The Extant Odes of Pindar

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Title: The Extant Odes of Pindar
Author: Pindar
Release Date: January 14, 2004 [EBook #10717]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
EXTANT ODES OF PINDAR ***
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THE EXTANT
ODES OF PINDAR
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
with
INTRODUCTION AND SHORT NOTES
BY
ERNEST MYERS, M.A.

_Sometime Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford_
1904
_First edition printed 1874._
_Reprinted (with corrections) 1884, 1888, 1892, 1895, 1899, 1904_
SON OF THE LIGHTNING, FAIR AND FIERY STAR,

STRONG-WINGED IMPERIAL PINDAR, VOICE DIVINE,

LET THESE DEEP DRAUGHTS OF THY ENCHANTED WINE

LIFT ME WITH THEE IN SOARINGS HIGH AND FAR

PROUDER THAN PEGASEAN, OR THE CAR
WHEREIN
APOLLO RAPT THE HUNTRESS MAID.
SO LET ME RANGE
MINE HOUR, TOO SOON TO FADE
INTO STRANGE
PRESENCE OF THE THINGS THAT ARE.
YET KNOW
THAT EVEN AMID THIS JARRING NOISE
OF HATES,
LOVES, CREEDS, TOGETHER HEAPED AND HURLED,

SOME ECHO FAINT OF GRACE AND GRANDEUR STIRS

FROM THY SWEET HELLAS, HOME OF NOBLE JOYS.

FIRST FRUIT AND BEST OF ALL OUR WESTERN WORLD;

WHATE'ER WE HOLD OF BEAUTY, HALF IS HERS.
INTRODUCTION.
Probably no poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar
finds so few and so infrequent readers. The causes are not far to seek:
in the first and most obvious place comes the great difficulty of his
language, in the second the frequent obscurity of his thought, resulting
mainly from his exceeding allusiveness and his abrupt transitions, and
in the third place that amount of monotony which must of necessity
attach to a series of poems provided for a succession of similar
occasions.
It is as an attempt towards obviating the first of these hindrances to the
study of Pindar, the difficulty of his language, that this translation is of

course especially intended. To whom and in what cases are translations
of poets useful? To a perfect scholar in the original tongue they are
superfluous, to one wholly ignorant of it they are apt to be (unless here
and there to a Keats) meaningless, flat, and puzzling. There remains the
third class of those who have a certain amount of knowledge of a
language, but not enough to enable them to read unassisted its more
difficult books without an expenditure of time and trouble which is
virtually prohibitive. It is to this class that a translation ought, it would
seem, chiefly to address itself. An intelligent person of cultivated
literary taste, and able to read the easier books in an acquired language,
will feel himself indebted to a hand which unlocks for him the inner
chambers of a temple in whose outer courts he had already delighted to
wander. Without therefore saying that the merely 'English reader' may
never derive pleasure and instruction from a translation of a foreign
poet, for to this rule our current version of the Hebrew psalmists and
prophets furnish one marked exception at least--still, it is probably to
what may be called the half-learned class that the translator must
preeminently look to find an audience.
The other causes of Pindar's unpopularity to which reference was made
above, the obscurity of his thought and the monotony of his subjects,
will in great measure disappear by means of attentive study of the
poems themselves, and of other sources from which may be gathered
an understanding of the region of thought and feeling in which they
move. In proportion to our familiarity not only with Hellenic
mythology and history, but with Hellenic life and habits of thought
generally, will be our readiness and facility in seizing the drift and
import of what Pindar says, in divining what has passed through his
mind: and in his case perhaps even more than in the case of other poets,
this facility will increase indefinitely with our increasing acquaintance
with his works and with the light thrown on each part of them by the
rest[1].
The monotony of the odes, though to some extent unquestionably and
unavoidably real, is to some extent also superficial and in appearance
only. The family of the victor, or his country, some incident of his past,
some possibility of his future life, suggest in each case some different

legendary matter, some different way of treating it, some different
application of it, general or particular, or both. Out of such resources
Pindar is inexhaustible in building up in subtly varying forms the
splendid structure of his song.
Yet doubtless the drawbacks in reading