Sens, 'Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the Golden Fleece (Argonautica)', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9410-sens-apollonius

Richard Hunter (trans.), <i>Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the
Golden Fleece (Argonautica)</i>.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Pp. 175. $38.00. ISBN 0-19-814757-0.
  Reviewed by Alexander Sens -- Georgetown University

  The recent flurry of monographs, including Richard Hunter's
own <i>The Argonautica of Apollonius.  Literary Studies</i>
(Cambridge 1993), and dissertations (the most recent <i>APA</i>
bulletin lists two more) on Apollonius attests to the burgeoning
interest in the <i>Argonautica</i> as a poem worthy of literary
study in its own right.  The great advances that have been made
in the criticism of Apollonius--and indeed of Hellenistic poetry
in general--over the past few decades point out the great need
for a new scholarly translation of the poem.  Gone are the days
when a translator could reasonably write the words written by
E.V. Rieu in the introduction to his 1959 Penguin translation,
which has until now been the most accessible and widely read
rendering of the poem into English: "I for one am prepared to
condone his wildest departures from exactitude--he makes them
with such zest and obvious enjoyment.  He has, however, one
mannerism which cannot be dismissed so lightly, and that is
redundancy.  When he has told us (III,1240 ff.) that Aeetes, Lord
of the Colchians, driving off to see Jason tussle with the bulls,
looked like Poseidon setting out in his chariot to attend the
Isthmian Games, we feel that the picture is complete and gains
nothing by the addition of seven alternative destinations that
the god might have had in mind.  But it seems that the
Alexandrians liked this sort of thing.  What I deplore is its
appearance in that delightful passage where 'Medea's heart
fluttered within her, restless as a patch of sunlight dancing up
and down on a wall as the swirling water poured into (a cauldron
or) pail reflects it' (III, 755).  Virgil, in adopting this
simile (<i>Aeneid</i> VIII, 22), wisely spares us a choice of
vessels for the agitated water; and I have ventured to follow his
example" (31-2).  Sadly, such editorializing, based on aesthetic
assumptions that startle today, is what Greekless readers have
had to contend with, and this has compounded the difficulty of
teaching the <i>Argonautica</i> to undergraduates.  Hunter's new
prose translation, fortified with an introduction and explanatory
endnotes, will make the task somewhat easier, and is thus
particularly welcome.

  The translation, which is based on Vian's now standard
<i>Bude</i> text, is readable and scrupulously accurate.  A
comparison with Rieu's translation of several passages may help
to give a taste.  First, Hunter's version of the famous simile
castigated and compressed by Rieu: "Often her heart fluttered
wildly within her breast.  As when a sunbeam, which is reflected
out of water that has just been poured into a bowl or a bucket,
dances inside a house and darts this way and that as it is shaken
in the rapid swirl, so did the young girl's heart quiver in her
breast."  Unlike Rieu, Hunter retains the structure and syntax of
the Apollonian simile, only reversing--as one must in
English--the syntax of TINA/SSETAI and A)I/SSOUSA.  As for
diction, it may be noted that both translators use the verbs
"flutter" (a tad tame?) and "dance" for E)/QUIEN and
E)NIPA/LLETAI respectively.  

  Hunter's close adherence to the text and his resistance to
compressing or elaborating on Apollonius can be felicitous, as,
for example, in his translation of the difficult simile at A.R.
2.541ff., where the text and interpretation are uncertain.  First
Rieu's version:

  "There comes a moment to the patient traveller (and there are
  many such that wander far afield) when the road ahead of him
  is clear and the distance so foreshortened that he has a
  vision of his home, he sees his way to it over land and sea,
  and in his fancy travels there and back so quickly that it
  seems to stand before his eager eyes.  Such was Athene's speed
  as she darted down to set foot on the inhospitable coast of
  Thynia."

Now Hunter's: 

  "As when a man who wanders far from his own land--as indeed we
  wretched men often do wander, and no land seems distant, but
  all paths are spread before us--can picture his own home, and
  as he sees in a flash the path there over land and sea, his
  thoughts dart quickly and his eyes grasp one place after
  another, just so did the daughter of Zeus swiftly leap down
  and place her feet on the Thynian coast of the Inhospitable
  Sea."

At the level of diction, "wretched" surely does better justice to
TETLHO/TES than does Rieu's "patient," but more importantly,
Hunter's literal version preserves the elliptical and evocative
quality that I at least miss in Rieu's "in his fancy travels
there and back so quickly ...".

  Elsewhere, too, Hunter does a fine job of handling densely
packed and difficult passages.  Rieu (31) quite rightly heaps
scorn on R.C. Seaton's 1912 <i>Loeb</i> translation of 4.435ff.: 

  "And when she had worked upon the heralds to induce her
  brother to come, as soon as she reached the temple of the
  goddess, according to the agreement, and the darkness of night
  surrounded them, that so she might devise with him a cunning
  plan for her to take the mighty fleece of gold and return to
  the home of Aeetes, for, she said ..."

Rieu himself has the following: 

  "Medea gave the heralds a message for Apsyrtus that would
  serve as bait.  As soon as she had come to the temple of
  Artemis in accordance with the treaty, he was to meet her
  there under the cover of night.  She was planning to steal the
  golden fleece and return with him to the palace of
  Aeetes--they must confer.  And as a pretext for her treachery
  she said that the sons of Phrixus had compelled her to go off
  with the Argonauts."

Now here is Hunter's: 

  "Medea entrusted her message to the heralds, to lure Apsyrtos
  to come, as soon as she reached the goddess' temple in
  accordance with the agreement, and the dark gloom of night was
  spread around; he would help her devise a trick by which she
  might take the great golden fleece and return again to Aietes'
  house, for the sons of Phrixus had forcefully compelled her
  when they handed her over to the strangers."

The Apollonian passage provides a fine example of the way the
poet innovatively extends indirect discourse to lengthy speeches
which in Homer would be reported directly.  Hunter has a useful
discussion of the phenomenon in <i>Literary Studies</i>, where he
draws upon Genette's distinction between  "narratized, or
narrated, speech" (<i>narrativise, ou raconte</i>) and
"transposed speech" (<i>transpose</i>): the indirect mode of the
latter "never gives the reader any guarantee--or above all any
feeling--of literal fidelity to the words 'really' uttered" (G.
Genette, <i>Narrative Discourse</i> [Ithaca, NY 1980] 171-3,
quoted by Hunter on p. 144).  In the case of A.R. 4.435-44, the
indirect mode is specially significant: "Here then indirect
speech is associated with deceit; heralds are used as the
trustworthy transporters of untrustworthy words.  Indirectness of
speech points to the possible gap between 'what is said' and
'what is meant'" (Hunter, 145).  While this gap is made
distortedly explicit by Rieu's "as a pretext to her treachery she
said that...", Hunter's version, which omits (as Apollonius does)
any overt introductory "she said", nicely catches the subtlety of
the Apollonian passage.

  It is in such passages, where Apollonius' language somewhat
resembles "versified prose" (cf. intro. xxix-xxx), that the
translation is at its best.  At other times, though, Hunter is
less successful at capturing the complexities of Apollonius'
diction, style, and tone.  This is understandable and, to some
extent at least, unavoidable.  How would it be possible for a
translator fully to approximate in English (especially if she or
he has endeavored to remain as literally close to the text as
possible) the great variegation of Apollonius' style--in which a
predominately "Homeric" substrate is regularly overlaid with
words of (e.g.) medical, lyric, or tragic coloring?  The
difficulty is that Hunter's concern with literal accuracy tends
often to produce markedly and uniformly prosaic English.  I
suspect, for example, that my students will find it hard to
imagine poetry behind the translation of A.R. 1.18-9: (*NH=A ME\N
OU)=N OI( PRO/SQEN E)/TI KLEI/OUSIN A)OIDOI / *A)/RGON
*A)QHNAI/HS KAME/EIN U(POQHMOSU/NH|SI):  "The ship is celebrated
in the surviving songs of earlier poets who tell that it was
built by Argos with the advice of Athena."  Accurate, yes, but
unlikely to leave many with a good sense of the lines' flavor in
Greek.

  Another central problem for the translator of Apollonius is
how to handle the poem's rich intertextuality.  Except for some
brief discussion in the introduction of the way in which the poem
evokes and engages antecedent texts as a way of producing
meaning, Hunter offers little, either in the translation or in
the explanatory notes, that will help the Greekless reader in
this regard.  Again, I suspect that the problem of how to deal
with Apollonian intertextuality in a translation is an insoluble
one, short of appending a full (and necessarily unwieldy)
commentary.  But while readers will have different views on the
matter, I myself would have liked to see a little more attention
paid in the endnotes at least to some of the more significant
allusions that scholars, including Hunter himself, have uncovered
in recent years.   

  In fact, the endnotes devote the greatest amount of space to
explanations of toponymns and proper names, and in this regard
Hunter is careful to call attention to and explicate Apollonius'
etymologizing.  He is also scrupulous about noting those passages
where the text or interpretation is uncertain.  Other sorts of
literary issues are discussed somewhat less frequently (e.g., his
note to "we know' on p. 6). 

  The introduction contains a very brief discussion of the
evidence for Apollonius' life; a short but sane treatment of the
relationship between the <i>Argonautica</i> and other Alexandrian
poetry, especially the work of Callimachus and Theocritus; a
section on "The Argonautic Story and the Argonautica"; and a page
and a half on the <i>Argonautica</i> in Rome.  Interested
students should be encouraged to consult <i>Literary Studies</i>,
where the issues raised cursorily here are discussed at greater
length.  There are three helpful maps, and an index of proper
names, as well as an abbreviated list of "References and Further
Reading"; for a fuller bibliography readers are referred to
<i>Literary Studies</i>.  

  Translating the <i>Argonautica</i> is an unenviable task, and
one fraught with perils.  Hunter, more a scholar and critic than
poet, has not avoided them all, but he has given us a reliable
translation of the <i>Argonautica</i> that surpasses those
previously available.  The volume marks an important step forward
for the study of Apollonius by those without access to it in
Greek.