Penguins on Parade: Jason and the Argonauts!
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Some Penguin Classics, however humbly and unassumingly, make some fairly large claims for themselves, or at least dare to dream big dreams. It’s certainly understandable: after all, the Penguin line has an illustrious history, and several of its editions have gone on to a textual life of their own. These editions are very often used as classroom texts and can thereby gain an enormous second life; as we’ve mentioned more than once in Penguins on Parade, the Penguin Classic edition of some work of literature is often the only version of that work most readers ever know. That’s a pretty brightly-lit stage, and it takes an extra helping of optimism to hope to reach it.
We have an example of that optimism in the new Penguin Classic edition of the Argonautica of the 3rd century BC poet Apollonius of Rhodes. The volume is called Jason and the Argonauts, and it’s edited by Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, and the translator is Aaron Poochigian, whose name was unfamiliar to me before I got my hands on this book. And I admit, I came to his handiwork a bit predisposed against it, mainly because I’ve loved Peter Green’s magisterial edition of this poem since its first edition appeared about twenty years ago.
And Poochigian, in his Translator’s Note, doesn’t start off helping himself! What am I of all people, I, who have loved so many old-time Penguin Classics, to make of this assertion from our translator: “Thus I found justification for a verse translation of the epic within the epic itself – a prose version would have captured the meaning but left out the magic.” Countless close re-readings of some of Penguin’s most popular old prose-renditions of verse classics over the years have revealed to me their surprising beauty – their ample amounts, in other words, of magic. So naturally I was tempted to give the hairy eyeball to any translator who came to his work somehow without having seen that factor in the work of his predecessors. And right after that souring comment came the soaring note of optimism:
For as long as I have known the ancient Greek language, I have been certain that Apollonius is a great poet and that Jason and the Argonauts is a great epic. My translation, a labor of love, is an attempt to convince Greekless readers that this is so. I hope that the poem becomes, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, essential reading for a cultured individual.
I began, of course, to like the chutzpah of this, since when Poochigian says he hope “the poem” finally takes its place on the same shelf as Homer, what he really means is that he hopes “HIS poem” takes that place. And I was surprised to find myself nodding right away at some of his choices. He inserts more stanza-breaks in his rendition of the poem than I’d seen in any other version edition, and right at the outset he puts the names of the various individual Argonauts in boldface, to pluck them out from the mosquito-cloud of collateral names that always surround them. These and similar little decisions are clearly intended not just for those Greekless readers Poochigian mentions but for new readers, people who might be unfamiliar with the way ancient Greek poets tend to rattle on. These little decisions do no violence to Apollonius but immediately lend a very real helping hand to the newcomer to this poem.
So what about the poem itself? Not what Apollonius wrote, mind you (no amount of optimism on Earth can elevate this entertaining but squeaking and shabby affair to the level of Homer), but this new translation of it? Well, before we get to it, let’s look at one of those despised and magic-less prose versions – in this case, the 1993 Oxford World’s Classics translation by Richard Hunter, and we’ll take a good quick juicy speech (one of Apollonius’ few strong suits). The scene is Lemnos, the women of which have recently slaughtered all their men-folk in a fit of pique, and have, after an initial reluctance, decided to offer their slew of new vacancies to the Argonauts, with the Lemnian queen, Hypsipyle, picking out Jason himself, by virtue of his arresting beauty as much as anything else (you’ll look in vain for that arresting beauty on the cover of the new Penguin Classic, where Jason is depicted – heavy sigh – as a neck-bearded and somewhat epicene hipster). While Jason is thus dallying, his most famous shipmate, Hercules, sits down on the beach with the Argo and grouses to a group of fellow malcontents:
“Poor fools, does the shedding of kindred blood prevent us from returning home? Have we left our homes to come here in search of brides, scorning the women of our own cities? Do we want to live here and cut up the rich ploughland of Lemnos? We will not win glory shut up here interminably with foreign women. No god is going to hand over the fleece to us in answer to our prayers; we will have to work for it. Let us all return to our own countries and leave him to wallow all day in Hypsipyle’s bed until he has won great renown by filling Lemnos with his sons!”
Now let’s look at how the aforementioned Peter Green does it:
“You wretched creatures, is it murder of kin that keeps us
far from our country? Was it for lack of weddings
that we came thence hither, scorning our native ladies?
Is it our pleasure to dwell here, sharing out rich Lemnian lots?
We’ll not win renown cooped up for all this time
with a passel of foreign women, nor will some deity
grab the Fleece if we beg him to, make us a present of it.
Let us go back each to his own, and leave this fellow
in Hypsipyle’s bed all day, till he’s remanned Lemnos
with his sons, and got himself greatly talked about.”
One thing that’s clear at once is that rendering Apollonius in English prose instead of English verse does virtually nothing to weaken or strengthen his stuff. Hunter and Green both capture the scorn of Hercules’ staccato questions; they both convey the contempt Hercules feels for his captain (this is the first time in the poem that we learn 
of it, and of course our esteemed poet doesn’t see fit to explain it), Hunter with a bare ‘him’ and Green with “this fellow.” Green goes for the alliteration of “Lemnian lots,” where Hunter gives us the more straightforwardly effective “rich ploughland,” and Hunter likewise stresses the human counterpart of Hercules’ taunting scenario (“we will have to work for it”) in a way Green elides. But the approaches even out almost exactly, especially since Green has been so faithful to his author that he’s managed – in this passage and many others – to replicate the bland, third-tier feel of the verse itself, with all those long, wavering lines that all but defy dramatic reading.
So what of Poochigian and his striving for accessibility? Here’s his version:
“Fools, what prevents us from returning home -
what, have we shed our kinsmen’s blood? Have we
set sail to seek fiances in contempt
of ladies on the mainland? Are we planning
to divvy up the fertile fields of Lemnos
and settle here for good? We won’t accrue
glory while cooped up here with foreign girls
for years on end. No deity is going
to nab the fleece in answer to our prayers
and send it flying back to us. Come, then,
let’s each go off and tend to his own affairs.
And as far as that one – leave him to enjoy
Hypsipyle’s bedchamber day and night
until he peoples Lemnos with his sons,
and deathless glory catches up with him.”
You can see some choices right away: the alliteration is back in that one line, for instance, only this time it’s “fertile fields” instead of “Lemnian lots.” And both the noncommittal “him” and the donnish “this fellow” have been dropped in favor of the withering “that one” (you can almost hear Hercules spitting it). And certainly in Poochigian’s version Hercules’ final line has the sound of the malediction it’s certainly meant to be! In Hunter, all Jason’s going to get from rogering the queen all day long, his mission forgotten, is “great renown” – hardly a bad thing! Green brings us closer to the negative with that hilariously mild-mannered bit about Jason getting himself “greatly talked about,” which doesn’t as good as renown, does it? But Poochigian captures it perfectly: it’s not that Jason will win deathless glory, it’s that deathless glory will catch up with him – the element of menace is very skillfully hinted.
I’m pleased to report that such skill is on hand at every point in this new verse translation. At every turn, Poochigian not only subtly improves on every English-language translation of the Argonautica that’s come before him but also subtly improves on poor ridiculous Apollonius himself. Jason and the Argonauts might not be fit to sit on the same shelf as the Iliad and Odyssey, but this translation of it, at any rate, is one for the ages – and that’s a pretty big dream right there.