Details: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/honeyvoiced-9781350226401/

When the young winner of the women’s 800 metres at the recent Paris Olympics was asked how she felt about her gold medal, she replied simply that she was now the Olympic champion for four years and no-one could take that away from her.  She was there making a very Pindaric statement, evoking the glory and the absolute achievement of her victory: she is the best and will remain so until the next time.  It is a good time to read Pindar during an Olympic festival: the contests are often over in a flash, but the ceremonies, interviews and discussions last a long time.  This is where Pindar plays his part: in his victory songs for winners of contests in the Olympic Games, as well as the Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian games too.  These prolong and publicise the victories ensuring that they remain in the memory of the culture of the ancient Greek world.  Pindar is no longer widely read but the impulse to commemorate these victories is still there in the media coverage, especially in the way we all take pride in our local hero or heroine’s status just as Epizephyrian Locri took pride in the victory of Hagesidamos in the boys’ boxing at the Olympic Games of 474 BCE which we learn about from Olympian 10.

Wells translates all of the Olympians, Pythians, Nemeans and Isthmians into English, preceded by a preface setting out his translation principles and a thirty-page introduction to Pindar generally.  There is an extensive thirty-page glossary appended for the explanation of names and Greek words and ideas.   Each poem is preceded by an explanatory introduction but there are only brief endnotes which consist of mainly references to scholarly literature. He adopts a hellenizing approach to translation from Greek: all names are faithfully transliterated into the Latin alphabet with diacritics, even ones which have familiar English-language forms (so: Píndaros, Moúsai) and ‘Hellenic’ is used throughout for ‘Greek’ (to avoid “colonialist language”).  The lines are shaped by Wells as a kind of sprung verse (derived from Manley Hopkins) though they read more like modernist free verse.  This impression is strengthened by the lack of capitalisation and punctuation, the surprising compound adjectives, and the chopping up of lines into short segments.  It all reads a bit like E. E. Cummings.  The lack of punctuation is mentioned as a release from the convention of silent reading which punctuation was introduced to facilitate and was absent from ancient texts.  However, I tried reading these translations purely silently, and then again as if aloud hearing the words in my head.  The reading aloud was a more successful method, although I felt that for an actual reading before an audience, I would have to annotate my text and put back all the marks for pauses, sense breaks, distinctive voices and emphasis that Wells has so carefully removed.  Here is a short example of his method chosen almost at random:

Eileíthyia seated beside the deepthought Moírai

daughter of Héra

            whose power is vast

                        hear us

midwife of children

            without you

                        we look upon

no light

            upon no gloomy night

                        without you

we do not share

            the lot

                        of your brightlimbed sister

Hébe

            we do not all live and breathe

                        for identical

callings

            onliness isolates

                        each   

                                    of us

(Nemean 7, opening)

Writing for Euroclassica, I am conscious of how this translation will seem to second- or third-language readers of English.  This is a version which is steeped in English literature and shows what it is like to read Pindar as an English-speaker at the beginning of the 21^st century CE.  For worldwide Classicists it might be a little baffling.  Pindar is baffling enough on his own and I wonder how much this version elucidates him for a wide modern audience.  However, it is thoroughly thought-through and has a consistent idea of what a new version of Pindar should be. 

There are two ways of approaching Pindar: an historicist method which explicates all the mythological, historical and cultural references in great detail, or a more literary one which concentrates on imagery and literary figures.  To some extent explanation of who is who and what event is referred to in unavoidable and Wells provides a set of notes before each poem to guide the reader through.  This is a reversal of the usual practice of putting the notes after the poem for the reader to refer to when an obscurity is encountered, and anticipates the obscurities before the reader comes across them.  The result is a successful synthesis of the two methods where Wells’ idiosyncratic approach to language leads the reader to appreciate just how weird Pindar’s texts are.

John Bulwer