The Homeric Hymns E-Book

Peter McDonald

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Homeric Hymns are a crucial work in the Western literary canon, and Peter McDonald's new verse translations offer the major modern account of this still under-appreciated body of ancient poetry. The thirty-three 'hymns' are poetic accounts of ancient Greek gods, including Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Zeus, and Poseidon. Some of the poems are micro-epics in their own right, recounting the lives and affairs of the divine; taken together, they form a meditation on the primal themes of love, war, betrayal, desire, and paternity, and contemplate the dangerous proximity of gods and men. The book includes a new translation of the 'Life of Homer', a narrative incorporating the shorter poems known as Homer's Epigrams, attributed to Pseudo-Herodotus. Two appendices provide verse translations of episodes from Homer's Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony, while McDonald gives fresh versions throughout of relevant passages from Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and other Greek poets. The accompanying notes and commentaries on the poems are the most generous and authoritative of any translation. This book revives an ancient classic for the twenty-first century.

Leseprobe

The Homeric Hymns

Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962, and educated at Methodist College, Belfast and University College, Oxford. He has published four books of literary criticism, and six volumes of poetry, most recently Herne the Hunter (2016). His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He has lectured in English at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol, and since 1999 has been Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, University of Oxford, where he is also Professor of British and Irish Poetry. He has edited the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber, 2007), and is currently editing a multi-volume edition of the Complete Poems of W. B. Yeats for Longman.

Details of Homer’s life, including his dates, are a matter of scholarly speculation. He is thought to have been born on the Greek island of Chios sometime between 700 and 900 BC, and is credited with authoring the first recorded European literature in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Whether Homer was in reality an individual or rather a loose school of writers spanning generations is a matter for conjecture; his works, nevertheless, are of unparalleled importance in the Western literary canon.

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

The Homeric Hymns

Translated by

PETER McDONALD

TO MY TEACHERS

R.H. JORDAN

T.W. MULRYNE

SEMPER IN MEMORIA

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Homeric Hymns

Hymn 1        To Dionysus

Hymn 2        To Demeter

Hymn 3        To Apollo

Hymn 4        To Hermes

Hymn 5        To Aphrodite

Hymn 6        To Aphrodite

Hymn 7        To Dionysus

Hymn 8        To Ares

Hymn 9        To Atremis

Hymn 10      To Aphrodite

Hymn 11      To Athene

Hymn 12      To Hera

Hymn 13      To Demeter

Hymn 14      To the Mother of the Gods

Hymn 15      To Heracles the Lion-hearted

Hymn 16      To Asclepius

Hymn 17      To the Dioscuri

Hymn 18      To Hermes

Hymn 19      To Pan

Hymn 20      To Hephaestus

Hymn 21      To Apollo

Hymn 22      To Poseidon

Hymn 23      To Zeus

Hymn 24      To Hestia

Hymn 25      To the Muses and Apollo

Hymn 26      To Dionysus

Hymn 27      To Artemis

Hymn 28      To Athene

Hymn 29      To Hestia

Hymn 30      To the Earth, Mother of All

Hymn 31      To Helios

Hymn 32      To Selēnē

Hymn 33      To the Dioscuri

(Pseudo-) Herodotus, On Homer (containing Homer’s Epigrams)

Epigram 1

Epigram 2

Epigram 3

Epigram 4

Epigram 5

Epigram 6

Epigram 7

Epigram 8

Epigram 9

Epigram 10

Epigram 11

Epigram 12

Epigram 13

Epigram 14

Epigram 15

Epigram 16

Appendices

1      Demodocus’ Song: Odyssey 8: 266–366

2      The Battle of Typhoeus and Zeus: Hesiod, Theogony 820–868

Notes

Hymn 1        To Dionysus

Hymn 2        To Demeter

Hymn 3        To Apollo

Hymn 4        To Hermes

Hymn 5        To Aphrodite

Hymn 6        To Aphrodite

Hymn 7        To Dionysus

Hymn 8        To Ares

Hymn 9        To Atremis

Hymn 10      To Aphrodite

Hymn 11      To Athene

Hymn 12      To Hera

Hymn 13      To Demeter

Hymn 14      To the Mother of the Gods

Hymn 15      To Heracles the Lion-hearted

Hymn 16      To Asclepius

Hymn 17      To the Dioscuri

Hymn 18      To Hermes

Hymn 19      To Pan

Hymn 20      To Hephaestus

Hymn 21      To Apollo

Hymn 22      To Poseidon

Hymn 23      To Zeus

Hymn 24      To Hestia

Hymn 25      To the Muses and Apollo

Hymn 26      To Dionysus

Hymn 27      To Artemis

Hymn 28      To Athene

Hymn 29      To Hestia

Hymn 30      To the Earth, Mother of All

Hymn 31      To Helios

Hymn 32      To Selēnē

Hymn 33      To the Dioscuri

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

My work on these translations began before I had any idea that they would turn into a book. Over the course of a year in 2008–9 I translated the Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2), intending it as part of my collection Torchlight (2011), in which in due course it appeared. That Hymn, and subsequently my version of Hymn 5 (to Aphrodite), were both published in PN Review: I am grateful to the editor for this, since readers’ reactions gave me the confidence to carry on and undertake the whole of the Homeric Hymns. I was very fortunate, as I went about my work, to have the encouragement and attention of the poets Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney: this confirmed me in my course, and kept me going at those moments when stamina seemed in danger of flagging. I was lucky, too, to have been working amongst classicists in Oxford: I am grateful to Stephen Harrison, Dirk Obbink, Peter Parsons, Christopher Pelling, and Oliver Thomas for their helpful responses to my many queries. At home, help of a different kind was just as vital; and I am indebted again, as ever, to Karen, Louisa, and Sammy.

Woodstock, Oxfordshire

July, 2015

Introduction

If asked to name the poems written by Homer, most of us would come up with the Iliad and the Odyssey without too much trouble. How many people would add the Homeric Hymns to that list? These are not, we might tell ourselves, by Homer in quite the same sense that the epics are by him: they are merely ‘Homeric’, and we do not talk about the ‘Homeric Iliad’ or ‘Homeric Odyssey’. And yet, of course, those epics are more ‘Homeric’ than they are Homer’s, for they almost certainly came into their received forms over a number of generations, at the hands of different schools of composition and performance who became known as ‘Homer’. The Hymns, which mostly derive from such schools a century or two after the bulk of the epics had been consolidated, are by the same ‘Homer’.

This is how things appeared, at any rate, to those who saw Homer’s works through the process of printed publication in the renaissance and after. The first printed edition of Homer in 1489 was of the Opera, the complete works. It was edited in Florence by the scholar Demetrius Chalcondyles (1423– 1511), and included the Hymns as a part of the poet’s whole output; that these were indeed the works of a particular named poet was made all the clearer by the inclusion of three Lives of Homer, beginning with the (pseudo-) Herodotean Life in which Homer’s Epigrams are contained. From then on, Homer had both a biographical identity and a recognized oeuvre: the Iliad and Odyssey, the Epigrams, the Batrachomyomachia (a late mock-epic piece on a war between the Frogs and the Mice), and the Hymns.

It was as Homer’s Hymns, then, rather than the Homeric Hymns, that the poems in the present volume for centuries made their way in the world. For George Chapman, the pioneering (and still perhaps the greatest) translator of Homer into English verse, these were ‘The Hymnes of Homer’ and, far from being pale, late imitations of the genuine article, formed part of The Crowne of All Homers Workes when he published his versions in 1624. As late as P.B. Shelley’s time, these were still Homer’s Hymns, and it was not until 1838 that ‘Homeric’ crept in, when an English article spoke of ‘the Hymn to Apollo … The Hymn to Hermes … The Hymn to Aphrodite and that to Demeter’ as ‘the principal of the Homeric hymns’, adding that ‘these, with the ‘Battle of the Frogs and Mice’, make up the sum of the Homeric poems, genuine and spurious.’1 In this context, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, ‘Homeric’ could mean, instead of verse characteristic of Homer, Homer of the second order, or something merely Homer-like.

The ancient world itself was perhaps less strict in the rigour of its methods of literary attribution. While someone as close to the originals as the historian Thucydides in fifth century BC Athens could refer to readily (and quote from) ‘Homer in the Hymns’ (see Notes to Hymn 3, page 209), there is a distinct scarcity of surviving evidence about either the nature or the general circulation of that collection. It might, of course, have been something very like the Hymns as we have them (certainly, it contained the Hymn to Apollo), but there are no firm grounds for assuming this; also, we should remind ourselves that allusions to, imitations of, and citations or discussions of the Hymns in antiquity, though they do exist, are many times scarcer than those relating to the Iliad and the Odyssey. The learned Hellenistic poets of the second century BC, notably Callimachus, imitated and elaborated ingeniously upon Hymns that were either the ones we know as Homeric, or something very like them. Oddly, though, the many scholars who commented in detail on classics like the ancient epics, dramas and lyric poetry seem neither to have lavished their attention on the Hymns nor (more remarkably) to have found much need to refer to or quote from them in the course of their editorial and lexicographical labours. Given the obscurity of some of the Greek literature that we know from just these kinds of source, that is all the more curious a thing. Where had the Hymns gone?