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I first read Pindar in a rather unsatisfactory university reading class with an elderly academic. We sat around a table in a side room of the library, drearily reading out our prepared translations one after another. The main thing I recall was the frustration engendered by the teacher’s significant deafness, to which he didn’t want to admit. I prepared very carefully for these classes, but he obviously found the higher pitch of my voice (and that of the one other girl) difficult to hear and would regularly ask one of the boys in the small group to “have another go” at the passage I had just translated, regardless of what I had said. This was particularly irritating because one of my fellow students, with a nice resounding bass voice, was just reading out the Loeb translation which he had under the desk: our teacher, who could at least hear what was said in his manly tones, would then praise it extravagantly. Annoying!

Annoying but also immaterial, because there is nothing quite like Pindar in Greek. When I read Pindar I feel the true shiver of critical impossibility: of just how hopeless it feels, in the face of the greatest and strangest art, to say anything other than a more-or-less sophisticated version of “you should read this, because once you’ve read it, you might find that nothing is quite the same”. And as Horace (via Cowley) puts it: ‘Pindar is imitable by none; / The Phoenix Pindar is a vast Species alone’. So there’s not much of a way round him. What can be said, though, or what can be read, to give a sense of Pindar if you don’t read Greek?

Pindar’s odes hover somewhere at the edge of the Western literary canon. His poetry feels foundational, but also markedly strange — the first of many signature contrasts. This is partly a generic point: of Pindar’s many works, we have only the victory odes. For us, he is a poet only of epinicia, odes composed to celebrate athletic victories at Greek games held in the 5th century BCE (Pindar was born about 518 and died in about 438 BCE). These are commissioned poems — indeed he sometimes refers directly to his fee — designed to glorify the athlete, his town and family; the aristocratic sponsor and his origins and achievements; and finally the poet himself. This is not a genre which has ever been fully absorbed into the subsequent Western tradition, although lyric and hymnody of various kinds have undoubtedly been influenced by it. To some extent, Pindar remains strange as Homer or Euripides or Theocritus do not simply because the type of poem he wrote has never quite been domesticated.

So what is a Pindaric ode like? He has a somewhat deserved reputation for dazzling difficulty. Definitions have tended to focus on formal features and the use of myth and imagery. Pindar’s poems are metrically and formally complex: the typical ode contains several repetitions of a group of three stanzas, the strophe (‘turn’), antistrophe (‘counter-turn’, ‘turn back’) and epode (when the chorus stand still). The strophe and antistrophe in this structure have the same metrical form, and the epode a different one. An ode consisting, as most of them do, of multiple triads keeps the same metrical patterns for each repetition. The stanzas are long — often around 10 lines each — and contain lines of various length and shape. In English, you can get a rough sense of the formal structure of the triadic Pindaric ode from Ben Jonson’s experiments in the form, especially the Cary-Morison ode.

Perhaps the second most striking feature of Pindaric style is the signature contrast between expansion — the dwelling on and development of an image, a comparison or an inset myth, sometimes at enormous length — and very rapid transitions and unexpected juxtapositions. More experienced readers might start to notice also the role of ‘gnomic’ statements (often quite commonplace proverbs and sayings), and the surprising prominence of the poet and his art. Pindar often writes about himself: his own skill and the value of what he does, often in metaphors and similes, but sometimes quite pragmatically, in terms of the fee he is owed. The poet’s gift is aligned with the brilliance of the winning athlete, the wealth and nobility of the patron, and the mythic accomplishments of their ancestors.

So what about translations? I can’t, honestly, think of a single English ‘literary’ translation of Pindar which succeeds to any serious degree. (If you know of any English translation which you really do think works, do be in touch.) And as Cowley notoriously remarked, ‘If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another; as may appear, when he, that understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving’.

All the same, since almost every translation flattens Pindar, there’s something to be gained I think from a literal approach. So at the risk of raving-ness, here’s the first two stanzas (the first strophe and antistrophe) of Olympian 7, a 95-line long ode written to commemorate the victory of Diagoras of Rhodes in the boxing competition in 464 BC, followed by a version in which I have tried to maintain the word order as closely as possible without completely sacrificing comprehensibility (though you’ll have to work a bit to follow it). I’ve chosen this poem because in this instance the simile is fairly straightforward, the application to the poet himself particularly clear, the stanzas short, and the language is (as Pindar goes) pretty transparent:

φιάλαν ὡς εἴ τις ἀφνειᾶς ἀπὸ χειρὸς ἑλὼν

ἔνδον ἀμπέλου καχλάζοισαν δρόσῳ

δωρήσεται

νεανίᾳ γαμβρῷ προπίνων οἴκοθεν οἴκαδε,

πάγχρυσον κορυφὰν κτεάνων,

συμποσίου τε χάριν κᾶδός τε τιμάσαις νέον, ἐν δὲ φίλων

παρεόντων θῆκέ νιν ζαλωτὸν ὁμόφρονος εὐνᾶς·

καὶ ἐγὼ νέκταρ χυτόν, Μοισᾶν δόσιν, ἀεθλοφόροις

ἀνδράσιν πέμπων, γλυκὺν καρπὸν φρενός,

ἱλάσκομαι,

Οὐλυμπίᾳ Πυθοῖ τε νικώντεσσιν· ὁ δʼ ὄλβιος, ὃν φᾶμαι κατέχοντʼ ἀγαθαί.

ἄλλοτε δʼ ἄλλον ἐποπτεύει Χάρις ζωθάλμιος ἁδυμελεῖ

θαμὰ μὲν φόρμιγγι παμφώνοισί τʼ ἐν ἔντεσιν αὐλῶν.

A cup — as if someone from [his] rich hand drawing

[it] inside foaming with the grape’s dew

gives [it]

to a young man, [his] son-in-law, while toasting

[him] from [one] home to [another] home, [it, the cup] all gold, crown of possessions,

the joy of the symposium and his own burden honouring, and in among

his friends he puts him to be envied for his accordant marriage;

I too the poured nectar, gift of the Muses, to prize-winning

men sending, the sweet fruit of the mind,

ask blessings for

those who at Olympia and Pytho win prizes. Fortunate he, whom favourable reports embrace.

From one man to another moves the glance

of Charis [Grace] who gives life its bloom with sweet-singing

lyre, often, and with the every-voiced instruments of pipes.

The gold cup of the imagined wedding banquet is, briefly, the poem itself. (Note that we haven’t yet got to any part of the ‘subject’ of the poem: Diagoras, or his lineage and associated myths, or the island of Rhodes.) To understand the effect of this opening we could look at more coherent modern translations, such as this one by Diane Svarlien freely available online. But we might do better to read a poet like Robert Duncan, in all his challenging strangeness and (sometimes) self-indulgence:

Have you a gold cup

dedicated to thought

that is like clear water

held in a flower?

or sheen of the gold

burnishd on wood

to furnish fire-glow

a burning in sight only?

Or, more bracingly:

In the center of the field a Lamb

from whose male heart the intellectual blood

 gushes, gushes, gushes

to fill the cup that is now a poem,

 stillness

toward which the procession comes,

 muted

from the world’s music as if drawn home.

Recent classical scholarship on Pindar has tended to focus on the historical, political and performance context of his life and work, while work on his ‘reception’ and imitation has looked mainly at questions of form, style or imagery. Pindar’s style is indeed extraordinary: routinely pushing words and images against the limits of themselves and each other. Any attempt to convey what Pindar is “like” has to try to reckon with that. But Pindar himself is clear that what is remarkable about his poetry flows from contact with the divine, the ἂιγλα διόσδοτος (‘God-given gleam’, Pythian 8.96) of inspiration. For most poets (rather than scholars), and perhaps for most of his real readers too, this seems to have been the most important thing about his work. As Duncan (again) puts it:

The light foot hears you and the brightness begins

god-step at the margins of thought

            quick adulterous tread at the heart.

Who is it that goes there?

Pindar’s poetry seeks over and over again to capture a particular kind of religious experience, described by William Fitzgerald as ‘the meeting of God and man in action [. . .] the accommodation of divinity, or the Absolute, to a humanity that cannot contain it’. For Elizabeth Jennings this is the definition of mystical experience.

This is an unfashionable way of talking about Pindar’s enduring importance and irreducible sublimity: but it also seems to me, both as a reader of Pindar and of the Pindaric ‘tradition’, to be obviously the most important one. Pindar is a poet of religious experience. Most British readers will cringe reflexively at this point: British culture is peculiarly uneasy about any unironic expression of religious feeling, and I’d bet some money that several readers jumped ship in horror as soon as they reached that gushing Lamb. I can’t think of a single British poet from the last couple of centuries who writes anything convincingly Pindaric in this mystical sense. But there is an important Pindaric thread in modernist poetry more broadly, as I hinted at last week, both in America (we might think of Hart Crane as well as Duncan) and in France. If you read French, both Saint-John Perse and, especially, Paul Claudel’s Cinq Grands Odes give a genuine sense of this aspect of Pindar. Here’s a brief extract from Claudel’s second ode:

Mon Dieu, qui au commencement avez séparé les eaux supérieures des eaux inférieures,

[. . .]

L’argile humaine et l’esprit de tous côtés vous gicle entre les doigts,

De nouveau après les longues routes terrestres,

Voici l’Ode, voici que cette grande Ode nouvelle vous est présente,

Non point comme une chose qui commence, mais peu à peu comme la mer qui était là,

La mer de toutes les paroles humaines avec la surface en divers endroits

Reconnue par un souffle sous le brouillard et par l’oeil de la matrone Lune!

My God, who at the beginning set apart the upper waters from the lower waters, 

[. . .]

The clay of man and his spirit spurts between your fingers on every side,

Afresh after long travel overland,

Here is the Ode, here this great new Ode is presented to you,

Not as a thing that begins, but gradually like the sea that was there,

The sea of all human words with its surface in various places

Recognized by a breath under the fog and by the eye of the matron Moon.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can range farther than French. Stephanie Jamison comments in a few places that we can’t understand Pindar until we have read the Rig Veda, the sort of enjoyably provocative off-hand comment that only someone who has spent decades immersed in a tradition can make. But as is well known, Pindar does preserve in his language many features, presumably of significant antiquity, which have parallels in Vedic Sanskrit. If you find this as fascinating as I do, let me recommend the wonderful Twitter account ‘Pindar and the Rigveda’ (I believe someone tweeting their doctoral dissertation on this topic). If you have German, you should certainly have a look at Hölderlin. But let’s end more modestly and (for most people) more usefully: I think the best introduction, especially for anyone without Greek, is still D. S. Carne-Ross’s little book, Pindar, published back in 1985 by Yale but still quite easily available. Unlike a lot of recent work, Carne-Ross’s focus is always on Pindar as a poet. His combination of translations and commentary are sensitive and highly readable, and he conveys above all ‘the enormous joy breathing through the odes, before which we stand abashed and awed’.

Thank you for reading Horace & friends. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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