In my final year of my undergraduate degree, I produced a full draft translation of Sophocles' Antigone. Every so often, I go back to this translation and start tinkering with it--I want to eventually revise it into something polished, but it's not there yet. Recently, though, I revisited my absolute favorite speech for an event I wound up being too unwell to attend, and I found myself once again trying to retranslate one of my favorite lines.

If you aren't familiar: Antigone is about a girl, Antigone, whose brothers have both killed each other in battle for the kingship of Thebes. Since one brother (Eteocles) was in the position of king at the time, and the other (Polyneices) brought soldiers against Thebes to try and overthrow him, the new king (Creon, Antigone's uncle) has declared that only Eteocles will be buried: Polyneices' body will lie outside the city for the birds and dogs to eat. Antigone buries him (ignoring her sister's protests), and Creon sentences her to be shut in a cave with enough food that he escapes blame for her death. If you want to read the full play (highly recommend!), you can find a good free translation on Ian Johnston's website. I also recommend Ruby Blondell's translation if you have time and/or money to spare on acquiring it, and of course if you can find a production or a recording of a production, there's no substitute for seeing a play performed.

In this post, though, I'm going to zero in on a specific line in the Greek text. This line is in Antigone's speech after Creon asks whether she knew he had forbidden Polyneices' burial. "I knew," Antigone says. "How could I have missed it?" Creon then asks why, knowing the law, she had decided to break it. Antigone then gives a speech in which she explains to Creon that the gods did not give her this law, and she was not about to go against the gods to avoid consequences from a mortal. She goes on to explain that she accepts her death, even considers it a positive, and finishes by essentially calling Creon a moron.

And in the middle of all of that is this line:

θανουμένη γὰρ ἐξῄδη, τί δ᾽ οὔ;

Or, transliterated into the Latin alphabet:

thanoumenē gar exēidē, ti d'ou;

Taken literally, this line says something like, "For going to die, I have known well: why not?" But that's not a good translation. It's borderline incoherent in English. Making it coherent requires a complete overhaul.

If we break this line down into its parts, it's:

The first time I translated this line, I translated it as, "I know that I am dying. What else could I be?" But "What else could I be?", although evocative, is not really a fair translation of "τί δ᾽ οὔ;" Not to mention that this translation doesn't get at either the continuous sense of the imperfect "ἐξῄδη" or the future sense of "θανουμένη." One really important part of Antigone's character for me is that she does not see any way out of this situation but death, and that is because, surrounded by the deaths of her loved ones, she has conceived of herself as dying or already dead for some time. This line is the prime evidence, and I want any attempt I make at translating it to reflect that. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the sense of inevitability that comes with generational trauma or genetic illness, and "What else could I be?" really communicated that.

Since then, I've gone in and fiddled with the line quite a few times. My most recent translation reads, "I'm going to die. I've always known. Why not?" This doesn't fit the meter my translation uses (I've been mimicking the iambic trimeter of the original Greek, probably more legible to English speakers as an iambic hexameter), but every day I come closer to converting it all into iambic pentameter anyway, which this line would fit. Even if not, it's an appropriate place to break the meter: this is a line I want the audience to remember.

This translation communicates some of the ambiguity I see in the Greek--I find "τί δ᾽ οὔ;" very hard to translate because it feels like a bit of a nonsequitur. I have to decide whether to keep it that way (and if so, what two-word phrase works best--"Why not?" or "How not?" or "What else?"), or whether I ought to expand further on how I think it connects to the thought before it: "Why wouldn't I be?" or "What's the alternative?" or something. Similarly, because there's no "to be" verb, the first part of the sentence feels very concise. The best way I can figure to communicate that is by using multiple short sentences.

Even with all this thought and revision, though, I'm still not convinced I've fully grasped the sense of the original Greek. I feel like there's got to be something I'm missing, something I'm not quite understanding... and I'm sure there is. I'm not an expert in Greek yet (that's my summer project...), and even if I were, there's a two-thousand-year-wide gulf between myself and Sophocles. I might never figure out the best way to interpret this line. That's what makes translation--and in particular, translation out of ancient Greek--so much fun, but it's also nervewracking. I don't want to misrepresent the play to an audience of people who may never read the original. But the truth is, there are countless ways to interpret any given line, and eventually a translator has to choose one... or else keep tinkering forever. I suspect I'll choose the latter path.