Helios (the Sun) rises in his quadriga (4-horse chariot); above, Nyx (Night) driving away to the left and Eos (the goddess of dawn) to the right; Herakles offering sacrifice at altar. Source: The Met (41.162.29)
One of the most striking descriptions in Hesiod’s Theogony begins at line 736 when he describes Tartarus, the pit under the earth. The first few lines of the Greek read:
ἔνθα δὲ γῆς δνοφερῆς καὶ Ταρτάρου ἠερόεντος / πόντου τ’ ἀτρυγέτοιο καὶ οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος / ἑξείης πάντων πηγαὶ καὶ πείρατ’ ἔασιν…
In his translation, Glenn Most renders this “That is where the sources and limits of the dark earth are, and of murky Tartarus, of the barren sea, and of the starry sky, of everything, one after another…”
All three translations put the concept of “sources and limits” at the open of the paragraph. M.L. West renders it “sources and extremities” while Hugh Evelyn-White translates “sources and ends.” Only Evelyn-White also moves the concept of sequence and order to the open of the lines: Most and West keep it at the end. The adjectives in this section also vary. Evelyn-White describes the earth as “gloomy” and the sea as “unfruitful.” West in turn calls the earth “dark” and the sea “undraining.” “Undraining” conjures a starkly different picture from the other translations: the others show a sea devoid of life, while it shows simply a massive, unending body of water. Both Evelyn-White and West call Tartarus “misty” rather than “murky,” keeping the same mystery but removing the dark connotations of the latter word.
The next line is “ἀργαλέ’ εὐρώεντα, τά τε στυγέουσι θεοί περ.” Most translates this “distressful, dank, things which even the gods hate.” This line is relatively consistent across translations, with Evelyn-White translating ἀργαλέ’ as “loathsome” and West as “dismal.” Each word highlights a different aspect: Tartarus as a source of anxiety, a source of disgust and hate, and as a source of depression. However, the most notable difference on this line is West’s translation of στυγέουσι, which he renders as “shudder at.” This puts Tartarus in a very different light. The gods don’t simply hate it – to some level they also fear it.
The next three Greek lines read: “χάσμα μέγ’, οὐδέ κε πάντα τελεσφόρον εἰς ἐνιαυτὸνοὖδας ἵκοιτ’, εἰ πρῶτα πυλέων ἔντοσθε γένοιτο.” Glenn Most translates these lines “a great chasm, whose bottom one would not reach in a whole long year, once one was inside the gates.” The largest difference in the translations is how they handle the conditional in this section. The Greek puts both result clauses around the condition. All three put the second result clause last (examined in the next portion), but differ on how they order the first two lines. West, like Most, puts the protasis after the apodosis. Where Most puts a comma in between “year” and “once,” West chooses to add the conditional word “if.” Thus, West’s read “a vast chasm, whose floor a man would not reach in a whole year if once he got inside the gates.” Here, he sacrifices English clarity for the sake of maintaining the original structure. Ending with “if once he got inside the gates” is convoluted in English, especially given that the apodosis is not clearly stated, but it still retains the conditional sense of the Greek more than Most’s. Evelyn-White, by contrast, switches the order of the clauses, creating a flow of logic much easier to understand in English. “[I]f once a man were inside the gates, he…” This sacrifices the Greek structure to allow for smoother English composition. Another difference in Evelyn-White’s translation is how he communicates the idea of a year. Where both Most says “a whole long year” and West simply “a whole year,” Evelyn-White makes “εἰς ἐνιαυτὸν” more explicitly by rendering the phrase “until a whole year had reached its end.” This adds not just the idea of πάντα, whole, but also the completion of the year.
The second apodosis of the above protasis is “ἀλλά κεν ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα φέροι πρὸ θύελλα θυέλλης / ἀργαλέη.” In Most’s translation, this reads “but one would be borne hither and thither by one distressful blast after another.” Even the most recent translation can not avoid the allure of “-ither” words in translations. West also chooses the rather archaic “hither and thither,” and shocking to me, Evelyn-White, the oldest of the three translations, the one where “hither and thither” would make the most cultural sense, translates “ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα” as “this way and that.” Especially for Most’s translation, published 2018, the use of “hither and thither” connotates an archaic language that is not in the original Greek to my understanding. It engages more with the tradition of Classical scholarship more so than with the text in a way that is akin to adding “thou” into a new edition of Harry Potter.
The next clause reads “δεινὸν δὲ καὶ ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι / τοῦτο τέρας.” Most translates this “it is terrible for the immortal gods as well, this monstrosity.” Three main differences in translation occur in this line. First is where the nominative “τοῦτο τέρας” is placed. Most and West both put it after the main section, following the word order of the Greek. Evelyn-White places this at the opening of the sentence, creating an order more natural in English but departing from the Greek. The next difference is how “δεινὸν” is rendered in English. Most translates it as “terrible” and Evelyn-White as “awful.” West, however, renders it as “a cause of fear.” This translation shows that the gods do not simply detest it, they also fear it. The other word that has differing translations is “τέρας.” While Most translates it as “monstrosity,” both others choose “marvel.” The word has the potential to mean both, and obviously has monstrous characteristics if the gods hate it, but Most’s translation emphasizes that dimension of the word, whereas the others focus on it being a great sight, even if one that is awful and feared.
The final clause reads “καὶ Νυκτὸς ἐρεμνῆς οἰκία δεινὰ / ἕστηκεν νεφέλῃς κεκαλυμμένα κυανέῃσι.” Most translates this “and the terrible houses of dark Night stand here, shrouded in black clouds.” Here, each author renders δεινὰ the same way they translated δεινὸν in the previous clause, showing the connection to earlier although each having their own translation. In Evelyn-White’s translation, this line marks the start of a new English paragraph, where both West and Most, it marks the end of one that begam with line 736. To Evelyn-White, this clause, despite being part of the same sentence as the entire rest of the paragraph, seemed closer in thought to the following section. This is a choice that neither West nor Most had in their translations.
One last difference stands out when regarding the section as a whole, which is the use of punctuation. Both Loeb editions show these lines in Greek as being one long sentence. This is something that only Most retains in his translation. He connects his clauses with colons, semicolons, and dashes, but does not add any full stops into the English. This gives his translation a much faster speed than the other two, which both break up the Greek into multiple sentences.
