Jack Mitchell on Bacchylides, Hopkins and the translatability of the compound epithet
Last evening I attended an exceptional lecture by Jack Mitchell of our Department of Classics here at Stanford entitled ‘Bacchylides, Hopkins, and the Compound Epithet: Can Archaic Greek Verbal Culture be Translated?’ The lecture dealt with a key matter of concern encountered in the philological process of moving from a Greek poem, such as Bacchylides 17, to an English version for a wider audience. In his talk, Mitchell took issue with the translatability of archaic Greek verbal culture and specifically with the problem of reduction. This problem of translation, to be sure, is a common concern that I share as an archaeologist dealing with the material world rather than poetics per se. Therefore, I should underline the point at the outset of this short commentary that Mitchell is very aware of the simultaneous amplification that results in the process of transforming a Greek text into a language of the contemporary world. In translation something of Bacchylides is made legible and circulates for audiences in our time. Mitchell concludes that ‘we lose insofar as we gain.’ However, be that as it may, his interest lies with the complexities and multiplicities, which, to borrow from the subtext of Hans Gumbrecht’s latest book, are related to ‘what meaning cannot convey.’ To this end he focuses on one polysemous and therefore unruly aspect of archaic lyric—the compound epithet.
A compound epithet is a particularly elaborate adjective which combines two or, at times, more words to create particularly potent, or not, poetic ensemble. So the Greek term ‘chalkothorax’ might be translated as ‘bronze-breastplated.’ However, the multiplicities of such compound epithets have defied adequate translation. For Mitchell, one potential response to this dilemma lies in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In his translation of the compound epithets Hopkins, both a keen poet and savvy philologist, applied a design aesthetic for poetics called ‘inscape.’ Inscape has to do with the manifestation of the multiple—the evocation of more than simply meaning. Through such poetic devices the audience is invited to participate. But this should not imply consistency across the audience as a whole rather each and every audience member may have their own angle. This is a form of multiplicity without the imposition of rigid specificity. This complexity, I believe, is what Mitchell wishes to translate for the audience of today.
While novel on a number of levels, one aspect of Mitchell’s work stuck with me and it dealt with the issue of good philological practice. It wasn’t necessarily where he sought such practice that is of importance, rather it was ‘when’ he found it that I found of interest. Much of academia looks to our contemporary for the most cutting-edge scholarship on a particular topic. But instead of 2004 or 2005, Mitchell finds some of the best practice regarding the translatability of the compound epithet in the smack-dab, or likewise in the slab-bang, middle of the later half of the19th century with the work of Hopkins.
Herein lies an extremely important lesson for contemporary scholars dealing in the Greek past: ‘all authors are our contemporaries’ (Serres with Latour 1995, 44). While Mitchell, apathetic to temporal distance, applies this credo to Hopkins, this also applies to Bacchylides. So long as we continue to mix such rich texts irrespective of their vast temporal distance we will continue to learn something new for our time and the future. Manifesting this multiplicity for non-specialists is our responsibility, whether poet, philologist, or archaeologist. For Mitchell, this is a measure of good practice in translation.
Reference
Serres, M., with Latour, B., 1995: Conversations on science, culture, and time. (tr. R. Lapidus.) Ann Arbor.