This translation is one of the vanishingly few Greek compositions done by Milton. It came to him of a sudden by a kind of divine inspiration, while he was lying in bed before day-break. So he writes to Alexander Gil in 1634, a tutor at St Paul’s School, giving this poem in exchange for some verses that were sent by him:
"I send, what is certainly not mine, but also belongs to that truly divine poet, this Ode of whom, only last week, with no deliberate intention certainly, but from I know not what sudden impulse, before day-break, I composed, almost in bed, to the rule of Greek heroic verse.”
Milton adds the following interesting remarks:
“Should anything occur to you in it not coming up to your usual opinion of our productions, understand that, since I left your school, this is the first and only thing I have composed in Greek,--employing myself, as you know, more willingly in Latin and English matters; inasmuch as whoever spends study and pains in this age on Greek composition, runs a risk of singing generally to the deaf." (Letter to Alexander Gil, 4 December 1634; transl. from Latin by Masson 1859:499.)
A thought: may not this complaint, that Greek composition runs the risk of "singing to the deaf," have found its remedy in the modern age, where foreign-language poetry can be recited on film with bilingual subtitles?
The composition differs from the original in many interesting ways. A number of innovations have a Grecian tinge. God is called, like Zeus, a God of thunder, for which (as G. S. Gordon says) Milton even invents a new word, ἐκκτυπέοντα, the one who thunders out. Jacob is introduced under the patronymic of Isaacides, as if he were a Homeric hero: and the Egyptians are said to speak a barbarian tongue; as if to draw a parallel between the special light in which both the Greeks and Hebrews viewed their own nations, as against the outside world. We are reminded of the translation-philosophy of Chapman’s Iliad; and the work seems to pass beyond the modern conception of a translation into what we might call an emulatively original poem.
It is also an extraordinary fusion of Greek and Hebrew culture; almost seeming to revive the Hellenistic Judaism to which Philo and Josephus and the Septuagint belonged. Milton takes the greatest poet of the Hebrew nation, and expresses his thoughts in the metre and language of the greatest poet of the Greeks. He thus makes the greatest poets of both nations appear to speak with one voice. This circumstance looks forward, with dramatic irony, to the Paradise Lost, so thoroughly influenced as it is both by Homer and the Bible. And it is also interesting to think that Milton is himself the greatest poet of the English nation; so that, in this translation, we find (as it were) three of the greatest poets in history meeting in one place.
The very best essay on this poem is "Milton as a Translator of Poetry" by John Hale, originally published in Renaissance Studies 1, 1987, pp. 238-56. It is also treated of in his book "Milton's Languages" (1997).
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My translation of this poem is free to use under CC-BY-4.0 (attribution only). For want of space, I include it in a comment beneath the video, along with the Greek text.
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A possible erratum: Milton's name, on reflection, would be better Hellenized as Μίλτων, Μίλτωνος; as opposed to my pronunciation of Μιλτών, Μιλτῶνος. This is not only how the word is accented in modern Greek, but the analogy of nearly every bisyllabic name ending in -ων that I can think (Πλάτων, Σόλων, Χάρων &c.), the only exception being Παιών. There was only a small amount of precedent for what I have done; which is that Milton’s name is written with an oxytone accent in Professor Cook's translation of Young's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” into ancient Greek (1785:173) a work which was much praised in its day:
Ενθάδε καὶ Μιλτών τις ἄμωσος &c., Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest.
