mentioned above; I will eventually look into the screenshots from back then, so as to see if I copypasted from the note or had an intermediate file; this was further changed to 有把在后面的一辆自行车 for ease of singing 19/1/25 12:44 as I recorded the translation;
While editing the video (more specifically captioning it), I realised clocka can also mean watch, so I fixed 时钟 to 手表 on 9/2/25 at 19:55, and at 20:01, having realized över means past and not to, I fixed the following lines of the verse; this brings us from Video version to Final version.
We then end our post with Sappho E 142 LP inc. 25 C inc. 25, which reminds us of the line "Diving into mom's hug" (投进妈妈的怀抱) in the Chinese song. This is a quote from a scholiast on Theocritus, and it is about «Aeolians adding a consonant» to ἐπτερύγωμαι. It is then certain that the Etymologycum Magnum and the Etymologycum Gen. have it right as πεπτερύγωμαι, while the sources reading πεπτέρυγμαι got it wrong.
So let's see these songs, shall we?
Tingelingelinge, tåget går
Uti vida världen
Den som femti öre har
Får följa med på färden.
Se (…), se (…)
Nu köper han biljetten
Och nu stiger han på
Och tåget kan gå
Mors lilla Olle i skogen gick,
rosor på kinden och solsken i blick.
Läpparna små utav bär äro blå.
– Bara jag slapp att så ensam här gå.
Brummelibrum, vem lufsar där?
Buskarna knaka’, en hund visst det är.
Lurvig är pälsen, men Olle blir glad.
– Å, en kamrat, det var bra, se god dag!
Klappar så björnen med händer små,
räcker fram korgen, – Se där, smaka på!
Nalle han slukar mest allt vad där är.
– Hör du, jag tror att du tycker om bär.
Mor fick nu se dem, gav till ett skri.
Björnen sprang bort, nu är leken förbi.
– Å, varför skrämde du undan min vän?
Mor lilla, be honom komma igen.
– Å, varför skrämde du undan min vän?
Mor lilla, be honom komma igen.
Only mama’s best in the world
A child with a mom is like silver and gold
Dive into mama’s warm hold
Happiness you’ll hold
Without mama grief you’ll hold
A child without mom is like trampled grass
If you leave mama’s warm hold
Where will happiness hold?
[all again twice]
Ὠς δὲ πάϊς πεδὰ μάτερα πεπτερύγωμαι.
Sì come bimbo͜ io verso la mamma men volo.
Ding ding ding the train goes
Out in the wide world
He who has 50 cents
Is allowed to follow [us] on the joruney.
See (name), see (name)
Now he buys the ticket
And now he comes up (onto the train)
And the train can go
Dīng a dīng a dīng a huǒchē lái,
Huì qùguò wǔzhōu a,
Yǒu yī yuán jiù kě shànglái
Gēn wǒmen lái lǚyóu a.
Kàn…, kàn…:
Tā xiànzài mǎi zhāng chēpiào,
Jiù shàng rù huǒchē lǐ,
Huǒchē jiù néng qù.
Mother’s little Olle went into the forest,
Roses on the cheeks and sunshine in the eyes.
The small lips out, the berries are blue,
– Only I should not have to go here so alone.
Brummelibrum, who lumbers there?
The bushes creak, it’s surely a dog.
Shabby is the coat, but Olle becomes happy.
– Oh, a comrade, that’s good, see a god day!
[He] pats the bear with small hands,
Stretches out the basket, – See there, taste!
The teddy bear, he devours almost all there is.
– Listen, I think you enjoy berries.
Mother now got to see them, gave out a scream,
The bear ran away, now the game is over.
Oh, why did you scare my friend away?
Little mother, ask him to come again.
– Oh, why did you scare my friend away?
Mor lilla, be honom komma igen.
Māmā de Ōulè jìn sēnlín qù,
Méiguī zài liǎnjiá, yángguāng zài yǎn lǐ,
Shēnchū xiǎo chún, dài lánsè de yěguǒ,
«Wǒ què bù gāi zhème gūdān de guò».
Trasiga Trasse, a doll was called,
He had a clock that always went wrong.
5 to 10 so he went to the movies,
10 to 5 yeah then he went home.
Wabada, wabada, wa pa pa.
Wabada, wabada, wa pa pa.
Trasiga Trasse, a doll was called,
He had a bike where the handlebar is back.
He rode forward so he rolled back
Into a farm and up to a roof.
Wabada, wabada, wa pa pa.
Wabada, wabada, wa pa pa.
Trasiga Trasse, a doll was called,
He had a red spotted big umbrella.
One day there came the wind and took little Trasse
He went with the nose to the sky.
Wabada, wabada, wa pa pa.
Wabada, wabada, wa pa pa.
Céng yǒu gè wán'ǒu, tā míng jiào Xiè Pòhuài,
Tā yòu yī gè zǒng dōu cuò de shízhōng a.
Wǔ fēn dào shí diǎn tā jiù lái qù yǐngyuàn,
Shí fēn dào wǔ diǎn tā jiù lái huí jiā.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Céng yǒu gè wán'ǒu, tā míng jiào Xiè Pòhuài,
Yǒu bǎ zài hòumiàn de yī liàng zìxíngchē.
Tā xiàng qián qí a, jiù xiàng hòumiàn gǔndòng,
Gǔn rù nóngchǎng, yě gǔn shàng wūdǐng.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Céng yǒu gè wán'ǒu, tā míng jiào Xiè Pòhuài
Tā yǒu zhī hóngsè yuándiǎn de dà yǔsǎn.
Yǒu yī rì dàfēng lái dài zǒu xiǎo Pòhuài,
Tā jiù lái fēixiáng, bízi wǎng tiānshàng.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Céng yǒu gè wán'ǒu, tā míng jiào Xiè Pòhuài,
Tā yòu yī gè zǒng dōu cuò de shǒubiǎo a.
Shí diǎn wǔ fēn tā jiù lái qù yǐngyuàn,
Wǔ diǎn shí fēn tā jiù lái huí jiā.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Céng yǒu gè wán'ǒu, tā míng jiào Xiè Pòhuài,
Yǒu bǎ zài hòumiàn de yī liàng zìxíngchē.
Tā xiàng qián qí a, jiù xiàng hòumiàn gǔndòng,
Gǔn rù nóngchǎng, yě gǔn shàng wūdǐng.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Céng yǒu gè wán'ǒu, tā míng jiào Xiè Pòhuài
Tā yǒu zhī hóngsè yuándiǎn de dà yǔsǎn.
Yǒu yī rì dàfēng lái dài zǒu xiǎo Pòhuài,
Tā jiù lái fēixiáng, bízi wǎng tiānshàng.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Wabadǎ, wabadǎ, wapàpà.
Shì shàng zhǐyǒu māmā hǎo
Yǒu mā de háizi xiàng gè bǎo
Tóujìn māmā de huáibào
Xìngfú xiǎng bù liǎo
Méi yǒu māmā zuì kǔnǎo
Méi mā de háizi xiàng gēn cǎo
Líkāi māmā de huáibào
Xìngfú nǎlǐ zhǎo
Xìngfú nǎlǐ zhǎo
[Suǒyǒu duō liǎng cì]
Sol la mamma è la miglior
Un bimbo colla mamma è come un tesor
Se ti tuffi nel suo calor
Gioia avrai ognor
Senza mamma c'è grande dolor
Un bimbo senza mamma com'erba è
Se tu lasci il suo calor
Dov'è la gioia per te?
[tutto di nuovo due volte]
Pārvŭlŭs ūtquĕ pŭērcŭlŭ' mātr' ădĕ' ālīs.
Just like a small little child do I fly to my mommy.
We change type of nostalgia today: form nostalgia for youth, pining for a far-away daughter. This closes our series of Sappho posts with the fourth and last post. We have two poems today:
We start with a quote by Hephaestio, who quoted this 3-line passage to exemplify trochaic meters; it is Bergk 87, Edmonds 130, Lobel-Page 132, Campbell 132; from the Paracritical Note I gather that I first saw these lines as trochaic lines, and to reach this I wanted a synaeresis in χρυσίοισιν turning ίοι into a single syllable; then I read about Hephaestio's analysis (probably on Campbell, and I give you the image of this fragment in Campbell to avoid having to copy the quote text), which gives l. 1 as –u–x–u– || –u–x–u–x, l. 2 as –u–x–u–x || x–u–x–x, and l. 3 as –u–x–u–xx || –u–x–x; at that point, ll. 1&3 fit the analysis perfectly; l. 2, however, did not; I had for some reason already integrated Κλεῦις (from Edmonds), so to reach the analysis in question I proposed to add μοι after the name; adding a syllable after the name is also Campbell's proposal, perhaps another thing may be better; in any case, I then read Edmonds' idea that Hephaestio read Κλέευις or Κλέειϊς, and just followed Edmonds' Κλεῦις; by the way, Bergk has yet another take on that name: Κλᾶις; I don't know what I did about the meters in the translations; it seems I only imitated the original well in Italian, and the rest of the translations are merely trochaic meters;
Let us then look at what happens in my files:
L. 4 first appears in Edmonds form (Λέσβον ἀγρέην κε) in S2 (25/7), meaning SP2 (4/7) didn't have it at all still; in fact, that file still had the Wikisource take on the name, namely Κλῆϊς'; yes, with apostrophe;
The 16/8 file brings Edmonds' Κλεῦις and a synaeresis mark on χρυσί͞οισιν;
The start-of-November printout has an annotation giving us <μοι> in l. 2;
The [9,21]/12 printout, probably from 17/12, annotates the μοι again, deletes the synaeresis, and suggests ἐσλάβοιμί κεν in an annotation; it has an overlay which accepts the first two but does not cover the last one, so perhaps the last one is later than the overlay; said overlay is from the 21/12 Sapphus nova file;
That same printout bears the manuscript versions given below, which the 5/1/11 file updates to the S9 versions below;
The files and printouts only make the following two changes:
ai dorati fiori -> a dorato fiore, first appearing in the 17/5 file and not in the 7/5 Sapphus nova;
to golden -> t'golden, ditto;
The typo Pulchrĕ in the Latin is only fixed in blog times; the post was posted 5/5/18, and no post update notice mentions correcting this, so it would seem the correction happened while drafting the post;
The Italian, going to the edition form below, has the following changes:
«Cle͜ide del mi͜o cuore» -> «Cleide, amore del mio cuore», 15/5/25 16:50;
«Ella ha una gran beltà» -> «Ella͜ è di sì gran beltà», 16/5/25 18:05;
Addition of "no" then changed to "mai" at the end, 26/5/25 10:45;
The English version gets a "my" in l. 2 24/5/25 3:01, and reverses the elision "t'golden" Idk when before that;
Then we have the remakes, Latin being from 26/5/25 0:23-0:37, while the English starts at 0:37 and gets finished, with much work, 0:51, followed by the change superbā->venustā and 1:02;
We end with a poem from two papyri, which probably has holes between the two parts and in the middle of part 2; I discuss the papyri at the transcriptions post, and that is where the notation comes from; I also report the older version of the text below, which first appeared in the 5/1/11 file; note that:
The integration of l. 5 first appears in the 7/5/11 "new in Sappho" file;
The μέγαν->μέγα in l. 2 is blog-time;
In l. 7, the 9/6 file actually has προφανεστέροις, and the change back to προφανεστέραις is blog-time; a similar situation happens in l. 8 with ἐπαρτίαις vs. ἐπαρτίαν in the 9/6 file;
The two lines with the word μιτράναν are «[μ]ί̣τραν‹αν› δ’ ἀρτίως κλ[uu–ux» and «μίτραν‹αν›· ἀλλὰ τῶι Μιτυληνάωι» respectively in the file, and the changes are blog-time, I assume; I'm too lazy to check :);
OK, screw it, here are the last two tercets in the file's form: «[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ].[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] / †παισ̣απ̣ειον† ἔχην πο[λιν] / αἰ κε̣[ν] ἦ̣ ποικίλας κ[uu–ux / / ταύτα̣ς τᾶς Κλεανακτίδ[ᾱν] / φύγας λ̣α̣ῖ{σ}α πόλῑς ἔχει / μνάματ’· ο̣ἴδε γὰρ αἶνα διέρρυ̣ε̣[ν]»; the only non-blog-time change in this line is πο[λιν]->πο[λις] from the uncertainly-dated fragments file which is presumably either 25/6 or 14/7;
All other changes (modulo possibly changes to the bracketing and underdotting, and any underlines which all definitely first appeared on the blog, and the switch from BA-style lacuna marking "– ^ ^" to my style "–uu"/"–ux", which seems to have happened in the 17/5 fragments file) only appear in the 9/6/11 fragments file, and were dealt with on 2/6/11 as per diary;
be it noted that the indications of missing strophae probably also are a blog-time addition, and that the version below is actually copypasted from the 9/1/11 file, since the 5/1 file is a PDF that doesn't copypaste well (e.g. «[�]μμεναι μ�λα το�το . [ ^ ]» is how l. 5 gets copypasted from that file); the meter is gl||gl||cr+gl, that is two glyconics and a line made from a cretic and a glyconic, aka xx–uu–ux || xx–uu–ux || –u–|xx–uu–ux, and I imitated that with rhymes interspersed in English and Italian, and kept it in Latin.
Ho͜ una figlia splendida, || simile͜ ai dorati fiori
Ella ha una gran beltà, || Cle͜ide del mi͜o cuore,
Per le͜i ’n cambio Lidïa || tutta [prenderèi]
Né la cara [Lesbo… ]
Ho͜ una figlia splendida, || simile͜ ai dorati fiori
Ella ha una gran beltà, || Cle͜ide del mi͜o cuore,
Per le͜i ’n cambio tutta Lidïa || i͜o non [prenderèi]
Né la cara [Lesbo… ]
Ho͜ una figlia splendida, || simile͜ a dorato fiore
Ella ha una gran beltà, || Cle͜ide del mi͜o cuore,
Per le͜i ’n cambio tutta Lidïa || i͜o non [prenderèi]
Né la cara [Lesbo… ]
Ho͜ una figlia splendida, || simile͜ a dorato fiore
Ella͜ è di sì gran beltà, || Cle͜ide͜ amata del mi͜o cuore,
Per le͜i ’n cambio tutta Lidïa || i͜o non [prenderèi]
Né la cara [Lesbo mai.]
Est mihi puella pulchra, floribus habetqueparem habet quĭd’ a͞urĕīs1
Formam est quæ par, mihi carissima Cleis, IpseaPro ea eg Ipsa pro’ e͞a nequ' omnem nec Lydiam totam ^ha͞udquĕ cārăm is missing^
Lesbum accipi͞am 1Messy manuscript, presumably floribus habetque parem -> florribus parem habet -> floribus quid(em) aureis.
I do have a pretty daughter, to golden flow’rs she has
Comparable indeed a beauty, Cleis, who my love has,
I would not [exchange] for he^r^ all Lydia, nor darling
[Lesbos for me…]
I do have a pretty daughter, to golden flow’rs she has
Comparable indeed a beauty, Cleis, who my love has,
I would not [exchange] for her all Lydia, nor darling
[Lesbos, not at all… ]
I do have a pretty daughter, || t’ golden flow’rs she has
Comparable indeed a beauty, || Clei͜s, who my love has,
I would not [exchange] for her || all Lydia, nor darling
[Lesbos, not at all… ]
Oh how pretty my child is, || quite comparable in beauty
To a golden flow'r most pretty, || my Clei͜s, my darling baby,
Even all of Lydia or dear || [Lesbos] I would never
[Take] in place of her, oh no!
In the last two posts, we had a lot of Sappho. Now, in one fragment in the last post, the ending «I won't marry you 'cos I'm too old» suggests some nostalgia for youth, and another fragment from the post before that, the one we only have line endings of, mentions sweet singing and a violet-bosomed girl, which also seem to hint at youth. So today I'm bringing you 5 poems, 2 of which certainly express nostalgia for youth, whereas of the other three, one also does in some versions, and the other two do in this particular completion (which is AFAIK the only completion that was made, since besides Edmonds people tend not to complete so much). The critical notes are, with one exceptions, short enough to be made right before the poems. The exception has a huge critical note, and is why I prepared this post on July 5-6 2017 as a draft. That draft has since been edited on March 1 2018 because I created the papyri transcriptions post in the meantime so the exception may not have the incredibly long critical note I mention. "You were also a tender young child" has its Italian version featured in a 2/5/11 file with alternate l. 9 «Per il grande Olimpo non v'è una via». The same file also features the Italian version of "Remember: we did those things too", with the variant l. 2 «Quel che quasi vecchie si ha in pensiero» and the comment «καί γ᾽ ἂρ» indicating a different word division of l. 3, probably matched by the translations. Let's get to those poems though.
Weaving garlands
This is fragment Bergk 34 [66], Edmonds 67, Campbell 125. It is a quotation by a scholar on Aristophanes (full abbreviated referece Schol. Aritsoph. Thesmoph. v. 400). According to Bergk, tradition has the passage as «Πρὸς τὸ ἔθος ὅτι ἐστεφαναπλόκουν αἱ παλαιαί· Σαπφώ· αὐτάορα αἰστεφαναπλόκουν». The part before the quotation says «Concerning the custom whereby the ancients wove garlands; Sappho». The passage is blatantly immetrical and corrupted. Various restorations exist. Bergk reads «αὔτα γὰρ ὠράα στεφαναπλόκουν», «for I myself, in my youth, wove garlands», similar to the solution I adopted back then, but making it an Alcaic hendecasyllabic, hence probably part of an Alcaic stanza. Edmonds reads «αἴ τ' ὀράαι στεφαναπλόκην», translating to «and the maids ripe for wedlock wove garlands»; this makes it look like a dactylic tripody, or maybe some Aeolic dactylic line (compare Hector and Anromacha) we only have the end of, and makes the meaning completely different from Bergk and me. Campbell leaves it as locus disperatus, reading «†αυταόρα† ἐστεφαναπλόκην», and translating to «(I myself in my youth?) used to weave garlands». Bibliotheca Augustana reads «...αὔτα / ὠράα στεφαναπλόκην»; the meter is incomprehensible, since the last line is evidently a glyconian, but the first one ends in a double long syllable, which is not how a glyconian ends. safopoemas only has «όραΤαι», presumably meaning «ὀραῖαι», «young (plural feminine)», but translates «y ellas, hermosas, tejen guirnaldas», «and they, beautiful, weave garlands», rendering evident how horrible that document is. Greek Wikisource has «Αὐτὰρ ὀραῖαι στεφανηπλόκευν», which would be what I'd probably choose now, since it's closest to the tradition. It does, however, suppose a single missing syllable at the start, or maybe a whole 5 syllables, depending on which meter you choose. Back in the days, I didn't have Bergk, I didn't look at Edmonds because «non ho un indice per ricerca veloce e la navigazione del pdf è molto lenta» («I don't have an index for quick search and navigation of the pdf is very slow», and it more or less still is, though I now made myself that index), so I completed B.A. in two ways, either «Ὡς πλεῖσταί γε, καὶ] αὔτα ‹ἦ / Ὠ›ράα στεφαναπλόκην», i.e. «Like most women indeed, even] I ‹actually, / In› my youth, wove garlands», or the below fashion. In fact, I suspect the below is from somewhere, but I can't trace where. My Paracritical Note from those days makes no mention of The Complete Poems of Sappho, but says that the only one amending save for safopoemas, Edmonds, and Greek Wikisource is BA, so I assume TCPOS doesn't amend either.
The completion and translations all date to between May 2010 and Dec 30 2010, I guess closer to the former than the latter. In fact, all the work on this fragment besides the Italian remake were done in December 2010, since the text is not fixed in a Dec 2010 printout of the fragments. The translations specifically can be placed past 21/12/10, since a "new in Sappho" file of that date has none of them.
The Italian original didn't really have the right rhythm and was thus remade at 10:52 on 13/9/21.
Moreover, the Latin «‹Ōlīm› cūm, iŭvĕnīs t’ ĕrăm.» featured a "cum" that seems shoehorned, so at 15:12 on 18/5/23 I fixed it as below.
‹I› myself ‹once› did garlands make,
In my young age, for beauty’s sake.
Beautiful gifts of the Muses
This is Bergk 80 [43], Edmonds 118, Campbell 58, and the one with the huge-ass critical note. Same dating info for the translations. I report the P.Oxy. 1787 lines with blank lines between what should be different poems, then I add the poem that P.Köln has before the Tithonus part, as completed by Obbink's article. That poem will only have an English prose translation for the moment, because I never knew it existed up till I looked further into the sources, but I report it because IIRC it is still thought to be Sappho, and who knows if I will one day make a translation into poetry. Group 6 of The Rest of Sappho has different restorations and/or more completions for many of the below.
Now for the history.
In the 2/11/10 file, the Greek text is missing some parts (see the text put in the manuscripts tab below), and the translations are completely absent;
The presumably 3/11/10 printout has manuscripts for the parts from the 13/11 file, then the pages of that file inserted in it with manuscripts of the rest and overlays with the rest; the manuscripts below are a combination of all the manuscripts in this printout; also, the integration πολυώνυμόν is from between 2/11 and 13/11, and annotated on the Greek, and the translation to Latin of that line is on top of the rest of the manuscript of the 13/11 parts, as well as in the manuscript in the form given below; l. 24 has manu «eg'ipsaqu'amo» in the original pages, and the form below in the inserted pages;
The diary only says a translation was almost completed on 12/11, and since the file from the next day has only the Italian in a "nearly complete" state (in fact, it's complete), a big chunk of Italian must have been done that day;
By the 13/11 file, the Italian is complete, the Latin has ll. 1-9 (plus an extra blank line I expunged from all translations at the beginning of the texts) 17 22-23, and the English is absent; the following differences can be seen:
L. 18 Latin has cūm in place of nām;
L. 4 Italian has ella in place of lei;
L. 11 Italian has soave instead söave, and ends with a period instead of a semicolon;
L. 13 Italian has «Diventat'è» in place of «Diventata è»;
L. 14 Italian has «E il cuor» instead of «E 'l cuor»;
L. 15 Italian is «Che ugualmente ai fauni erando un tempo rapide a danzare»;
L. 19 Italian has the typo "portanto;
The 17/11 diary says I translated ll. 12-13 and 21, and reports the below final forms;
The 19/11 says «traducto anglice "ὔμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν", quod demum abrelinquere possum, exeo» (having translated "ὔμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν" [i.e. this fragment] to English, which I can finally leave behind, I go out [of the classroom I suppose]), so that's that; also, it mentions I printed these translations out, so I assume this is when the overlays in the presumably 3/11 printout were made, which match the 5/1/11 file; note how the Italian manuscript is missing ll. 10-13; those were probably the first I did, who knows where; probably directly on computer;
In this file, we see the missing parts appear, and items i, iv-v, and vii get fixed; now, the appearing parts (which also get translated btw) are probably from the holidays, where I believe I discussed the fragment in the Paracritical Note; indeed, the overlays mentioned above, while fixing those errors, do not add the parts; thus, the errors were fixed within 19/11;
The P.Oxy. lines also display the English and Latin versions found in Ýmmĕś pĕdà Mŏísan_latinoanglice.doc, a file from 20/11/10, created 17:12 and edited 17:25; Latin only has ll. 10-25, with differences only in 14 and 22; the English also stops at l. 25, but has the lines before 10 (in fact, has an extra line there), where the extra bit of papyrus is missing, and differences only in ll. 13 18-19 and 25; 'twould seem l. 25 English and l. 14 Latin blog thing, so keep an eye out for them at the end of this history, and the other differences are precisely the ones listed in the next item;
This leaves us with ii, iii, and vi to fix, plus the following extra things:
Latin l. 14 «Gravisque mihi factu' cor est»;
English l. 13 has «hath it stolen»;
English ll. 18-19 «Indeed it is said that Tithon once the rosy-armèd Dawn did, / Conquered by his love, go bringing out unto this earth’s extreme en[ds]»;
Out of those, only ii gets fixed in the files, more specifically in the 17/5/11 file, putting it between 7/5 and 17/5;
iii appears to be a blog-time change, but the old intro didn't mention it, so it was probably done upon writing the draft for this, which happened I'm not sure when, but within the posting date of 1/5/18 and after Jun 2017 when I opened the blog;
「On 21/8/21 at 15:19 I notice «Grāvīsquĕ mĭhī fāctŭ’ [c]ŏr ēst» misgenders "cor", so I fix it as below」, and this is a;
「At 15:24 I fix «Che͜ ugualmente͜ a’ fauni͜» as per below」, and this is vi;
「The lines «Indeed it is said that Tithon o[n]ce the rosy-armèd Dawn did, / C̣ọṇq̣ụẹṛed by his love, go bringing out unto this earth’s extreme ends» were also touched that day. At 15:28 I start with «that Tithonus did once the rosy-armed Dawn», because that is the name. Then, at 15:28 still, I make the current version」, and that's c;
Finally, 「"Beautiful gifts of the Muses" got a fix to English l. 14 at 13:05 of 13/9/21, where "hath it stolen" became "hath all stolen"」, and that is b;
Note that the overlay for the English has an annotation «Caught by love for him», which was apparently ignored or missed.
There are, finally, some more recent tweaks:
successum ad ora donat -> successum ad ora donet (12/10/24 16:06) -> bonum ōrīs donet exitum illa (14/10/24 0:34) -> bonum ōrīs donet exitum ill* (0:35) in the last line of the pre-Ymmes lines;
consumptam is apputatque -> consumptam i' reputatque (12/10/24 16:06) -> consumptam eam putatque (16:07);
alla bocca dà successo -> alla bocca dia successo, 12/10/24 16:07;
Beauty, yes, and splendour very soon th' love for the sun did earn me -> Beauty, yes, and splendour my great love for the bright sun hath earnt me, 12/10/24 16:09; this original version given here is the one from SP5 and the SP4 overlay, and is in no OS; SP5 seems to have been printed on 17/12 based on the diary, and OS9 whic doesn't have it is from 9/12, so that would be the range.
…
…
…
…a
[x‒uu, ‒ ‒u] avendo ella fuggito [‒x
x‒uu, ‒ ‒uu, ‒ ‒uu,] esser carco
x‒uu, ‒ ‒uu, ‒] altr[uu, ‒u] ella
x‒uu, ‒ ‒] peso [‒ –] che, [‒u‒]a
[x‒uu, ‒ ‒u] la [‒ ‒uu –]nimo te
[x‒uu, ‒ ‒uu] alla bocca dà successo.
<4v.
feci
(usqu'ad
ἐκ μελαίναν)>
E il cuor m'è pesante, e le ginocchia su più non mi tengon,
Che ugualmente ai fauni erano un tempo rapide a danzare.
Questo io lamento di frequente; ma che debbo fare?
Gl’uomini di essere immortali occasion non tengon.
E infatti si dice che Titon l’Aurora braccia d’oro,
Presa dall’Amore, andò portando ai confin di terra,
Bello e giovin, ma lui prese per il tempo che rinserra Grigio di capei, in ugua avente un’immortale sposa.
[x–uu, – –uu] crede lei consumataunta stare
[x–uu, – –uu, – –u] potrebbe dare.
La delicatezza amo io, sappiate po' anche questo:
Del sole l’amor bello splendor mi ha donato presto.
P.Oxy. lines, English
I know [x]
na
having she then fled [–x]
to be loaded [–x]
… … … … x–uu, – –uu, – –] other [–u s]he [x
weight [–u] what [–u–x
you of names so many
[x–uu, – –uu] success to the mouth a-giving.
You all to the violet-bosomed Muses’ pretty gifts, o virgins(?)maidens,
Hasten, and the sweet song-loving lyre, clear-singing and melodious;̣
Once my body tender was indeed, but now old age already
Hath it stolen, and, from black it was, my hair all white has turnèd,
And heavy my heart has now become, my knees no longer hold me, OWhich onece very quick did dance, as lightly as fawns indeed in dancing.
Thiese things very often I lament; what should I do about them?
Someone who’s a man can ne’er become si(?)one who can stop his ageing.
Indeed it is said that Tithon once the rosy-armèd Dawn did, Go bringingConquered by his love, ogo bringing out unto the ends of earth this earth's extreme ends
As he still was young and handsome, but hime anyway was taken
Gray-hairèd in time, by older age, e’en with a wife immortal.
… her consumed belive does
… he might give.
For delicacy indeed I love, and you<->know this thing as well:
Beauty, yes, and splendour very soon the love for th' sun did earn me.
[x–u chia]ma͜i [–uu, – –uu, –u] so [x
x–u] intorno [uu, – –uu, –u–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –uu, –u–]a
[x–uu, – –u] avendo le͜i [f]uggito [–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –uu,] esser carco 5
x–uu, – –uu, –] altr[uu, –u e]lla
x–uu, – –] pes[o –] che cosa, [–u–]a
[x–uu, – –uu, – –] te dai molti nomi
[x–uu, – –uu] alla b[o]cc[a] dia successo.
[Verso]͜ i doni belli [delle Muse s]en [di viola], donne, 10
[V’affrettate, e la] söave͜ amante del cantar, la lira;
[A me] la vecchiaia già [il corpo, giovin pria, rubònne,
Diven]tata ͜[è bianca] la mia chioma da com’era nera,
E ’l [c]uor m’è pesante,͜ e le ginocchia su più [n]on mi tengon,
Che sì come fauni͜ erano un tempo rapi[de]͜ a danzare. 15
Questo io lamento di frequente; ma che debbo fare?
Gl’uomini di essere ͜[im]mortali͜ occasïon non tengon.
E͜ infatti si dice che Titon l’Aurora braccia d’ rosa,
P̣ṛẹsa dall’Amore, andò portando ai confin di terra,
[B]ello͜ e giovin, ma lui pres[e] per il tempo che rinserra 20
L’avanzata͜ età, canuto,͜ av[ente] un’imm[o]rtale sposa.
[x–uu, – –uu] crede le͜i [con]sunta stare
[x–uu, – –uu, – –u] potrebbe dare.
La delicatezza amo i͜o, [sappiate po’]͜ anche questo:
Del sole l’amor bello splendor mi ha donato presto. 25
………………
Ama [
E [
x–uu, – –uu, – –uu, –] I know [x
x–uu, – –uu, – –uu, –u–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –uu, –u–x
x–uu, – –uu, –] having she fled [u–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –] to be loaded [–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –] other [–u] she [x
x–uu, – –uu] weight [–u] what [–u–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –] you of names so many
[x–uu, – –uu] success to the mouth a-giving.
Ye all to the violet-bosomed Muses’ pretty gifts, o maidens,
Hasten, and the sweet song-loving lyre, clear-singing and melodious;
Once my body tender was indeed, but now old age already
Hath it stolen, and, from black it was, my hair all white has turnèd,
And heavy my heart has now become, my knees no longer hold me,
Which once very quick did dance, as light as fawns indeed in dancing.
These things very often I lament; what should I do about them?
Someone who’s a man can ne’er become one who can stop his ageing.
Indeed it is said that Tithon once the rosy-armèd Dawn did,
Conquered by his love, go bringing out unto this earth’s extreme ends,
As he still was young and handsome, but he anyway was taken,
Gray-hairèd in time, by older age, e’en with a wife immortal.
[x–uu, – –uu, – –] her consumed beliveth
[x–uu, – –uu, – –uu, –] he might give.
For delicacy indeed I love, and know ye this thing also:
Beauty, yes, and splendour very soon th’ love for the sun did earn me.
…………
Loves [
And [
P.Oxy. lines, English
[x–u I ca]lled [–uu, – –uu, –] I [k]now [x
x–u] around [–uu, – –uu, –u–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –uu, –u–x
x–uu, – –uu, –] having she [f]led [u–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –] to be loaded [–x
… … … … x–uu, – –uu, – –] other [–u s]he [x
x–uu, – –uu] weigh[t –u] what [–u–x
x–uu, – –uu, – –] you of names [so many]
[x–uu, – –uu] success to the m[o]ut[h] a-giving.
[Ye all to the violet-bos]omed [Muses’] pretty gifts, o maidens,
[Hasten, and the] sweet song-loving lyre, clear-singing and melodious;
[Once my] body [tender w]as indeed, but now old age already
[Hath all stolen, and,] from black it was, my hair all [white has tur]nèd,
And heavy my [h]ea[r]t has now become, my knees [n]o longer hold me,
Which once very qui[ck] did dance, as light as fawns indeed in dancing.
These things very often I lament; what should I do about them?
Someone who’s a man can ne’er become one who can [stop] his [a]geing.
Indeed it is said that rosy-armed Dawn once did lead Tithonus,
C̣ọṇq̣ụẹṛed by his love, all the way out unto this earth’s extreme ends
As he still was young and [ha]ndsome, but he anyway was take[n],
Gray-hairèd in time, by older age, e’en wi[th] a wife imm[o]rtal.
[x–uu, – –uu, – –] her [con]sumed beliveth
[x–uu, – –uu, – –uu, –] he might give.
For delicacy indeed I love, [and know ye] this thing also:
Beauty, yes, and splendour my great love for the bright sun hath earnt me.
…………
Loves [
And [
] . not(?)[
] pray [
] . now [let] Thal[i]a [be present
] under earth may (who?) h[av]e
the great glory of the muses], having spoils as is [a]ppropriate
and everywhere] they would [marve]l [at me] while I am on earth
they call (me)] a shrill [swallow if], having taken the harp,
or the barbiton or that l]yre, I sing to wedding beds
I would marry, but I'm old
This is Edmonds 42 and Campbell 21. The source for this is P.Oxy. 1231 fr. 10, a scrap of papyrus of considerable size found in Oxyrhynchus – yep, we've already heard this place in Hector and Andromacha, and we will hear it again many many times. That papyrus is discussed at the transcriptions post. I follow Edmonds' reconstruction. I must admit I have no idea why my original file assumed a whole missing stanza before this. Campbell's line numbering suggests an extra lost line was visible in the papyrus. I'll just ignore that. After all, no point having 4 empty lines when we don't even know if that extra line actually belonged to the same poem (which is not an easy thing to determine, as we will see in the huge-ass note to the previous poem). So I'm just dropping that assumption. Two completions are justified by two quotations. One is at l. 8, where the Dissertations of Maxymus of Tyre (full reference in Bergk Maximus Tyr. XXIV) tell us that «Διοτίμα λέγει, ὅτι θάλλει μὲν Ἔρως εὐπορῶν, ἀποθνήσκει δὲ ἀπορῶν· τοῦτο Σαπφὼ ξυλλαβοῦσα εἶπε γλυκύπικρον καὶ ἀλγεσίδωρον· τὸν Ἔρωτα Σωκράτης σοφιστὴν λέγει, Σαπφὼ μυθόπλοκον» (Diotima says that love blooms when it has much and dies when it has little; gathering this, Sappho called [love] "sweet-sour" and "giver of pains" [the adjective in l. 8]; Socrates calls love a sophist, Sappho a "weaver of tales"). One might object that the quote has an accusative and the completion a nominative, however the quote is just "hey Sappho described love as X", so it's just telling us Sappho used that adjective, and nothing about what case it was in, IMO. The other one is l. 12. In this case, it is Apollonius Dyscolus in his treatise on pronouns (full Campbell reference Ap. Dysc. Pron. 124b (l. 67 Schneider)) who tells us that «τὰ γὰρ παρ' Αἰολεῦσιν ἕνεκα τῆς συντάξεως πολλάκις ἀποβάλλει τὸ ν δι' εὐφονίαν· ἄεισον ἄμμι τὰν ἰόκολπον· αἰ δέ κ' ἄμμι Ζεῦς τελέσση νόημμα, Ἀλκαῖος.» («[pronouns] which in Aeolian writers' works often lose the nu for euphony due to the context: sing to us of the violet-bosomed; but if Zeus should fulfill our plan, Alcaeus», where τελέσση must be amended to τελέση for reasons of meter). That quotation doesn't make it clear if the fragment was by Sappho or Alcaeus, and indeed Bergk ascribed it to Alcaeus and gave it number 12, but in the light of P.Oxy. 1231 we are brought to reconsider this. By the way, the excerpt quotes another line, which is Bergk Alcaeus 73, and which is Alcaeus 361 in Campbell.
The translation of this I remember as one I made around Easter 2010. In particular, I remember myself doing the Italian one while on the bus that took me to the Angelus with the pope that year. Aaaand that memory is incorrect. The ones done on the bus going "ad beatificationem Karoli Wojtyłæ», as the folia poematum put it, were in fact the next fragment here, and Let's sing for the couple. This was translated to Italian on 26/4/11 and to English on 7/5/11, as per "nova Sapphus" files, then to Latin on 17/5/11, as referenced in the folia. The Italian originally started «Se il mi͜o sen] pote[sse͜ ancor latt]e dare, / E il mi͜o] ventre ͜[adatto͜ a bambin]i [fare / Fosse͜ ancor, allor mi vedreste͜ andare,]», and was fixed to the below form at 1:20 on 1/5/22.
Se il mi͜o sen] pote[sse͜ ancor latt]e dare,
E il mi͜o] ventre ͜ancor fosse [adatto͜ a fare
[Figl]i,͜ allora voi mi vedreste͜ andare,]
Certa [di piede,] 8
Ver[so͜ un altro talamo; ma͜ or] vecchi͜ai͜a
M’empi͜e͜ il corpo [con rugh]e [a migliaia,
Né] volando͜ inseguemi ͜[Amo]r, [che rai͜a
Duol che non cede. 12
–u–x–] dell’illustre [–x
–u–x–u; la melodi͜osa
Arpa] prendi,͜ e cantami [della sposa
Seno di vi͜ola. 16
Degl’[a]mor più ch’altro u–u–x
–u–x–uu] finché v[a]ga
[–u–x–uu–u–x
–uu–x] 20
If my bosom] sti[ll] had [some mil]k to feed,
[Or] my womb [had power to babie]s [bre]ed,
[Then you’d see my steps going, su]re indeed,
To a new [bed 8
And new wedding; now] doth the old-age ill
[With a thousand wrinkl]es my body fill,
[Nor doth Lov]e pursue [me] in flight, [which ill
Always has bred. 12
–u–x–] of the noble [–
–u–x–uu] out now take
[Th’ harp, o’ th’ violet-bosomed] a song now make
[With her sweet voice. 16
–u–x–] of the [l]oves o’er all
[–u–x] long as she wanders [–
–u–x–uu–u–
–uu–] 20
Remember: we did those things too
Without P.Oxy. 2166(a)7a: old translations
This is Edmonds 43 and Campbell 24(a). The sources are two Oxyrhynchus papyri, P.Oxy. 1231 fr. 13 and P.Oxy. 2166(a)7a. Edmonds only had the first one at his disposal when he published his Lyra Graeca. Unfortunately, back in the days, I didn't know that, apparently, so I ignored Campbell completely and just followed Edmonds' completion, save for preferring the to my eyes equally valid completion of Campbell for l. 4 to the weird Edmonds long-υ συνεπόημμεν. The papyrus is discussed at the transcriptions post, and the more recent fragment destroys Edmonds' completion of stanza 2, while still allowing that of stanza 1. Along with the transcriptions, I present my own completion of the combination, mostly a rehash of Edmonds.
The translations of this probably date around the same period as those of the previous poem. Kind of. I mean, that period goes from "before 26/4" to "before 7/5" to "exactly 17/5", so yes, these translations probably did date to that period. The Italian at least, in its original form, was made in the night between 30/4/11 and 1/5/11, just after the Italian of this one, then by 7/5 it was almost in blog form, save for «[Quel che quasi vecchie s]i ha in pensiero» at l. 2, which was fixed between 24/5 and 9/6/11. The Latin originally had īstă in l. 3, but then on 20/9/21 at 19:37 I realized it didn't really fit, and presumably changed it to īllă, a change that was definitely on my mind on 25/9/21 at 1:16/17 as I typed this sentence.
[Dis]si [lor]: “O tenere donne, invero
[Ciò che quasi vecchie s]i ha ’n pensiero,
[A]nche noi negli’an[ni splendenti] – è vero –
Fatto [l’a]bbiamo:
[Molte pure] e bel[le] azioni [in essa
Fatte abbi]amo, [ed or che lasciate] dess[a
Voi, l’amore] m[ordemi ’l cuor con ressa
Di dolor] g[r]amo.
Italian
[Dis]si ͜[a lor]: “O tenere donne,͜ invero
[Quel che fino͜ a vecchi͜e s]i ha͜ in pensi͜ero
Giovin[ezza splendida f]atto ͜– è vero –
Da no͜i [l’]ha visto: 4
[Molte pure]͜ e bel[le] azioni ͜[in essa
Fatte͜ abbi]amo, ͜[ed or che lasciate] dess[a
Voi, l’amore] m[ordemi ’l cuor con ressa
Di dolor] m[e]sto”. 8
Unto them I sa]id: “Ten[der women, you,
Till old age, t]hink of [what you wish to do;
But remember:] in your [bright] yo[uth] did you
[Those things] not do?
Many [pure] and beau[tiful] things [did we
Then get] done, [and now] you [leave] tow[n, to me
Th’ love for you] d[evours the heart, ay me!,
To] s[h]arp [pains due]”.
With P.Oxy. 2166(a)7a: new Latin
Deeming all but the Latin translation above as badslations, I decided the Sicilian episode for this fragment would be a Latin crossover, which meant I had to fix this up, because the Sicilian had accepted the extra papyrus fragment, of course. Well, the anthology accepted it, the translation doesn't exist yet as I type. So anyway, on 19/7/24 I came to this and, between 19:42 and 20:22 I made a bunch more tweaks. The text I based my translation on is completion 2 found at A few papyri transcribed, with ἐκπονήσαμεν integrated in l. 2, but with all the double underdots and underlinings replaced with underdots, because those two have no clear definition and I will remove them from my Italian edition as well, replacing then with underdots, eventually.
I also realized, looking at Edmonds, that l. 2 was misinterpreted back in the day. It does not say "What you can remember near old age", but "As you will remember until old age". So I fixed that too. I'm left with a little meter problem, in that I had to assume I can use juventūtī as an archaic ablative when the regular one would be in -e. I asked Calcagno about it, but he hasn't replied it. I tried to fix it on 20/7/24 at 19:21 via «In juventūte luminōsā ea ipsæ / Fēcimu' quoque», which is badly non-scanning and doesn't help. I did, however, on that day at 13:07, fix the damn mūljerēs to fēminæ, which doesn't require turning an i into a semiconsonant to lengthen the first syllable. Now, as I contacted him about this, I also suggested the change «fāt[a ipsa ad eās» -> «dīx[ī ipsa tum eīs», but apparently this was lost in the messages. It was from 20:41 on 19/7/24.
«Fēminæ»,] dīx[ī ipsa tum eīs,] «ten[ellæ,
Sī]c[ut ad senēs r]ecolēti' se[mper],
Nōs [q]uoque illa fēcimus in juv[entū-
tī luminōsā.
Pūra] enim permulta tum atque pul[chra
F]ēc[i]mus quidem. [Cum ab] urb[e abīsse
Vīderim v]ōs, nunc [mihi c]or[d]a m[ordet]
F[o]rtibu' p[œnīs
Stūdium».
You were also a tender young child
This is Edmonds 46 and Campbell 27. According to Campbell, the sources for this are a whopping 7 papyrus fragments: P.Oxy. 1231 frr. 50-54, and P.Oxy. 2166(a) frr. 5a-5b, the last two of which weren't available to Edmonds, giving the completely different reconstruction he gives. In fact, Edmonds only used fr. 50 as a source, because the 2166(a)5 linked the other 1231 fragments to fr. 50 (except for fr. 53 which Edmonds ignored for some reason, maybe the combination hadn't been thought up yet), and without that link there weren't compelling arguments for the combination. Moreover, Edmonds used a transcription which the new fragments revealed to have incorrect letters. Anyways, I discarded Edmonds' completion, because either I knew about the papyri or I wanted a complete first line, or maybe both, who knows. I will report the fragment collage from the discussion in the transcriptions post at the end, before the big critical note, using colors to mark origin fragment, as I will specify just before the collage. Joining fr. 52 and fr. 50 was, by the way, a possibility already for Grenfell and Hunt. Edmonds' version fits perfectly with fr. 50, modulo swallowing a iota from l.3 in his ζαλέξα. One last thing: it appears that, for my completion to work, I tampered with part of l. 14. More precisely, the original GH transcription reads ]α̣ικ.[, so I saw that uncertain alpha and arbitrarily reinterpreted it as an omicron. Back in the days, I probably thought they would look similar, because I imagined shapes close to the printed ones, whereas uncials are not so, and indeed this change was totally unjustified and wrong. But I have to come back to the text I translated, so I'll keep that bad change. One last thing: Group 6 in The Rest of Sappho has both the Edmonds version and the different restoration of this Italian anthology. As for the translations:
Latin «Betw. 4/5 and 7/5/11 | OS24 residue placed after 4/5 by OS23, with SP6 manuscript», so that's the date range, it appears in the "new in Sappho" from 7/5 and is marked as to be done (at least for Latin) in the 4/5-edited "missing fragments" file, and has a manuscript (reported below) on the Jan 2011 printout;
Italian «Betw. 4/5 and 7/5/11 | OS24 residue placed after 4/5 by OS23, with SP6 manuscript «Ch'anche tu una tenera bimba eri» and «terminai 3/5 in lct et 4/5 adjornai Sappho» in place of the rest («I finished [this] on 3/5 and updated Sappho on 4/5», I guess it refers to OS23?)», so same thing as before except the manuscript has that single line and then «terminai / 3/5 in lct / et 4/5 adjornai / Sappho», meaning I finished the translation in the night between 3 and 4/5 as I lay in bed, and presumably reports updating "missing fragments" on 4/5;
English «Betw. 4/5 and 7/5/11 | OS24 residue placed after 4/5 by OS23, with SP6 manuscript for stanza 1», so much the same, and the manuscripted stanza differs from the below, modulo square brackets, in:
L. 1 ending in a semicolon instead of a comma;
"and" in place of "to" before the "sing" in l. 2;
L. 2 ending with the weird "you plea[se]", which doesn't rhyme when it should;
"do" missing at the end of l. 3;
«From that your heart» given as the final line, then changed to «Out of your heart» as it is below.
Once] you [wer]e a [tender] young child, you too,
[C]ome to me to sing [all] of this, please do,
[And] to talk, and to us [g]reat favours do
Out of your [h]eart: 8
For we’re [g]etting married; and well you [know]
This yourself, as fast [as you can] now, though,
S[e]nd the [m]a[i]ds away, may the gods [u–]
Have [uu–] 12
To the g[r]eat Ol[ympus there is no] way
[That for us m]e[n also may open stay;
–u–x-uu–u–
–uu–] 16
Fragment collage
So finally we combine the text, marking fr. 50 as black, fr. 51 as blue, fr. 52 as red, fr. 53 as brown, fr. 54 as purple, fr. 5a as cyan, and fr. 5b as pink (what a lot of colors :) ). Hopefully the terribly holey first stanza didn't change excessively since I first collaged this way back in July, so I adapted the colors and kept the rest as was, given it is omitted from the collage in the transcriptions post.
This poem (or these poems?) is very controversial. Indeed, it is not even universally agreed upon where the poems break. But we'll get to that later as we analyze the sources.
The first source (in a chronological sense), and the only source available for Bergk (fr. 80 [43]) and Edmonds (fr. 118) is Athenaeus's Deipnosophistae (another name we will hear very many times, and that we have heard in Hector and Andromacha), which, in book XV, say «ὑμεῖς δε οἴεσθε τὴν ἁβρότητα χωρὶς ἀρετῆς ἔχειν τι τερπνόν; καίτοι Σαπφώ, γυνὴ μὲν πρὸς ἀλήθειαν αὖσα καὶ ποιήτρια, ὅμως ᾐδέσθη τὸ καλὸν τῆς ἁβρότητος ἀφελεῖν λέγουσα ὧδε· Ἐγὼ δὲ φίλημμι ἁβροσύναν καί μοι τὸ λάμπρον ἔρος ἀέλιω καὶ τὸ κάλον λέλογχε, φανερὸν ποιοῦσα πᾶσιν ὡς ἡ τοῦ ζῆν ἐπιθυμία τὸ λαμπρὸν καὶ τὸ καλὸν εἶχεν αὐτῇ. ταῦτα δέ ἐστὶν οἰκεῖα τῆς ἀρετῆς.» (thus some codices, others start the quote with «ἐγὼ δὲ φιλήμμα βροσύναν»), which Edmonds translates to «Do you think that delicacy or refinement without virtue is a thing to be desired? Why, Sappho, who was a woman out and out and a poetess, too, hesitated nevertheless to separate refinement from honour, for she says: But I love delicacy, and the bright and the beautiful belong for me to the desire of the sunlight; making it clear that the desire to live comprehended for her the bright or famous and the beautiful or honourable; and these belong to virtue.». Bergk proposes his own emendation in the footnotes, «Ἔγω δὲ φίλημμ' ἀβροσύναν, καὶ γὰρ ἔμοι τὸ λάμπρον / ἔρος γλυκίρω ἀελίω καὶ τὸ κάλον λέλογχε». Outside the footnotes, however, he prints pretty much my text, save for having «ἀβροσύναν .... καί μοι». This means he accepts someone else's suggestion to emend ἔρος to ἔρως for metrical reasons. Edmonds has his own line-breaking to solve the same problem.
Then, Oxyrhynchus happened. Yes, that name again. Told you it was gonna pop up often :). Oxyrhynchus offered one big scrap of papyrus that definitely linked to this quotation, and two micro-scraps that possibly linked to the big one, though the link is doubtful. All of that is discussed at the papyri transcriptions post, where the following collage of the three scraps is presented, with fr. 1 uncolored, fr. 2 and 2a red (top is 2a, bottom 2, so no ambiguity), and the Athenaeus quote cyan:
Then, in 2002+ (meaning after Campbell, whose Sappho and Alcaeus book dates to 1952), a number of papyri were acquired by some institution in Cologne from some guy who possessed them. They were analyzed, and a number of them stuck out. All of those are discussed… wait for it… I bet you know… in the transcriptions post, where two combinations are presented. Indeed, the overlap is blatant (the only reason to combine the Köln material, in fact, besides it being from the same cartonage -- right?), but only starts at the κάλα δῶρα παῖδες line, so the rest of the lines in the Oxyrhynchus collage and in the Köln fragments are other poems – surprise motherEFFers! Anyway, here comes the combined text. The left column integrates the previous Oxyrhynchus collage with the Köln material, using blue for fr. 1, pink for fr. 2, and purple for fr. inv. 21376, keeping the non-common lines from Oxyrhynchus. The right column, on top of exactly the same integration, keeps the lines from Köln, thus using cyan for fr. 1b, and leaves the end of the fragments alone because it is not by Sappho so we don't care about it.
More on the lines in "Beautiful gifts of the muses" that come before the Köln part in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus
In this section, I want to narrate my interactions with that part. which brought me to a crazy completions (basically "pulling an Edmonds" on this fragment). I am following the relation of this I made to Calcagno in the evening of 24/6/24, injecting the dates and timestamps of the integrations made by me as found in my self-chat where I annotated them. I started with basically the papyrus text:
Here is the papyrus, which then goes on for a bunch more with more poems, as we have seen. The image, differently from the above text, is lacking fr. 2a (whence κάλεσσα, πέρι, εικε), which I don't know what became of it as it seems to have vanished from Sappho after the Grenfell-Hunt transcription. Both have an extra fragment first published by Lobel and dubbed L.Σ.μ. IV 1, which I never knew existed until blog times, and which I somehow thought might be fr. 2a at some point. This seems to transcribe «].[. .] . .[ / ]χ̣υ̣θ[.] . . [ / ] . χ̣θο[ / ]μ», and it inserts into ll. 5-9 of the above text.
φύγοισα(ν) and δάχθην require a word. The former sees an uncertain Y initially taken for an I, which is no wonder for a trace that is basically a dot plus an acute accent (yes, that is indeed in the papyrus). As for the latter, the first editors (aka Grenfell and Hunt) thought of δ' ἄχθην (as I had back in the days), but it looks like they had a thing for apostrophes since they even took the οἶδα for ιδ'α, though I see no sign of an apostrophe in either case.
Another thing that would come spontaneous is [πολυ]ώνυμόν σε, or the like. In effect I also ended up taking that up, but looking at the papyrus that trace does not seem compatible with ω, and the proposal of ]άνυμόν of the editors seems more likely. Cannot explain why they end up with ]αν ὐμο . . though.
στύματι or στύμασι? The latter would fit the gap better, because sigma is narrower than tau. Let's go with the former though, maybe that ]νι agrees with it.
Before the δάχθην there is a dot, which could be read e.g. as I.
We thus arrive at:
At this point, let the critics intervene. First off, that φύγοισα could be an accusative, maybe in the object clause of a verbum dicendi (cfr. φαῖσι δή ποτα Λήδαν ... εὔρην, or the ἔφαντο βροδόπαχυν Αὔων / ... βάμεν εἰς ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισαν in the part below, the Tithonus part). So someone involved in a fleeing act has been bitten. It could be Eurydice, so before δάχθην we want ἐχίδνας ὄδοντι. At which point I swoop in and complete even more:
L. 1 was completed 23/6/24 19:23, l. 2 was done 20:44 («Ἀρίσταιον is hard to integrate in x–u ἐχίδνας] ̣[.] ̣[uu––u ὄδοντ]ι ̣δάχθην̣, given that the first vestige is either Γ Ι Ρ Τ Υ Φ Ψ, so maybe the rho or T… maybe Ἀρίσ]τ̣[αι]ο̣ν̣ [ἐχίδνας μὲν ὄδοντ]ι ̣δάχθην̣», I wrote) except the first word which came at 23:42, and the ποτ' coming in place of μὲν at 23:45. That ]τ̣[ is admittedly a bit of a stretch, it looks more like ]ρ[, and that verb θήρηντά for "(Aristaios) who was chasing (her)" may not really fit.
Now we need to talk about the next line, . . . . . . . . . . ]χ̣υ̣θ[.] . . [. .] . λ̣λ̣[. . . . . . . . . . . α]ὔτα̣ν. «θ[.] . .» looks more like «θ [.] ε̣ι̣», or maybe the ε̣ is an ό. Maybe θ[ε]όι = θ[έ]οι, where the scribe accented the diphthong instead of the epsilon because they didn't know Aeolic too well :). The gap could be of one letter, we could read [Κ]άλλ[ιόπα, σὺ δ' in that place. We would thus have:
That ]χ̣υ̣ could be πάγ]χυ, or Idk what else. Always taking from the myth, we could integrate Δύσθυμοι ἔον, (the gods) were sad, because Orpheus, once he learned his wife was dead, sang in such a way that he made all the gods cry. I actually started with «x–uu– πάγ]χ̣υ̣ θ[έ]ο̣ι· [Κ]α̣λλ̣[οόπα, σὺ δ' α]ὔτα̣ν -> Καὔτταν κλαΐην πάγ]χ̣υ̣ θ[έ]ο̣ι· [Κ]α̣λλ̣[οόπα, σὺ δ' α]ὔτα̣ν not good because it's supposed to be in the myth, so aorist or perfect infinitive, not present.» (20:10), then considered «I guess Κλαύσασθ' ἐπὶ τὰν could do? Doesn't link to previous, uses tàn as pronoun… hmm…» (20:14), then «Κ'ησαν ταλανοι/ες παγχυ θεοί?» (21:24, but it's ἔον not ἔσαν/ἦσαν), and finally got to the integration given here at 23:51, where I also considered «Γένοντ' ἄτυχες», discarded at 23:52: «Second one is no-go because it should have ἀτύχεες». Thus, putting everything together:
For the penultimate line I took up, at least temporarily, the proposal of those who say that the apparent trace before the ν is not part of a letter, of which only the acute accent would remain. As if, after the putative ω, the scribe had gone down to the base of the ν, and this descent were the trace in question.
OK, I skipped a line, but I just went to the next one that I can integrate. Indeed at the start of the part we have of this lane we can integrare κεκλο]μένα. As an adjective with στύματι we can put κρέσσονι.
At this point we must discuss θῆται πρόκοψιν. Until relatively recent times, πρόκοψιν was taken as equal to προκοπήν, and the translation was something like "success is given to the mouth". Which obviously isn't very good, as that is a subjunctive, so "May success be given to the [better?] mouth", i.e. "May the better singer win" (my original idea for the Japanese translation, cfr. the English at the Sicilian anthology and the older version at the Chôka anthology). Instead, Benelli translates «che realizzi una prestazione con una voce migliore» (may (s)he make a performance with a better voice). Oh goodie, and where does this translation pop out of? Aside from mouth->voice, which is conceivable, he takes θῆται πρόκοψιν as a turn of words, and as the original sense of that very rare noun, and in fact of all the compounds of προ- and *κόψις (πρόκοψις, προκόπτω, προκοπή), he gives me «"stirare, distendere" (to stretch, to extend), whence "procedere, avanzare, progredire" (proceed, advance, progress) and, thuss, "svilupparsi, migliorarsi" (develop, improve)». Thus "to place a distension/stretch / progress / an improvement" = "make a performance"? Sounds like a stretch (ha!), maybe if you guys look at Luca Benelli's Il «Quarto Libro» delle Odi di Saffo you can understand it better, especially if you're more expert in Greek than me :).
For the penultimate line, I did consider «Κήνα δέ τε νῦν sounds like dé te might be unjustified, and also, who is kēna? Eurydice again? Is Sappho praying for Eurydice to perform well in the underworld or to come back to life?» at 23:58, but couldn't find any satisfactory alternative.
The last integration comes in roundabout ways. Basically, at this point I started remaking the Japanese, and I was missing a line. Thus, with the inspiration of the moment, I thought "according to his/her wish", which I was able to fit in the Japanese meter, and thus Κὰτ ὄττι θέλει in Greek (conceived at 1:34 the following night), with the same subject as θῆται, i.e. the one who called upon the Goddess of many names (κεκλο]μένα τὰν [πολυώ]νυμόν σ̣ε̣), which is Calliope btw, which is another reason to integrate Calliope two lines above. And thus, the final text:
And the English version I added into the Chôka anthology:
… I called …
… around …
…
… they say Eurydice,] having fled
[Aristæus who was chasing her,] was bitten [by the tooth of a snake
(And)] the gods [were wholly sad; but you, o Calliope,] her
…
… having called] unto you of [many] names,
[As she wishes, may she] perform with a [better] voice.
I am still uncertain if that φύγοισαν Ἀρίσταιον is correct, or if it should be Φυγοισαν απ' Αρισραιου, a doubt that came to me 27/4/24 10:14.
