Late-night Greek problems in the wee hours
I have been translating the Antigone of Sophocles with a colleague and have come to a problem in the very first sentence. The Greek appears thus:
ὦ κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον Ἰσμήνης κάρα,
ἆρ᾽ οἶσθ᾽ ὅ τι Ζεὺς τῶν ἀπ᾽ Οἰδίπου κακῶν
ὁποῖον οὐχὶ νῷν ἔτι ζώσαιν τελεῖ;
which I translate rather freely into:
“O Ismene, my very own sister,
Do you know which of the evils from Oedipus
Zeus does NOT accomplish in both our lifetimes?”
The problem begins with κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον. Griffith points out that a supposed lack of feminine endings here may conjure the idea of their shared brother, but that doesn’t quite cut it in my book. In fact, there are instances where these endings are considered feminine…sort of. It is the direct ambiguity that gives me pause, especially as it comes so early in the work. Sophocles is usually rather more straightforward in grammar at the beginning of his plays, though, unlike Euripides and Aeschylus, he mostly avoids monologues setting location in favor of dialogues addressing the main problems that make up the plot.
The second problem comes with this periphrastic Ἰσμήνης κάρα, which I have seen translated as “very sisterhood” in a commentary from the mid 1800s. This assumes that κάρα here is the poetic kephale, or head, which is quite probable. Of course, English has this very same phenomenon, since the ‘hood’ in sisterhood was originally “head”. But still! And so:
“O head Ismene with respect to a common same brother”
fits clumsily in to the line. So does:
“O Ismene, you (who are in) common very sisterhood”
or…
Well, on with the show.