“Oh Yes It Is.” “Oh No It Isn’t.”

There was an interesting interview in Saturday’s Grauniad with the translator Michael Hofmann, that I rather wish I had seen before doing the final revisions to the latest iteration of my adaptation of the Melian Dialogue (just published in Disclaimer magazine). Of course, my piece isn’t a translation in the conventional sense, but an attempt at a distillation, trying to capture and intensify the essense of the original.* This means I don’t have quite the same fear (experienced by most translators, but bullishly dismissed by Hofmann) of criticism for introducing anachronistic language – that’s actually part of the point, and I would *love* to hear the Melian Dialogue converted into a rap battle or similar contemporary idiom (any classically-inclined MCs out there, feel free to get in touch…). But the hubris of the enterprise, claiming to have got to the heart of Thucydides’ text and its intentions, does find echoes in Hofmann’s discussion of his own work – however much I set up alibis with phrases like “after Thucydides”. Even the implication that there is no definitive reading, that this dramatic interlude is designed to provoke identification – not necessarily with one side or the other, but with the situation and its complexities – and discussion on that basis, is a bold, if not entirely original, statement. But when the title of Yanis Varoufakis’ new book (And the Weak Suffer What They Must?**) explicitly draws on the traditional reading, and reviewers have latched onto this as a crucial insight into world affairs, a different way of thinking about Thucydides’ potential relevance to the present seems worthwhile.

*Yes, I’m aware of the risk that this paring down will eventually result in a two-sentence version; “Because I said so.”/”Not fair!”, perhaps, or, in a more Douglas Adams mode, “Resistance is useless!”/”But there’s so much more to life.” Anything so long as it remains a dialogue and debate, where we can weigh up the merits of the claims of either side, rather than a one-liner that insists on a single interpretation. Come to think of it, one might read the conventional Realist appropriation of the Melian Dialogue as itself an expression of the Athenian view: “The strong disseminate their reading across the media, and the classicists just have to put up with it.” “But what happens to nuance and ambiguity?” “That’s the way the world is.” I assume someone must have noticed this…

**My copy has arrived; thoughts on Varoufakis’ latest engagement with Thucydides (for previous iterations see my blogpost last year) to follow once I have had time to read it.