“Translate the following passage into clear, idiomatic English.”
My mind wanders from the examination booklet in front of me to my grammars and commentaries. The words of old men, commenting on and arranging the words of older men, bleed together. They suggest a singular reading of a single text—the one I am supposed to replicate here—clean, correct, compliant in draining the colours out of classics. Still, if I carelessly copy and heedlessly hand down only the translations that the exams ask of me, where are my words? That is to say, at what point does the translator become translaticius?
To translate is to carry (ferro) words across (trans-) time and space. But in that same breath, the words change and find renewed purpose (transferre). It has perhaps been too easy to lose the purpose of my own translations within the building blocks of Greek and Latin, or the comfortable Vergilian and Ciceronian moulds of my assigned readings. Why do I translate? I came to the classics as a deserter between majors, who found a camp so foreign and unfamiliar that I could do nothing but study to stay afloat. I stayed as an explorer, who found myself again and again in these passages.
Still, “to find oneself” is too trite an answer to leave unexplained. Do I feel like Lycinus or Hippolytus? Do I sound like Latreus or Pliny? I glimpse at a different perspective of “queerphobia” or “performative allyship” in these passages as often as I see the umpteenth special use of the dative case: dead words embody constructs posthumous to them. And when the passage ends—since all passages, however uncomfortable the thoughts they provoke might be, must end—I set it down and pick up another. By interpreting these experiences into English, I interpret myself.
And so I try again to jump across the gap between translation as examination and translation as creative self-interrogation by reading what I want to read. Perhaps I can stoke the flames of another reading, another purpose, another colour. And so I translate the following passages into clear, idiomatic English.
Which of these two do you consider better: men who love boys, or men who are satisfied with women? Since I myself am struck by either passion just like accurate scales and I swing back and forth equally balanced on either side, you, free from them, will pick out the better one by reasoning as an unbribed judge.
ποτέρους ἀμείνονας ἡγῇ, τοὺς φιλόπαιδας ἢ τοὺς γυναίοις ἀσμενίζοντας; ἐγὼ μὲν γὰρ ὁ πληγεὶς ἑϰατέρῳ ϰαθάπερ ἀϰριβὴς τρυτάνη ταῖς ἐπ᾽ ἀμφότερα πλάστιγξιν ἰσορρόπως ταλαντεύομαι, σὺ δ᾽ ἐϰτὸς ὢν ἀδεϰάστῳ ϰριτῇ τῷ λογισμῷ τὸ βέλτιον αἱρήσῃ.
pseudo-Lucian, Erotes, 4
“Do I have to put up with you, Caeneus? Because you’ll always be a woman to me; you’ll always be Caenis. Doesn’t your birth trigger you or sneak up on your mind, what you did to get that booty and what price you paid for that fake face of a man? Look at what you, a <i>woman</i>, were born as, or what you, a <i>woman</i>, suffered! Go away, pick up a spindle with a hand-basket, and spin wool with your thumb: leave wars to men.” At the centaur spewing such shit, Caeneus tore out his side exposed by running by throwing a spear at where Latreus was joined with a horse.
“et te, Caeni, feram? nam tu mihi femina semper,
tu mihi Caenis eris. nec te natalis origo
commonuit, mentemque subit, quo praemia facto
quaque viri falsam speciem mercede pararis?
quid sis nata, vide, vel quid sis passa, columque,
i, cape cum calathis et stamina pollice torque;
bella relinque viris.” iactanti talia Caeneus
extentum cursu missa latus eruit hasta,
qua vir equo commissus erat.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 12.470-478
Hippolytus: So, to where will I turn my wretched self? Whose house can I enter as a guest, banished by such an accusation?
Theseus: The one getting off on seducers of their women, the one who takes care of strangers and housemates plotting evils.
Hippolytus: Ay ay, straight through my heart! I’m almost brought to tears, if I just think that I seem so <i>evil</i> to you.
Ἱπ. ποῖ δῆθ’ ὁ τλήμων τρέψομαι; τίνος ξένων
δόμους ἔσειμι, τῆιδ’ ἐπ’ αἰτίαι φυγών;
Θη. ὅστις γυναιϰῶν λυμεῶνας ἥδεται
ξένους ϰομίζων ϰαὶ ξυνοιϰούρους ϰαϰῶν.
Ἱπ. αἰαῖ, πρὸς ἧπαρ· δαϰρύων ἐγγὺς τόδε,
εἰ δὴ ϰαϰόϲ γε φαίνομαι δοϰῶ τε σοί.
Euripides, Hippolytus, 1065-1070
Cicero complains how Tiro, cheating his lovin’ with a mean trick, snuck a precious few kisses owed to him at dinner away under the dark of night. When I read those things, “Why, after all that,” I ask, “do I keep my own love a secret, and why am I afraid to confess, even though I suffered my own Tiro’s tricks, and I’m familiar with his fleeting flattery, and how his thefts add fuel to my fire?”
nam queritur quod fraude mala frustratus amantem
paucula cenato sibi debita savia Tiro
tempore nocturno subtraxerit. his ego lectis
“cur post haec,” inquam, “nostros celamus amores
nullumque in medium timidi damus atque fatemur
Tironisque dolos, Tironis nosse fugaces
blanditias et furta novas addentia flammas?”
Pliny the Younger, Letters, 7.4
And when Elagabalus saw Zoticus, she leapt up to the rhythm, and because the man who addressed her as he ought, “Hail, my lord emperor!” and she who played the part of a woman wonderfully with her neck and turned her eyes towards him, replied and said not hesitating once: “Do not call me a lord, because I am a lady.”
ϰαὶ ὃς ἰδὼν αὐτὸν ἀνέθορέ τε ἐρρυθμισμένως, ϰαὶ προσειπόντα, οἷα εἰϰὸς ἦν, ‘ϰύριε αὐτοϰράτορ χαῖρε,’ θαυμαστῶς τόν τε αὐχένα γυναιϰίσας ϰαὶ τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς ἐπεγϰλάσας ἠμείψατο, ϰαὶ ἔφη οὐδὲν διστάσας, ‘μή με λέγε ϰύριον: ἐγὼ γὰρ ϰυρία εἰμί.’
Cassius Dio, Roman History, 80.16.3-5
So Elagabalus wore a veil to her wedding and got fucked as a woman, just as when she had a matron of honour and when she shouted, “Beat that meat, cook!”—and at a time when Zoticus was sick. Later, she asked the philosophers and the most important men whether they themselves had suffered in their youth, what she was suffering—and she did this most shamelessly.
nupsit et coit, ita ut et pronubam haberet clamaretque “concide, Magire!” et eo quidem tempore quo Zoticus aegrotabat. quaerebat deinde a philosophis et gravissimis viris, an et ipsi in adulescentia perpessi essent quae ipse pateretur, et quidem impudentissime.
Augustan History, Elagabalus 10.5
