My mind works in strange ways.

[katsaris]

"I haven't ever seen a sight so strange and so macabre:
a living beauty of such grace, thus dragged by the cadaver!"
She hears these words and frightened turns, and speaks unto her brother.
"My brother dear, you hear the birds, you hear what they chatter?
That a living beauty of such grace is dragged by a cadaver!"
"They're birds, my sis, so let them speak, they're birds so let them chatter."

My brain works in strange ways. Somehow in the bus this morning my mind had turned to *translation*. Possibly because the previous day I had read Tolkien's brief comments on his own translation of Gawain and the Green Knight -- but to tell the truth more probably because my mind sometimes *does* when it's idle. Many of those times it tries to translate difficult book passages from English *to* Greek.

This time my brain did the other way around, something rare, from Greek to English. It kept on thinking that I couldn't find a way to nicely translate "τέτοια πανώρια λυγερή, να σέρνει ο πεθαμένος", which I still remember from back in highschool as being described by our professor as one of the most powerful contrasts expressed in a single line. The translation problem mainly lay with "πεθαμένος" -- I kept on thinking that the two-word "dead man" is too clumsy (and the meter doesn't work), and "corpse" is even worse in that respect, and ofcourse "deceased" is out of the question -- too weak and official-sounding.

Then my mind leapt to "cadaver", and in the next five minutes I'd done the above translation of the following and previous lines as well, from memory.

*g* Now I'm not claiming the above is beautiful or elegant. I don't think it is. The "unto" is very clumsy, for starters. And when I checked the actual Greek verses over the Internet, I noted that I'd made an error -- at this point, which is the third and final hint that Arete's brother is now dead, she doesn't turn to him "frightened" (that comes earlier on), but rather "with heart breaking". But the fact still amuses me that I did the above translation in my head in just a few minutes, less than half a bus trip. So I'm saving this for posterity.

(P.S. the overall story, for the non-Greeks among you (I hope the others still remember it from school), is that there's a disagreement in a family over whether they should let the only daughter of the family get married in a far away land. Out of nine brothers, only one, Konstantis, argues in favour -- when his mother asks "and if something happens for good or for ill, who will bring her back?" Konstantis promises that he will go and bring her back himself. So she's married off, but soon a plague comes along wiping out all nine of the brothers. Over the grave of Konstantis, his mother curses him for the advice he gave and for the broken promise -- such a curse causes the very grave to rend asunder, Konstantis leaps out (horse and all), rides to his sister and tells her they must go back. In the journey back, various birds comment on the macabre miracle of a young beautiful woman riding on a horse with a dead man, and there are also various other hints to the fact that her brother is dead -- he smells of church fumes, he is pale, etc, etc. He brings her to their mother's house and promptly vanishes. When daughter and mother meet they embrace, and then they both instantly drop dead for some reason, probably because "they lived happily ever after" wouldn't fit the overall mood of the poem as an ending. Heh.)