Category: History

Minnesota Winters

darkness descends, light abates
breath quickens, pulse skips
not clear—do we close our eyes or flee,
inhale, inhale, inhale, gasp, grasp, break the spell
rush of air, icy, thought commences,
but edges, shapes—the outline of what must be done,
or what we leave undone

Unstopped Ears

gnarled tensions herniate the public weal;
bone fractures—order collapses.

author of ill, known to all—
yet the surgeon will not cut.

the patient pleads—
will ears unstop?

Blue, Again: Hesiod and the Persistence of an Anachronism

Some time ago, I noted a small but telling anachronism in a modern translation of Homer: the appearance of blue in a poetic world that had not yet learned to name it as a discrete chromatic color. The observation was not novel, but it was instructive. Once noticed, such moments have a way of reappearing.

Recently, I encountered the same impulse in a translation of Hesiod’s Theogony.

Hesiod, Theogony 279 (Greek)

τῇ δὲ μιῇ παρελέξατο Κυανοχαίτης
ἐν μαλακῷ λειμῶνι καὶ ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσι.¹

Two Modern Translations

One careful, respectful, the other good, but slightly reckless:

“with her alone the dark-haired one lay down in a soft meadow among spring flowers.”²

“The Blue-haired god slept with Medusa on the gentle meadow amidst the spring flowers.”³

Both translators footnote that Poseidon is being named without being named, identified solely by an epithet.

Nothing in the Greek has changed. The verb (παρελέξατο), the setting (ἐν μαλακῷ λειμῶνι), even the delicacy of the spring flowers (ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσι) remain constant. The divergence lies entirely in Κυανοχαίτης.

In archaic Greek, κυανός does not function as a discrete color term. It denotes depth, darkness, sheen—the quality of shadowed mass rather than hue. Joined to χαίτη, it identifies Poseidon by a familiar epic epithet: dark-haired, dark-maned, sea-deep. To render this as “blue-haired” is not a neutral literalism; it imports a modern chromatic category into a poetic system that did not yet organize perception in that way.⁴

Set beside the Greek, the difference becomes immediately visible. “Dark-haired” preserves the archaic register and the restraint of epic diction. “Blue-haired,” by contrast, draws the line forward abruptly. In contemporary English, blue hair belongs less to gods than to declarations—of taste, rebellion, or personal idiosyncratic identity. The sea recedes, and instead of an elemental god rising from its depths, one half-expects the crash of a punk rock concert to break into Hesiod’s meadow, amplifiers humming where spring flowers had been.

These moments are small, but they matter. Translation is always interpretation, but it is also a discipline of restraint. When modern colors slip too easily into ancient verse, they do more than brighten the palette; they alter the weather of the poem itself.

Read alongside Feeling Blue, this passage suggests that the problem is not isolated or accidental, but persistent: whenever modern color names intrude too confidently into archaic poetry, they risk replacing ancient depth with contemporary noise.

Notes

  1. Hesiod, Theogony 279, Greek text in Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans., Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, Loeb Classical Library 57 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 24.
  2. Ibid., 25.
  3. Barry B. Powell, trans., The Poems of Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, & The Shield of Herakles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 49.
  4. See LSJ, s.v. κυανός; Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); W. E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1858).

Blaspheme

Lips spit: I am the chosen one. I am the way. I am law—
by force alone I shatter.

Men bow—dirty knees, tongues lapping gilt from the calf.

Sacrifice: tablets, inheritance, will.

Constantine XI Palaiologos: The Wall Fails

Ἕσσεται ἦμαρ ὅτ᾿ ἄν ποτ᾿ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ἐϋμμελίω Πριάμοιο.

There will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,
and Priam, and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear.

—Homer, Iliad 6.447–449, in A. T. Murray, trans., William F. Wyatt, Loeb Classical Library 170 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 306-307.

Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, πόλεων πασῶν κεφαλή·
Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, ἰδοὺ πόλις, κέντρον τῶν τεσσάρων τοῦ κόσμου μερῶν·
Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, Ἀριστιανῶν καύχημα καὶ βαρβάρων ἀφανισμός.

O City, City, head of all cities;
O City, City—behold the City, the center of the four quarters of the world;
O City, City, boast of the faithful and destruction of the barbarian.

—Michaelis Ducae Nepotis, Historia Byzantina, ed. Immanuel Bekker (Bonnae: Ed. Weber, 1834), 41.1-3.

I

The signs gathered like storm-clouds over stone.
The moon held three hours in shadow,
as if faithfully remembering an ominous decree.
The City’s ikon slipped from its golden frame,
while rain came hard, with hail,
and darkened the candles’ light.

Fog lay thick upon the streets at dawn,
as though the Lord of history had withdrawn His gaze
and left the walls to reckon with themselves.

That night a luminous glow hovered over the dome of Hagia Sophia—
to those within, a burning crown of sorrow;
to those without, a sign the City’s time was done.

II

The emperor took up the old, hard work of prayer.
Along the battered circuit of the walls he walked,
bearing ikons and relics in his hands,
with Greeks and Latins chanting side by side,
their quarrels stilled beneath a sorrowful resolve.

The Mother of God, the martyrs, the confessors—
all were invoked as if their names
could buttress mortar more than stone.

In the Great Church, under the shadowed dome,
he knelt, seeking pardon—from bishops, from people—
received the mysteries, asked to be forgiven,
then rose to bid farewell to those of his own house
before he went alone to read the nighted ramparts.

III

The last assault came early, unheralded.
Waves of men broke upon the landward walls
until the very earth seemed to remember Troy.

He moved along the parapets with measured speech,
offering encouragement and what comfort he could,
standing where the shot tore stone to dust.

For a time the line held firm, the Rhomaioi
answering iron with iron, fire with fire.
But hope, not courage, failed first.

Then Giustiniani faltered, wounded, borne away,
and with his going something in the defence gave way—
not the line itself, but what had held the line together.

Through the small, forgotten gate of Kerkoporta
the first invaders entered—
banner against beleaguered sky;

the towers fell, and the wall itself failed open,
not by thunderbolt, but by an unattended door.

IV

When the breach could no longer be denied,
they urged him to flee—to seek a ship, a safer shore—
but he refused to outlive the City he had served.

Casting aside the purple and the eagle—
signs of basileus kai autokratōr Rhōmaiōn—
he stripped himself of what set him apart
and stepped into the tumult like any other man.

Sword in hand, he went to where the fighting
thickened into one indistinguishable struggle,
so that no eye might easily discern
which body among the fallen had been emperor.

Later they searched for him among the dead,
found a head, perhaps his, to lift before the sultan’s gaze;
yet some would say no certain corpse was ever found,
that beneath the sealed Golden Gate stone keeps a vigil,
and that a marble emperor bides his time in sleep
until the City, once more, has walls to be defended.