Two ancient Greek poems by women poets:
Nossis of Western Locris (southern Italy, early 3rd century BCE)
Stranger! If you sail to Mitylene (where dance is so
Exquisite) for the sweetly sung blossoms of
famed Sappho,
please say that I, birthed by a woman of Locris, am
as
precious to the Muses as she. Nossis is my
name. Go!
Anýtē (Arcadia, early 3rd century BCE)
For dark-brown Cricket—little
Muro’s grass-stem nightingale—
and for stout Cicada—her
great-voiced belly-drummer—who
both had lived and sung for her
in the toy cages she had
woven for them with bent green
twigs and weed stems, she was still
weeping. The tears falling from
her small round face plopped onto
the loose dirt she was digging
with her mother’s wooden spoon
to make a proper tiny
tumulus for them both that
she would cover with a pale
flat stone. Her minikins’ lives
have been taken, have been borne
away and down to a dim
ravine in the underworld
by tyrannical Hades.
Sophocles (b. 497/496 BCE, d. 406/405 BCE)
overpowers not just
and unjust human beings
only, but animals
too—and even the breath of
gods trembles, shakes, stops, bursts,
when Eros wings into them,
even from far away,
at their culmination. Great
Zeus Himself retreats some-
times from the overthrowing
comeliness of mortal
bodies. He Himself is far
too weak—even He!—to
ward off Eros. Even He
wants, more than anything,
anything, just to give in.
César Vallejo (b 1892, d. 1938)
Life pounds us very hard… I don’t know. I don’t
know!
Blows that might have come from God Himself, in
disgust.
The blood of all we’ve suffered for so long wells up
fast
then terrified it sinks back down—into the soul…
I don’t know!
For some, not so many blows. But they come…
They crack open,
they contort, the fiercest face; they gash and scar
the strongest back.
Maybe what they are is the half-wild young horses of
inhuman
Attilas. Or heralds Death send us all robed in black.
Jolts that knock the Christs within one’s soul into
long dire
plummets from a nice little faith that’s been
blasphemed by fate.
Bloody blows!—They sound like the crackling, as
we stand and wait,
of our holy bread in the old oven—
but the bread catches fire!
Human beings! Poor things, poor things! This way
and that, we look—
did somebody come up from behind and clap us on
the back?
Wide-eyed, skittish, we stare—is this somehow our
own fault?
Everything we’ve gone through sloshes like a foul
puddle of guilt.
Life… hammers us… hard as stone… I don’t know.
I just don’t know.
Nossis (3rd century BCE) lived in Locri, a Greek colony in what is now Italy. Only a dozen of her short poems survive. In one of them, she declares herself a rival of Sappho.
Anyte (early 3rd century BCE) of Tegea (a town in ancient Arcadia, Greece) Fewer than twenty of her epigrams survive. She was the first ancient Greek poet to write about animals. My version of her poem is elaborated beyond her words.
Sophocles (b. 497/496 BCE, d. 406/405 BCE) wrote more than a hundred plays, but only seven have survived intact. Many fragments from his work also survived. I have elaborated the fragment on Eros (which is from his lost play Phaedra) into what I call a “rendition,” which in this case is more detailed than the original fragment.
César Vallejo (b. March 16, 1892 – d. April 15, 1938) was born in a Peruvian mountain village, Santiago de Chuco, and died in Paris. His astonishing inventiveness of language, his passion as a poet, his sensitivities and perceptiveness, especially regarding the lives of the poor, all informed his work. Rather than working word for word (but almost doing so), I have tried to make the English of this translation as energetic and startling as the original. This poem (“Los heraldos negros)” is one of his best known and most admired.
Reginald Gibbons is the author of eleven books of poems, including CREATURES OF A DAY, a Finalist for the National Book Award, and his most recent book, RENDITIONS (Four Way Books 2021). He has also published several works of translation—Luis Cernuda, SELECTED POEMS (Sheep Meadow Press); a number of Mexican poets in NEW WRITING FROM MEXICO (TriQuarterly Books); Jorge Guillen, THE POETRY AND THE POET (Princeton UP, co-translated with Anthony L. Geist); Sophocles’ ANTIGONE and Euripides’ BAKKHAI (Oxford UP, co-translated with Charles Segal), and Sophocles, SELECTED POEMS: ODES AND FRAGMENTS (Princeton UP). Gibbons’ novel, SWEETBITTER, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and will be reissued in a new paperback by JackLeg Press in 2023.
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