PART 1: High school
Our story spans several decades, and starts when I was to start high school back in 2007. I was torn between two kinds of HS: "liceo scientifico" and "liceo classico". The former had way more maths and STEM subjects. The latter had Ancient Greek. The turning point for this decision was when my then-future art history and technical drawing prof asked me "Would you rather do 10 equations or 10 grammar exercises?". That's when I went with scientifico. Given what I do over at my last-opened blog, michelegorinidecipher.blogspot.com, that seems quite ironic.
However, I did not want to give up on AG. So I took my mother's textbook, and started self-teaching. I was translating from AG to Latin, doing all the exercises in the book. Then I reversed the process, taking translation exercises from the Latin textbook (which I had for school), and translating them to AG. Then I moved to authors, and in the meantime came across an appendix about AG dialects: Homeric, Herodotian, Aeolic, Doric. I decided I wanted to translate something for each of these. I started with Herodotus, as a starting point for the supposedly harder (by way of being more nonstandard) Homeric. By the end of summer, I had translated some parts of the Iliad.
These translations were in tentative hexameters, because knowing it was poetry I wanted to translate it as such. I say tentative, because my knowledge was severely flawed. I only got to meters in class the next year, after all. Now, after Homeric, it was the turn of Aeolic. Sappho, Alcaeus, or a bit of both? I decided to go all-in on Sappho, thinking I would just get my texts from Wikisource and get to translating. And, as you certainly know, I was grossly incorrect :). Thus began a 1.5-year journey down the Sappho rabbit hole, both in terms of textual issues, and in terms of new meters I had to learn. Because of course I was going to keep them in the translations. And when I decided to translate everything to Italian and English as well, I had to figure out how to imitate them. Eventually, I landed on a rhythmic imitations with rhymes thrown in for good measure. As an example, let's take the Sapphic stanza:
–u–x–uu–u–x
–u–x–uu–u–x
–u–x–uu–u–x
–uu–x
The imitation of this was initially just three hendecasyllabics and a quinario (5-syllable line), with the three rhyming, and the last lines of consecutive stanzas rhyming. Then, I got into other meters, and figured out I needed to keep the rhythm of the original. Thus, the stressed syllables of the three hendecasyllabics had to match those of the long syllables in the Greek, and ditto for the quinario. I did allow myself to do 10-line syllables and 4-line syllables, i.e. to drop the final anceps of any line. Once I was done with Sappho, I decided Doric was similar to Aeolic so I could avoid going through it, and moved on to Chinese and Japanese. And that was in summer 2011.
PART 2: The birth of my blog
Fast forward 6 years, and in May 2017 I decided to open a blog for my poem and song translations. I had done quite a number of them, after all, and they were all keeping the tune or meter, or imitating the meter, or anyway having a meter (like when I translated Carpe Diem into a sonnet). I named the blog "Artistic translations of Poetry and Songs, by Michele Gorini". You're on it now :).
This meant going back to my Sappho translations, writing out critical notes where needed, and slowly posting all those translations on the blog. For a list of the posts with those translations, see the Ancient Greek - Latin list at the blog's Index by Languages. I later realized many of those translations were pretty bad, but more on that later.
In my HS dealings, I had come across a horribly mojibake'd Spanish edition of Sappho, with outdated and corrupted texts which sometimes didn't even match the translations. Hence, I decided to make my own Spanish edition. And while I was at it, why not do a Chinese edition too? I had to figure out what meters to use, but then… I launched it. Later on, I tried Googling for Sappho for modern Greeks, and the result led me to start my own modern Greek edition, whose intro details the search results. All three are, as of now, very much incomplete, because time, of course, is scarce.
In fixing up the texts, I consulted various editions, and many times found myself dealing with disagreeing critical notation. I thus tried to look at images of the papyri (or parchments or ostraka) the poems came from, and thus, "A few papyri transcribed" was born to house the discussion of my transcriptions of those sources.
PART 3: The series
Initially, the Youtube channel, which had opened in 2012 to comment on a video of a Hakka song with Indonesian captions in order to better understand the original (Hakka is a Chinese "dialect"), was reserved for songs and translations thereof. In 2021, I had the idea of setting Sappho to music, and then treating the poems as songs and putting them on the channel. But how to musicate? Well, the tune had, of course, to follow the meter, i.e. respect the patterns of long and short syllables. I also wanted it to follow the pitch accent, as inferred from the diacritics (acute, grave, circumflex accents).
I started from "The stars and the moon", which I made two videos for: Italian and Hindi, and German and English. I went on with the Midnight Poem, only in Italian. I then tackled the Brothers Poem, with a very long AG-Italian bilingual Sapphic stanza intro explaining why this is addressed to the wetnurse (not the mother) and how I reconstructed (extremely tentatively) the first stanza. I then made several more videos in the series, for which I made a playlist.
I wanted to get to the BP because it's the first multi-stanza poem I tackled. I originally thought of setting each stanza to music individually, and in fact I started doing that with "I really wish I were dead" (LP 94). Then I ran into musications such as "Painetai", where all the stanzas had the same tune. I was convinced to do the same by an answer to a Quora question I asked, which I am currently unable to locate.
PART 4: The Italian edition
At some point in 2017-2019, I looked at my Italian translation of LP 2 (posted here), and I realized it was kind of terrible. To make amends for this and other similar horrors, born from a very flawed translation philosophy whereby anything that fit the meter and rhyme constraints and mostly conveyed the message was fine, I decided to launch a full Italian edition of Sappho on the blog. I started digging into the texts again, and added a bunch of fragments to the mix. I then made an index, where the histories of any translations and tunes were to appear. Once I finally had the texts assembled, the Italian column provided with all the translations made hitherto, and the index completed (modulo histories), I finally posted it. The translations here are those that end up in the videos, the high school ones are performed only if metrical and good (good enough for me, at least), otherwise there are "badslation reviews". As can be seen from the Sappho 16 videos I linked to above. Although in that case there is a remark to be made about Latin or English translations ending up in another series.
PART 5: The Japanese and Sicilian anthologies, and the respective series
One day, I thought of translating The stars and the moon (that's usually my starting point) into Japanese. What meter? Because of course, there had to be one. And I chose to use a traditional Japanese meter, the 5-7-5-7-…-5-7-7 syllable pattern, which is called tanka if it's 5-7-5-7-7 and chôka if longer. I then came up with a selection of fragments to translate that way, and voilà, Chôka no Saffō. That was in late 2023.
For Easter the following year, I went to Sicily, and again had the idea of Sappho, this time in Sicilian. I started with that one Sapphic stanza, then did stanza 1 of Sappho 16 and the whole of LP 31, and eventually decided I would mirror the Japanese anthology in Sicilian. And the choice of meter was obvious: barbarous meter. Et voilà: Antuluggia ṙi Saffu 'n Siçilianu.
And those two anthologies got their own series fully planned. Well, the Sicilian is fully planned, and has its playlist. The Japanese has two steps for each translation, since I send them to a Quora user and he corrects them. For the moment, I have the episodes for the corrected translations planned, but the only available episode is one where I have the uncorrected ones as well, and is a crossover with the Italian series. The playlist is this one.
PART 6: More anthologies, more series
First off, in the spirit of bringing every translation of the blog onto the channel, I will have a Chinese Sappho series. No episodes are available of now, but several are planned or listed at the Video list tab of my blog's index.
Alongside the Italian edition, I originally planned to do a German one as well. Then I looked at all the tatters in the Italian one, and decided I did not want to deal with them twice. So I downscaled the German edition to a more extensive anthology than the Sicilian and Japanese ones. In fact, I established a standard Sappho selection for any future choices of target languages for Sappho translations. You can find this list at Project: Standard Sappho selection in my todo list. Note that every 6 months this list gets a new post, so by July there will be a new post, listed, of course, in the blog's index.
The Modern Greek edition was very incomplete, non-metrical, and what was there required heavy revision, so I decided to temporarily abandon it and try, instead, to have another "barbarous meter" anthology. Feels weird to call it barbarous when it's in Greek, but I have no better name. Since the edition already existed, I figured I would add a few extra groups of fragments as a nod to it. These are listed in the todo list, but at Project: Ἀνθολογία Ψάπφως Νεοελληνικά.
I also decided to do the standard selection in Romagnolo and Spanish. Each of these languages will have its series, although they will be paired: German and Romagnolo, and Spanish and Greek. Except of course the Greek series will keep going for the extra fragments.
I was relatively recently told that there are two ways of reading the ratio between a long and a short syllable: the rational 2:1, and the hemiolic 1.5:1. I am thinking of trying to go hemiolic with at least some of the Modern Greek episodes, because this lets me map some meters to Greek folk dances (e.g. hexameter to Kalamatianó, as I did in this video with Homer).
PART 7: Alcaeus too, and some near-future plans
Late last year, I decided to do an Alcaeus anthology as well, always in Italian and in barbarous meter. I still have not managed to come up with a list of fragments.
I had all the anthologies above on my hands, as well as re-deciphering the Ostrakon Florentinum following the read of Caciagli and Ferrari's articles on the matter, plus looking at P.Bero. 9722 for my upcoming videos on the Arignota poem (LP 96), planned for April and May, plus getting ready for the Gongyla videos in June and July, not to mention the next planned Sappho episodes, supposed to air at the start of March, featuring a brutal disservice done to Sappho by Anastasia Guy and his "song" whose title includes square brackets because it smashes together incomplete lines with no regard whatsoever for meter. Here is that song. I have my channel planned all the way to 2033, as you can see in the spoiler in the Videos list tab of my index.
No comments:
Post a Comment