Kim Johnson

(Northwestern University Press, 2017)

Widely considered the first poet in the Western tradition to address the matter of his own experience, Hesiod occupies a seminal position in literary history. His Theogony brings together and formalizes many of the narratives of Greek myth, detailing the genealogy of its gods and their violent struggles for power. The Works and Days seems on its face to be a compendium of advice about managing a farm, but it ranges far beyond this scope to meditate on morality, justice, the virtues of a good life, and the place of humans in the universe. These poems are concerned with orderliness and organization, and they proclaim those ideals from small-scale to vast, from a handful of seeds to the story of the cosmos. Presented here in a bilingual edition, Johnson’s translation takes care to preserve the structure of Hesiod’s lines and sentences, achieving a sonic and rhythmic balance that enables us to hear his music across the millennia.

Review by Brian Jackson presented at Faculty Book Lunch

Poet Kim Johnson, a triple threat (she writes literary scholarship, poetry, and translations in both Greek and Latin), has now graced us with a translation of Hesiod’s two 2800-year-old poems, Theogony and Works and Days, both published in one bilingual volume for Northwestern University Press. As both poet and classicist, Dr. Johnson render’s Hesiod’s Greek in “variable meter governed yet loosely by the idea of dactylic hexameter,” preserving both the “discrete music” of Hesiod’s poetry and the integrity of the Greek poetic line. In Theogony, she renders the cosmogony (the birth of the universe and its rowdy gods) and the clash of the titans in in poetry sounding simultaneously archaic and lusciously present. In Works and Days—whose genre is more difficult to categorize—Dr. Johnson makes “legible” the “small cosmos of lived existence” that we find in a poem preoccupied by myth, fable, ritual purity, justice, hard work, and agricultural practice. In this poem, Hesiod exhorts his “idiot” brother Perses to “pile work upon work upon work,” which is what “the gods ordained for men.” Dr. Johnson renders Hesiod’s prosaic advice beautifully and rhythmically : “Attend to justice and ever shun havoc,” “Let the wage promised to a friend be fitly paid,” “weave a fat nap through your warp’s filaments,” “never let a house you’re building sit unfinished / Or a raucous crow may camp there and caw calamity down, “On the seventh of midmonth, survey the smooth curve / Of the threshing-floor, and toss thereupon the sacred grain / Of Demeter.” Like Hesiod, Dr. Johnson seems to have received the branch of “evergreen laurel” from “the wordspinning daughters of almighty Zeus” to have written such a lovely translation. Or maybe, unlike Perses, she just knows how and when to work. Either way, we congratulate her on yet another monumental work of art and scholarship.