Monday, April 27, 2009

Preserving idioms in translation...

..is difficult. I had to translate some lines in Sophocles' Antigone and write a short commentary. Kreon, the newly-crowned tyrannical king, states that:

οὐδὲν γὰρ ἀνθρώποισιν οἷον ἄργυρος κακὸν νόμισμ' ἔβλαστε.

The play on words here is difficult to keep in translation. Kreon is making a pun on νόμισμα and I'm not quite sure how to maintain it.

How would you translate it?

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