My exceedingly good friend and kick-ass Japanese student Raechel is listing portions of her translations over at her blog, and I thought that as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’d follow suit. Raechel, with many years of her language under her belt, is doing far more than I can, but I’ve been enjoying the snippets I can manage at this point in my studies.

The first real Greek I did were some fragments from Menander:

A life without marriage is a life without pain.

Bad friends bear bad fruit.

An ill-timed pleasure gives birth to harm.

The next was from Sophokles’ Philoktetes, lines 792-796. Philoktetes has just discovered he has been left behind on an island and his companions have left without him to go to Troy.

“Oh how awful!

Again, how truly terrible! O my two commanders,

Agamemnon, Menelaos, how after all this time

could you nourish this sickness instead of me?”

Woe, woe is me!”

The final lines of Euripides’ Alcestis (and Bakkhai, as a matter of fact):

Many are the forms belonging to the gods.

and the gods accomplish many unexpected things,

and the things expected are not accomplished,

but of the unexpeted things, the god discovers a way.

This story was of this sort.

Finally, here’s a few of the final lines of Aischylos’ Eumenides (754-756):

“O Pallas! You who have been the savior of my family,

you have allowed me to return to the paternal homeland of which I was deprived.”

Badassery, to be sure. Next I’m working on a selection from Persians. Woo!