‘We are all liars, we translators’ (xxvii), writes Gideon Nisbet. For one thing, translators face choices that perforce omit something of the original. Valuing accuracy over elegance, many choose a more literal route, frequently rendering a verse original into prose. Nisbet has chosen differently with great success: charm characterizes Greek literary epigram, and his translations exude charm. He composes in smoothly flowing blank verse, largely without poetic diction and archaisms, but with a flexibility of word order that often tracks the Greek closely. Although rhyming couplets are mostly eschewed, catchy rhymes do appear, as at 7.28, ‘Anacreon’s shrine/… Ilike my wine’. More common are sound effects reflecting original features, though usually with different sounds, as in 6.236 on dedicated ships’ beaks from Actium: ‘See how they, hive-like, hold the honeycomb,/Encircled by the humming swarm of bees’ (ἠνίδε σιμβλεύει κηρότροφα δῶρα μελισσῶν, | ἑσμῷ βομβητῇ κυκλόσε βριθόμενα).
Nisbet sacrifices literal translation in small ways to enhance conversational flow or colloquial tone: ‘Let’s … knock back/The unmixed wine …/The dolce vita’s short’ at 5.12 can be compared to Tueller’s more literal ‘let us drain unmixed wine … Short is the season for rejoicing’ (Michael A. Tueller, The Greek Anthology I, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA 2014), 209). The tone remains light and fun, even when we blink at sexist, pederastic or abusive content. Nisbet does not paper over naughty bits, which can be hilarious, often in closing punchlines as at 11.29 (‘An oarsman with no paddle’) and 12.232 (‘You will receive no mercy from my hand’) on erectile dysfunction. The satirical (or scoptic) epigrams of book 11 offer many opportunities for fun, including clever word invention in punchlines, as in 134, where Lucillius threatens to outdo the poetizing Heliodorus by making himself ‘so dense a bullshitter/That you will be out-Heliodorified’ (μακροφλυαρητὴν Ἡλιοδωρότερον).
My quibbles with Nisbet often concern the Greek text being translated. He accepts that of W.R. Paton, The Greek Anthology, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols (Cambridge MA 1916–1918), but a look at subsequent textual work might have repaid the effort: for example, Tueller’s revision of Paton for the difficult texts of book 3. Nisbet wisely avoids burdening his book with scholarly detail, although the endnotes are helpful on mythical and historical matters, and sometimes on stylistic points hard to convey in translation. He provides further guidance in the introduction and index. Especially for those new to the subject, the introduction (vii–xlii) outlines the history of Greek epigram and the Anthology, reviews its content, sketches modern reception and offers a helpful bibliography (if lacking Tueller’s revised Loeb vol. 1 and Alexander Sens, Asclepiades of Samos (Oxford 2011)).
Occasionally, however, Nisbet might have dived more deeply into the scholarship, as at 5.199, where the poem’s overall impression is at stake: is seduction or rape depicted? Nicagoras takes advantage of the maiden Aglaönice, and wine is involved, but for Nisbet she bears some responsibility: ‘Wine, and her sweet love for Nicagoras (ἔρως ἡδὺς ὁ Nικαγόρεω)/… Of her desire when she was yet a maid (παρθενίων … πόθων)’. For Tueller the situation is ‘something nearer … rape’ (199), and his translation (339) reflects that one-sidedness: Nικαγόρεω is taken as subjective, not objective genitive, ‘Nicagores’ sweet love’, and the other phrase is rendered ‘of her virginal allure’ (παρθενίων as objective). A commentary too recent for Nisbet to have seen (Alexander Sens, Hellenistic Epigrams (Cambridge 2020), 163) takes these genitives as ambiguous.
Nisbet translates over 600 of the Anthology’s nearly 4,000 poems. His criteria of selection include a desire to ‘represent the variety of the Anthology’s content’ (xxviii), and in that he has amply succeeded. The selection of epigrams ranges from the late Archaic period to the sixth century AD; they represent a broad spectrum of life and society and illustrate the popular topics: death, piety, love, literature, art, wine, satire, patronage, riddles. Amajor feature of epigram is variation on themes, and Nisbet gives us a feel for it. Several of the ecphrastic poems on Myron’s cow sculpture are included to illustrate variation on the theme of realism in art (9.713, 717, 719, 725, 727, 729). Books 5 and 12 offer countless variations on sexual infatuation, occasionally ribald, often with striking images like seafaring in two of Meleager’s poems for Myiscus (12.159 and 167).
In this fine contribution to the Oxford World’s Classics – his second, the first being Martial’s Epigrams (Oxford 2015) – Nisbet immerses us in a Greek poetic form that, through variation, allusion and direct reference, kept Hellenic tradition vital for over a millennium. Witness the many poems on poets that constitute an ongoing literary-critical discourse, explored in several chapters of Nora Goldschmidt and Barbara Graziosi (eds), Tombs of the Ancient Poets (Oxford 2018).
