Melinno

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

In King of Attolia, Eugenides quotes some lyrics of Melinno to Costis (p. 346-7 US Hardback edition):

To you alone, Eldest,
the Fates have given unassailable rule.
Time alters all things,
except this one thing.
For you alone,
the wind that bellows the sails of rule
makes no shift.

I just discovered that Melinno's poem is in fact a genuine ancient lyric in our world. (I know I've posted fake Greek poetry here before, but this one is for reals. You can google it!)

We don't know anything about Melinno. We have no testimony about her, and only one poem, a hymn to Rome which is transmitted by a 5th century CE encyclopedist (Stobaeus). He claims that Melinno was from Lesbos, but he's probably guessing based on the fact that Melinno uses a meter associated with Sappho (but she writes in standard literary Doric, not in a Lesbian dialect). And since he thinks that it's a hymn to "strength" (ρώμη) rather than to Rome, it's not clear that we should trust him too far (and yet: obviously Melinno is playing with the idea of Rome = "strength"). We don't know when Melinno wrote: it might have been any time from the mid-third century BCE to the second-century CE.

So here are all of Melinno's stanzas behind the cut, followed by my translation (which is less lyrical than MWT's, but tries to preserve the meter of Sapphic strophe). My text is that of Lloyd-Jones, but in the last line I've adopted Bergk's conjecture of ἀπ’ ἀγρῶν for the MSS ἀπ’ ἀνδρῶν. I've bolded the parts that appear in King of Attolia

χαῖρέ μοι, Ῥώμα, θυγάτηρ Ἄρηος,
χρυσεομίτρα δαΐφρων ἄνασσα,
σεμνὸν ἃ ναίεις ἐπὶ γᾶς Ὄλυμπον
  αἰὲν ἄθραυστον.

σοὶ μόνᾳ, πρέσβιστα, δέδωκε Μοῖρα
κῦδος ἀρρήκτω βασιλῇον ἀρχᾶς,
ὄφρα κοιρανῇον ἔχοισα κάρτος
  ἀγεμονεύῃς.

σᾷ δ’ ὐπὰ σδεύγλᾳ κρατερῶν λεπάδνων
στέρνα γαίας καὶ πολιᾶς θαλάσσας
σφίγγεται· σὺ δ’ ἀσφαλέως κυβερνᾷς
  ἄστεα λαῶν.

πάντα δὲ σφάλλων ὁ μέγιστος αἰὼν
καὶ μεταπλάσσων βίον ἄλλοτ’ ἄλλως
σοὶ μόνᾳ πλησίστιον οὖρον ἀρχᾶς
  οὐ μεταβάλλει.

ἦ γὰρ ἐκ πάντων σὺ μόνα κρατίστους
ἄνδρας αἰχματὰς μεγάλους λοχεύεις
εὔσταχυν Δάματρος ὅπως ἀνεῖσα
  καρπὸν ἀπ’ ἀγρῶν


You I hail, Roma, daughter of the war god,
Golden-girdled queen with a mind for battle,
Who inhabits on Earth holy mount Olympus
ever unshattered.

You alone, Eldest, have from Fate apportioned
Rule unbreakable and its king-like glory,
That you, holding your chieftain's might may
act as a leader.

Under your yoke, under its mighty thongs the
breast of earth is bound and the graying ocean
tight. But you guide with your helmsman's rudder
towns and their peoples.

Time's eternal length trips all a-tumble;
time remoulds all life now to this side, now that;
You alone see empire's breeze behind you
unchanging billow.

For indeed, you solely, of all the nations
birth men mighty in war: strongest, greatest fighters,
just as if you culled Dêo's splendid bounty
thickly from wheat fields.

Comments

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

O great Muses, I want to study these.!

(But now health compels me back to bed till next md appt.)

[booksrgood4u.livejournal.com]

Neat!! I love that whole scene..."No glory shall be your reward for me!"

[frosted-feather.livejournal.com]

This is so wonderful! I love it when literature in our world intersects with fiction (and when fiction intersects with fiction--I'll have to write an entry on my Beowulf discovery sometime). I really like this poetry. I've read Old English, Old Norse, and Old French poetry (translated, of course), but haven't read much Greek. Can you recommend a good book of this kind of poetry (but please--not Ovid!). There's something so foreign and beautiful and colorful about this kind of writing.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

There's something so foreign and beautiful and colorful about this kind of writing.

I am so thrilled that you felt this came out in my translation! I agree that archaic lyric is strange and wonderful, and I wish I knew more about it. Pindar and Bacchylides (writers of victory odes for athletes in the late 6th-early 5th century) are our best-preserved and (in the case of Pindar) greatest survivors: we have 4 books of complete odes of Pindar, and pretty complete odes of Bacchylides from papyrus. They are much more monumental than this (often running 100+ lines), with bits of myth and lots of geographical/geneological details, but the same emphasis on tiny moments and striking metaphors.

Sappho is sadly very fragmentary (we only have one or two pieces as long as this ode of Melinno), but really worth reading! (I confess that I sort of wondered what the big deal was with Sappho, until I actually read her. Archilochus, Alcaeus, and Hipponax (again all in very exiguous fragments) give weird little windows into various kinds of military and political life: Archilochus's persona is a cynical mercenary without a lot of regard for traditional honor but with a vengeful streak; Alcaeus is an embittered aristocrat on Lesbos caught up in a messy civil war of changing loyalties, and Hipponax writes absolutely obscene poetry from the persona of a low-life scraping life together among the prostitutes and thugs in the ports of Ionia. I think there are some anthologies of "Greek lyric fragments" that would have the most significant fragments of all of these.

[frosted-feather.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendations, now I have a place to start. Even in fragments that don't tell a story the mood of the ancient past comes through. I'm excited to look into this!

[icastlecaptured.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is so neat. I just recently reread the series and that line stood out to me, it was phrased to interestingly and seemed unique from the surrounding text, like it really did belong in a greater context than what Eugenides needed to draw from just then. I just attributed it to MWT's amazing skill at writing texts within text organically. No doubt part of that skill is knowing just when to echo the real world so that it blends imperceptibly with the one she created.

Also I too love the colourful wording of the rest of the poem, and am very impressed that you did the translation. I imagine poetry to be very difficult to translate and though I can't read the original I really love what you wrote. Both the imagery and the language come across powerfully.