“Hymn to the Muses” in Hesiod’s Theogony (vv. 1-115)

Abstract

Most of the existing Portuguese translations of Hesiod’s Theogony have a philological approach, considering mainly the meaning of the Greek text instead of the materiality of the signifiers that compose it. In Poundian terms, logopoeia and phanopoeia generally prevail, without an appreciation of the melopoeia that is so characteristic of ancient Greek poetic production. Based on these brief reflections regarding the possibility of a new “transcreation” of the Theogony (“transcreation” in the sense given by Haroldo de Campos to that word), I present a new translation into Portuguese of the first 115 verses of Hesiod’s Theogony, that is, of the passage known among Hellenists as “Hymn of the Muses”: in my translation, I will seek solutions that take into account the totality of the linguistic sign in order to provide a poetic experience of these verses also in Portuguese.