Fragment 543

Simonides of Keos


          the delicate ark the hardbreathing gale
the sea stirred up by terror Danaë hurled down
Danaë's cheeks not unwet Danaë's arms loving

(o child, she says, I have such pain)

the slumbering childtender heart
in the joyless bark bronze-bolted
in the nightgleam
in the deepdusk darkness
the briny wave smoothing over his hair
the wind's noise piercing
the mantle beneath him dark too,
but his face lovely upon it—

(if you knew the danger were danger,
child, my words would
stand your little ears on end)

among all this, Danaë prays
to Zeus, father that he is,
for sleep—not for herself:
but sleep child, sleep sea,
sleep measureless pain.

even to ask this much
she trembles
at her own boldness,
begs forgiveness—


 

translated from the Ancient Greek by Ana Maria Guay

Read the original in Ancient Greek

Fragment 543 survives only as a partial quotation by an ancient historian. In it, Simonides describes with clarity and pathos the plight of the mythological Danaë, put to sea in a chest with Perseus, her infant son. A series of antithetical images juxtaposes howling wind, raging sea, black night, and Danaë's suffering with the peaceful slumber and calm, bright face of her son. The poem, truncated by its fragmentation, ends with Danaë's wrenching plea to Zeus, her son's real father.

Simonides' Greek is a rich language. A single word can contain a multitude of subtleties one struggles not to lose in translation. For instance, in one line the poet employs an adjective and noun that both mean "dark": kuaneō dnophō might be literally (if clumsily) translated as "the dark darkness." Yet it seems the Greek kuaneos—used in other cases to describe the "glossy-blue" of a bird's wing or a porpoise's skin, the deep sea, or the bottom of the feared whirlpool Charybdis—can involve the definition of a surface or a depth by the presence, or the swallowing, of light. Simonides' night is more than night; it is a consuming "deepdusk darkness."

As with much Greek lyric poetry, the fragmentation of the piece also poses a problem. Some of the extant text is disputed. Still, the poem derives a curious power from its damage: as readers are abruptly hurled into and then torn, mid-line, from the poem's vivid play of tumult and stillness, harshness and tenderness, we undergo an experience that mimics the chaotic uncertainty of storm-tossed Danaë.

Simonides of Keos (c. 556–468 BCE) was a Greek lyric poet. Much of his work has been heavily fragmented or entirely lost to time. He composed in a variety of poetic forms, from the epigram to the dirge to the victory-ode, but today is perhaps best known for his epitaph for the fallen Spartans at Thermopylae.

Ana Maria Guay is an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is studying for a B.A. in classical languages and literatures with a focus in Ancient Greek.