The Argonautika.

Galdieri, Louis V.

Apollonios Rhodios The Argonautika. Translated and with an introduction, commentary and glossary by Peter Green. University of California Press, 490 pages, $60

The story of Jason and the Argonauts has captured the imaginations of translators, adapters, movie producers, and pedants, but until now Greekless readers who wanted a faithful English version of the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius had to rely on R. C. Seaton's Loeb trot and the prose paperbacks of E. V. Rieu and Richard Hunter. Peter Green has changed all of that: his lively, careful, and sometimes very beautiful English verse rendering will be the standard English version of Apollonius for many years to come. The fleece is won.

Green's nuanced and careful understanding of the Greek poem, its author, and audience informs his translation from start to finish. He discerns a complex and serious literary motive in Apollonius's fabulous epic. Apollonius, Green tells us in his introduction, was a poet out of key with his time, who set out in the Argonautica to claim the marvelous as poetry's proper domain. His epic rehabilitates an "archaic worldview" consciously rejected by the intellectual pioneers of the Periclean age, and makes no concession to the tendency, evident in other literary and intellectual quarters of the third century B.C., to read the ancient legends allegorically and to redefine myth as irrational or improbable.

Instead, Apollonius re-creates a heroic world in which strange and wonderful things really did happen, once upon a time: his poetry spins tales of acorn-eating Arcadians who lived before the moon, magical rocks, potions, monsters, and heroes. But he creates this world of make-believe with a sophisticated sense of anachronism, an awareness of how remote is the marvelous world he evokes. His sense of belatedness is apparent at every turn: at every landing of the Argo, there are traces of a "marvel;' visible even in his day; or there is an ancient mystery rite, a potent cure, a wondrous power, inaccessible or forbidden to his age; or a water-bearing race held "to this day" in Aegina that recalls another race, time out of mind, when Jason and his Argonauts strove to see who could soonest fetch water and bring it back to the ship. His heroes and battles and speeches and landings seem drawn not from life or from popular memory, but from study, and in particular from the grammatical and rhetorical study of Homer.

The Argonautica is, however, less an imitation of Homer than an exploration of the poetic and ethical possibilities that Homeric epic entails. So Apollonius's most Homeric similes draw the reader's attention to their Homeric qualities without necessarily deepening or enriching the narrative; and often his poetic strengths lie in decidedly un-Homeric directions, in, for example, the crafting of his famous simile of the aborigines in book 2--an epic simile likening dead aborigines to felled trees. Moral questions that drive characters in the Iliad--the role of good luck and cleverness in keeping mere mortals from grim fate, the irrevocability of human destiny--are for Apollonius commonplaces. The real moral interest in the Argonautica lies elsewhere, in careful portraits of characters in particular attitudes, as if Apollonius has chiseled their features into stone or created a frieze or relief. In book 3, for example, Apollonius summons vocabulary and imagery from the Iliad when likening barefoot Medea to an abducted woman; but Medea has, ironically, abducted herself and at least partly created the dire necessity to which she insists she is subject. This is not testimony to the force of necessity over human life, but poetry that approaches delicate psychological observation.

Or, again, Apollonius opens his poem with a catalogue of ships that consciously follows the order of Homer's catalogue in the Iliad, and takes us on a tour, in book 4, of the geography of Odysseus's homecoming, but there's very little room in the Argonauts' heroic enterprise for the likes of Agamemnon and Achilles. Having dispatched with Heracles in book 2, Apollonius leaves the Argonauts to wonder how much better off they'd be if Heracles were there. And there's some truth to what they say: without Heracles, the characters in the Argonautica are susceptible to Aeetes' spear and other harms; but they are also open to new ethical possibilities from which Heracles would have guarded them. Their venture may turn out "far from what they'd hoped" but Jason brings them together in a "common venture" where "many heads, better judgments" is the rule. The poem produces not a Heraclean hero--who, as a remarkable passage in book 4 reminds us, leaves suffering and woe in his glorious path--but a hero and a heroine, Jason and Medea, who are bound to one another in a shared undertaking.

The Argonautica is, in sum, a poem filled with what Green calls "informed pleasures;' pleasures reserved for readers who can luxuriate in the poet's allusions to Homer, or recognize some of the many places where Virgil owes a debt to Apollonius. (If memory fails, Green's commentary is of enormous help.) And yet there are other, simpler pleasures in reading Apollonius, like those that centuries of readers have taken in reading the love story of Jason and Medea in book 3. Green's third book is probably his strongest, but book 3 is by no means the only place where he's strong. When in book 2 Green describes the "wolf-light" at Thynias, he captures, in English verse, some of the marvel and awe induced in the exhausted heroes by the appearance of dawntime Apollo, and produces one of the translation's finer passages:

 At that moment when darkness is ebbing,
 yet light's divine
 brightness has not yet come, when an
 impalpable glimmer
 suffuses the night, what waking men call
 wolf-light,
 they entered the harbor of Thynias, barren
 island,
 and stumbled ashore, exhausted by their
 grievous
 labors; and here there appeared before them
 Apollo, Leto's
 son, on his way back from Lykia to the
 swarming
 Hyperboreans; and golden, framing either
 cheek,
 the clustering curls outfloated as he strode.

Green is especially good at setting a gloomy or grim tone--as in his description of Brimo, "roarer and rearer,/Brimo, night wanderer, chthonian sovereign"--but he ranges across many moods in rendering this very moody poem. So, for instance, his often exquisite, sometimes archaic diction ("gravid" "without cess' "unhandselled") will deliberately take the poem in an unexpected or comic direction. One lively passage, for example, describes Medea's "hot wired" nerve endings. In another, Aeetes describes his two brazen-footed bulls, "mouths gusting gouts of flame;' but when Jason tells his companions about the beasts, he doesn't quite get it right: "two brazen footed bulls, mouths gouting gusts of flame." Medea's "virgin heart" beats "a tattoo on her ribs"; after a sojourn through the desert, a hero emerges from drinking, "his lips all wet slobbered"; and when Polydeukes scores a knockout punch, his opponent's teeth are "slamdashed" to the ground, as they would be in a Superman comic book.

To its credit, Green's translation only occasionally betrays its academic origins. Green describes himself as "hopelessly old-fashioned" and even in his very learned commentary he is not prone to theoretical posturing or any such nonsense; he aims to produce a version of Apollonius that readers can enjoy, appreciate, and understand. Without being heavy-handed, his translation alerts us to the traditional shape of the Argonautica (reproducing, in one place, two curiously pedantic lines glossing the term mossynes, and, in another, a doublet that is pretty clearly an accident of textual tradition). Yet he sometimes seems scrupulous to a fault: the purist in him wants to purge his text of Latinized proper names that are, in many cases, familiar to English-language readers (he uses Medeia for Medea, etc.); he can do so only inconsistently, and he probably would have been better off conceding this point to established usage.

In a few places, Green chooses fidelity to his Greek original at the expense of the English poem he is writing. At the first sight of Medea in book 3, for example, Green follows Apollonius closely, so Medea slips into the poem as she does in the original--without much fanfare, "on her way to visit her sister in her chamber." But compare Green's translation of this passage with that of Apollonius's eighteenth-century translator, Francis Fawkes. Fawkes's very loose rendering of Medea's entry scene makes good reading precisely because it departs from the original, building suspense and anticipation for a full eight lines before bringing in Medea.

 The proud apartments that remain'd
 contain
 Chalciope, Medea and their train.
 Ordain'd a priestess to the Stygian queen,
 She at the palace now was seldom seen:
 But artful Juno, on this signal day,
 Within the regal court decreed her stay.
 Here now, from room to room, the pensive
 maid,
 To find Chalciope her sister, stray'd.

An unflinching fidelity is not Fawkes's concern: he rearranges the order of Apollonius's verse to satisfy the conventions and expectations that his English audience brings to the poem. This doesn't necessarily make Fawkes a better translator than Green. Indeed, his couplets very often produce an unintended bathos. Even so, Fawkes can take liberties where he chooses, because he, not Apollonius, is the master of his English poem. Fawkes's attitude toward translation, antiquity, and the inheritance that we call literary tradition may be most unscholarly, but it's not too dissimilar from the attitude toward Homer evident in Apollonius's own poem, or even in that most un-Homeric of Homeric poems, the Iliad of Alexander Pope.

Louis V. Galdieri reviewed Robert Fagles's translation of the Odyssey in our March 1997 issue.