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THE SOLDIER AND THE LADY: Poems of Archilochos and Sappho. Translated by Barriss Mills. The Elisabeth Press, New York. 38pp. $8.00 paper.

This simple but extremely elegant volume, designed like all the Elisabeth Press books by Martino Madersteig and printed at the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona, Italy, brings out yet another version of the two greatest Greek lyric poets. For a very long time both Archilochos and Sappho have been a standing temptation to translators, with distinctly uneven results.

     Of the two, Archilochos is perhaps the most relevant to our own times. Born the bastard son of a Parian noble towards the end of the 8th Century BC, he was a freelance soldier who died in battle at a relatively early age; he was also the earliest lyric poet and one of Europe a first individual voices. Archilochos is the first poet we know of to cast away the social and tribal conventions of epic poetry and place himself and his experience firmly in the centre of his poetry; his is the first “I”. With the jettisoning of the epic conventions comes a sense of humour and a down-to-earth attitude towards life; the loss of a shield in battle is cause for a poem, not shame.

     Archilochos is also credited with the invention of the iambic metre
which reached its greatest flowering in the dialogue of Athenian tragedy. Unfortunately, the great bulk of his poetry is lost to us, and we are left with a few complete short poems and several fragments, some of no more than a single line. It is as though nothing were left of T S Eliot than the opening thirty lines of ‘Prufrock’, scattered chunks of the ‘Waste Land’, two of the ‘Landscapes’ poems, fragments of a dialogue and a short description of ‘Four Quartets’ in a doctoral thesis. We can only look forward to the discovery of some new papyrus cache in Egypt which might add to the tragically small surviving body of work.

     In general, Mills’ translations stand up well against the competition. In a short autobiographical poem, Mills translates the poet’s words like this:

I work for the war god
Enyalios
               and yet
I’m not unskilled in the Muses’
more delicate craft.

Compare this to the ponderous phrasing of Richmond Lattimore or the over-elaborate version of Willis Barnstone:

I am two things: a fighter who follows the Master of Battles,
     and one who understands the gift of the Muses’ love.

(LATTIMORE: Greek Lyrics, 1960.)

I am a servant of the kingly wargod Enyalios
     and am also skilled in the lovely arts.

(BARNSTONE: Greek Lyric Poetry, 1962.)

     But as with all classic Greek poetry, the greatest problem in translating Archilochos is finding an acceptable substitute metre; a slavish imitation of the original iambic is fatal, but it is equally fatal to abandon any attempt at rhythm. This Is shown most clearly by Guy Davenport’s brilliant translation, in this case as far above that of Mills as Mills’ is above that of Lattimore:

Sergeant to Enyalios,
The great god War,
I practise double labor.
With poetry, that lover’s gift,
I serve the lady Muses.

(DAVENPORT: Archilochus: The Fragments.)

     Mills’ uncertain rhythm sometimes lets him down on other occasions, resulting in a rat her leaden effect: “Seven men lie dead / whom we over- ran. / But a thousand / claim credit for the killing.” At other times it is his ear which leads him into trouble: “Let’s forget / this womanish weeping / and endure.”

     These reservations apart, in most of the poems Mills Is ahead of the competition. He is at his best in the more direct poems, as in this account of a faithless friend captured by Thracian wreckers:

Then let him freeze in the cold,
tangled in seaweed, flat
on his belly like a dog,
teeth chattering, at the sea’s edge,
puking up brine. And let me
watch it happen, for the way
he doublecrossed a friend.

His version of the famous shield poem mentioned above is particularly effective, with a good snappy ending:

That good shield that I threw away
beside a bush is making
some Thracian proud.
                                  To hell
with both of them,
                              I’m here
and I’ll get me a better one.

Though Sappho has also only survived in scattered fragments, she is slightly better off in this respect than Archilochos. Most translations of Sappho tend to be a little florid and sticky, rather unfairly In view of the leanness and power of the originals. By contrast Mills is perhaps a shade too pedestrian but this comes as something of a relief. One of the nastiest examples of the first case is Beram Saklatvala’s:

The sight of horsemen’s fair, or marching soldiers,
Or a fleet, the fairest thing on the dark earth.
But I myself find loveliest and fairest
My own true loved one.
                                          (Sappho of Lesbos, 1968)

By way of contrast, here is Mills’ version of the same lines:

Some say the most beautiful thing
on the dark earth is a company
of horsemen. Others say infantry,
or ships. But I say
it’s the person you love.

This is not the definitive version of Sappho. But Mills manages to strike an honest and unpretentious tone which is more than adequate.