A new translation of Sappho 58
Everybody's doin' it, so here's “Ὕμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν ἰοκόλπων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες" (Sappho 58) in my translation (unveiled at a Stanford-Berkeley get-together on the poem some weeks back). Jody Maxmin kindly said it was worthy of the great Martin Robertson - a great compliment, as you will see if you check the fine compilation of his verse (including many translations) available online.
First, the Greek text (that of West in the TLS; thanks to whoever inputed it in Unicode) --
῎Υμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν Ἰ]οκ[ό]λπων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες,
σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰ]ν φιλάοιδον λιγύραν χελύνναν·
ἔμοι δ' ἄπαλον πρίν] ποτ' [ἔ]οντα χρόα γῆρας ἤδη
ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ' ἐγ]ένοντο τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν·
βάρυς δέ μ' ὀ [θ]ῦμος πεπόηται, γόνα δ' [ο]ὐ φέροισι,
τὰ δή ποτα λαίψηρ' ἔον ὄρχησθ' ἴσα νεβρίοισι.
τὰ <μὲν> στεναχίσδω θαμέως· ἀλλὰ τί κεν ποείην;
ἀγήραον ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ' οὐ δύνατον γένεσθαι.
καὶ γάρ π[ο]τα Τίθωνον ἔφαντο βροδόπαχυν Αὔων
ἔρωι φ .. αθεισαν βάμεν' εἰς ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισα[ν,
ἔοντα [κ]άλον και νέον, ἀλλ' αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε
χρόνωι πόλιον γῆρας, ἔχ[ο]ντ' ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.
And now (drumroll, please) . . .
Yourselves, girls, now seek out
The purple-bosomed Muses' spell
So fine, and that clear shout
From song-fond shell
I find old age has spread
In waves across what once was quite
A soft complexion; on my head
The black is white.
My heart's grown heavy, knees
Won't bear me, knees that once would steer
Me to the dance with ease
Like teenage deer;
Indeed I'll ever rage
Against it; yet for what? To be
A human being and to age:
Necessity.
And thus, they used to say,
In love Tithonus did ascend
With rose-arm'd Break of Day
To world's end,
When he was young and fine;
And yet grey age picked up his trail
In time, his wife divine
To no avail.
-----
A few notes:
* I adopt stanzas because it seems to me West's division of the text into 'couplets' reflects the necessary enjambment we see between lines 1&2, 3&4, 9&10, and 11&12, whereas there is no necessary enjambment between 2&3, 4&5, etc. Also, in these pairings, the second line does seem to me to complement the first, though of course that's a rather subjective point.
* "Teenage deer" (for ἴσα νεβρίοισι) in my third stanza took a certain amount of amiable flak. As I sit here typing, for example, a colleague comments that the idea "does need some defense." For one thing, as has been pointed out to me, deer have a lifespan in the wild of about 10 years (though apparently up to 20 in captivity); thus a teenage deer is, in deer reckoning, a greybeard. I am not "reading in" such irony to Sappho's text, charming as the thought is. In defense, I would point out that the metaphor of knees as fawns is strange enough anyway; that it is ancient practice to compare young women to deer (cf. Horace Odes 1.23 - "vitas inuleo me similis"); that "teenage" is not the same as "teenaged," the latter being a chronological term and the former a state of mind, so that a "teenage deer" might be, in deer years, 2 years old. In any case, the intention at least was to indicate that the speaker formerly belonged to that type of girl (teenagers) who were associated, in the dance, with deer (for their nimbleness); so the implicit association of teenagers and deer in νεβρίοισι is made explicit. If the result is too strange, I may need to change it, but I don't have any ideas at the moment.
Other translations: by Martin West | by Guillermo (in Latin, a noble attempt) | by Anne Carson in the NYRB | by various translators in this thread (scroll down)