Skyscript Astrology Forum

My language studies were limited to French and Spanish, and a little German. But reading the different Valens translations of even a sentence or two shows us that translating an ancient language is a fine art. Even a change in verb is significant. Translation isn't simply finding words in a dictionary and putting them together in a sentence which Andrea Gherz seems to have done on occasion. Nevertheless we have to applaud her efforts. But why, when we have Riley and Schmidt? And now perhaps Gramaglia.

In Greek, the section reads: τῳ μηʹ ???τει πενθος βα??υτατον τεκνου φιλοστο??γου θανατον θεασαμενος, ???ν δε τῳ α???τῳ και μητ??ος. t?? mē etei penthos barutaton teknou philostorgou thanaton theasamenos, en de t?? aut?? kai mētros.

Riley and Schmidt only really differ in the rendering of the adjective φιλοστο??γου - Riley has taken it to show the native's affection, Schmidt the child's.

In Gehrz's case, she has taken the noun θανατον ('death') and the participle θεασαμενος ('seeing') to be separate from the part about the child, which is odd for two reasons: first, Pingree has supplied a comma in the critical edition showing where he thinks the sentence should be broken up. Second, and more importantly, the participle is in the masculine nominative, and it looks like Gehrz thinks that μητ??ος is also in the nominative (the -os endings are nominative for most masculine and some neuter nouns, the nominative of 'mother' is μήτη?? mētēr), so the contemplation (or, more typically, the seeing) is the native seeing the death of both the child and the mother, rather than the mother contemplating her own death (which is an odd thing to think when the chart is of the woman's son, and not the woman). This error is compounded by the fact that the participle is in the masculine, and 'mother' is grammatically feminine, so its participle would read θεασαμένη theasamenē. Even the 'and herself' of Gehrz is based on a pretty basic misunderstanding of the Greek. It reads ???ν δε τῳ α???τῳ (literally 'and in/during the same'), α???τῳ referring back to the 48th year (α???τῳ is the dative form of the pronoun α???τός , and when it takes the article it means 'the same'). The issue is that Gehrz ignores the article and translates it as 'herself'. A bigger mistake is that α???τῳ is masculine, the feminine form is α???τῇ autē, so I don't see why she would connect it with 'mother'. All in all, it is a pretty bad translation.

Konrad wrote:All in all, it is a pretty bad translation.

Here, here, and here, we discussed some passages of the Gehrz translation (paraphrase? interpretation? rewriting?) of Valens's Book I, and the conclusions weren't very favorable. The observations made there are still valid, and so are Konrad's acute remark here. In other words, the concerns still prevail and the question arises whether Gehrz's work is a legitimate rendering of anything by Valens. If you ask me, my answer is a definite "no".

I also want to remark that translating old astrological texts is an arduous task. Most aspects worthy of consideration have been related by Stephan Heilen in two papers:

"Problems in translating ancient Greek astrological texts." In Writings of Early Scholars in the Ancient Near East, Egypt and Greece: Translating Ancient Scientific Texts, eds. Annette Imhausen and Tanja
Pommerening, 299–329. Berlin/New York: 2010. (Google Books preview here)

"Translating Greco-Roman Astrological Texts: The Horoscope of Hadrian by Antigonus of Nicaea." In Translating Writings of Early Scholars in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome: Methodological Aspects with Examples, eds. Annette Imhausen and Tanja Pommerening, 507–569. Berlin/Boston: 2016. (Google Books preview here)

I think without the awareness of the issues raised in these papers and a clear methodological strategy, it's risky (and somewhat foolish) to produce so-called translations.

I'm impressed. Thanks to you both.

I understand that ancient Greek wasn't punctuated, so there are judgement calls (and probably conventions) in how to break up long lines of text.

It would be interesting to get Andrea Gehrz on this thread to defend her translations.

I'll see if I can get the articles by Stephan Heilan. I have access to on-line journal articles via a university library; but unfortunately a lot of scholarship on astrology is published in limited edition edited volumes.