‘Orts, Scraps, and Fragments’: Translation, Non-Translation, and the Fragments of Ancient Greece

Abstract

This chapter shows how a wide range of writers—including Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, C. P. Cavafy, and James Joyce—deployed contemporary interpretations and translations of fragments of Ancient Greek. A wealth of newly discovered source texts on papyrus was uncovered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Together with recent scholarly commentaries on fragmentary Greek authors, these were taken up by modernist writers, foregrounding the difficulties of textual and cultural transmission. The chapter emphasizes the remoteness of the ancient texts and examines how modern attempts to downplay this historical difference, as in Liddell and Scott’s celebrated dictionary, could perversely prove to be barriers to understanding. The chapter contends that attempts to express the meaning of an alien and irrecoverable ancient past can be more estranging even than non-translation.