Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), "On a Military Graveyard,"
Complete Poems (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2004), p. 591:
Stranger, when you come to Washington
Tell them that we lie here
Obedient to their orders.
after Simonides
Rexroth modified slightly the epigram by Simonides recorded by Herodotus 7.228:
ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.
Rexroth also translated the original in his
Poems from the Greek Anthology (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999, rpt. 2002), p. 106:
Stranger, when you come to
Lakedaimon, tell them we lie
Here, obedient to their will.
Cicero's translation of Simonides into Latin:
dic, hospes, Spartae nos te hic vidisse iacentes
dum sanctis patriae legibus obsequimur.
C.M. Bowra,
The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. lix-lxi:
The first thing to notice is this — that by a fiction
the dead are made to speak, and that their epitaph
takes the form of a message from the field. As none
survived, some one else must deliver that message.
Hence the appeal in the first two words — a form of
address found in many another Greek epitaph, but
with less excuse.1
These first two words are the first difficulty.
Cicero rendered them by ‘hospes’, a closer approximation than English allows. No single word in
English has the same meanings, inherent and adherent, as the Greek. ‘Stranger’ is too remote, and
tends to be American, ‘friend’ is too familiar. The
compromise ‘passer-by’ has found, perhaps, most
favour.
Next, the word ἀγγέλλειν. Here a problem of
adherent meaning is raised not by the word itself but
by the use of the infinitive to convey an injunction. This idiom was common in Dorian speech, and
would therefore be appropriate on the lips of the
Spartan dead, while to Greek readers in general,
familiar with its use in Hesiod and other old poets, it
would also have had a dignified, archaic ring.2 If
that were the whole truth, an archaizing translation,
such as ‘Take tiding(s)’, might be defended. But the
idiom is also military and not confined to the Dorians
In this dispatch from the field its military use is
appropriate, and hence a very different suggestion,
namely, that we should translate ‘Report to the
Lacedaemonians ...’.
Modern poetry is wholesomely inclusive in its
diction, but even so Report would be out of keeping.
For the diction of the epitaph as a whole has a
conscious poetic colouring, as the forms ξεῖν' for
ξέν' and κείνων for ἐκείνων attest. And after all, the
idiom was archaic and poetical as well as military.
Once again, then, we must compromise on some
neutral expression such as ‘Tell them in Lacedaemon ...’.
Two further problems of meaning are set by the
last two words. Some have argued that ῥήμασι bears
much the same sense as ῥημάτων in No. 206 — the
poem written by Simonidês on Danaê. It would then
mean not ‘orders’ or ‘ordinances’, but ‘words’ or
‘sayings’ such as Plutarch collected in his Sayings of
Laconian Women, e.g. ‘Come back with your shield
— or upon it’. One may answer, of course, that the
meaning ‘orders’ is better suited to a soldierly dispatch;
but why demand one meaning and one only? A poet’s
economy, especially in epigram, is to say one thing
and suggest much more. In English ‘word’ (rather
than ‘words’) has some of the requisite associations,
and also covers the possible alternatives most completely.
Finally, πειθόμενοι. It is often said that the use
of the present participle implies continuity and demands the translation ‘still obeying’. But the temporal reference of the participle cannot be stressed,
and ‘still obeying’ is a sentimental, un-Greek idea,
certainly out of place on the lips of Spartans.
1 Cf. R. Heinze, Neue Jahrb. f. d. klass. Altertum, 1915, p 6.
2 Cf. W. Rhys Roberts, Eleven Words of Simonides, Camb.
Univ. Press, 1920.