harry potter in greek

Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone

"It's an ideal job for an old bloke in retirement." Peter Needham, translator of HP into Latin.

Sometime in the autumn of 2001, I was searching for Classics news for this website when I came across an article in the Daily Telegraph revealing that a Latin translation of Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone was under way (by Peter Needham, now published by Bloomsbury Press as Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis). It also mentioned that they were intending to bring out an ancient Greek version, "believed to be the first time a children's classic will have been translated into Greek", but were having difficulty finding a translator. "J K Rowling [who studied Latin at Exeter university] and her publishers hope that the translations will help children overcome the common dread of studying the two dead languages - where wars in Gaul and Virgil's thoughts on beekeeping can be as exciting as it gets." This would seem to be true, as according to a more recent Telegraph report, in the United States "The use of Latin in J K Rowling's books has prompted a surge of interest in the classics among high school students. After decades of decline, the numbers taking Latin for college credits has soared by 80 per cent since the first book was published in the United States six years ago" (Daily Telegraph 2 February 2003).

On a wild impulse I wrote to The Children's Book Commissioning Editor at Bloomsbury Press, offering my services. Greek prose composition had been my favorite thing at school and university - though of course we spent at least three hours working on about a paragraph of English to be turned into Greek. I didn't really expect to hear any more - my offer was in a slightly jokey form - but some weeks later I received a phonecall from Emma Matthewson at Bloomsbury telling me that they were indeed serious about an ancient Greek version, and would I like to do a specimen chapter? I said yes, and took Harry (the publishers kindly supplied me with a copy, as I had never read the book!) and my Liddell & Scott lexicon on holiday with me to the Caribbean, and concocted a version of chapter 1, plus a little bit of the Quidditch episode in chapter 11. In early January 2002 I submitted my draft, it was approved and I was offered a contract to complete the task by January 1st 2003.

The aim

My intention was to recreate a version of the book which would make sense to a Greek from any era up to the 4th century AD who had managed by some magical process (such as would only be taught only to very advanced students at Hogwarts!) to reach the 21st century. Objects and ideas would be unfamiliar - but once he'd got used to his new surroundings, the book would make complete sense. So I thought it was very important to have this time-travelling Greek in mind at all times, and continually ask myself "would that have any meaning for him? what would he make of that?" In other words a cultural transposition is involved, not just finding the words.

The work proceeds

Before getting down to the translation I had to find a style - J K Rowling would not lend herself to the style of Thucydides or Plato or Demosthenes (who had been our main models for prose composition). But there are Greek novels (Charitons's Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Cleitophon and Leucippe, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus' African Story) all of whom I read, along with the entire works of Lucian - a most entertaining task. Lucian's humorous tongue-in-cheek approach, together with his fantastical notions such as The True History (which is guaranteed to contain not a single word of truth) soon convinced me that he was the closest writer in ancient Greek to J K R. So Lucian became my model - his Greek, despite his date (3rd century AD) is (almost) pure 5th century BC Attic, which was being recycled the time. But this also gave me an excuse for using vocabulary from post-classical sources, without which it would have been impossible to proceed. He was also, like me, a Greek through culture and education, not ethnicity. I also read a lot of Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus - and medical and magical writers, for specialised vocabulary. Liddell & Scott was indispensable - and I also needed inspiration from modern Greek quite frequently: my most useful possession is a 19th century "Dictionary of the English and Modern Greek Languages, as actually written and spoken" by A N Jannaris, PhD, published by John Murray in 1895. This helped me find h( a(macostoixi/a for train rather than to\ tre/no. I worked in beta code, because all ancient Greek fonts map to the qwerty keyboard idiosyncratically - and I didn't want to force a particular font on to the printers. I'll also use it for quotations on this page - although there is a java applet which will turn it into almost "proper" Greek. You can see an extract here in fully accented ancient Greek. It's Lee Jordan's commentary on the Quidditch Game - which you can also hear me read - see below. I worked mostly at home, but also very productively in the Classics Faculty Library in Cambridge, and - thanks to my trusty HP Jornada hand-held computer - on trains, boats and planes, in bars and cafés around the world. Enormous thanks are due to Keith Maclennan, formerly Head of Classics at Rugby school, for his wise advice and inspired suggestions, and to Dr Manuela Tecusan for painstaking assistance with the highly complex proof reading. But translating Harry has been the most enjoyable hard work of my life.

Ancient authors

As well as my very obvious debt to Lucian, alert readers will note numerous borrowings from other classic (Aeschylean moments for example at the start of chapter 2 - de/katon me\n e)/tos to/d' e)pei/ ... and Hagrid - like the watchman in Agamemnon - finds an ox on his tongue at some point). But there are hidden gems from Homer, Thucydides, Plato and many others for those wise enough to discern them. This is of course good classical pratcice, where recycling was properly regarded as a compliment to the original writer. Aristophanes' dung beetle in Peace provides *aitnai=os ("the size of Etna" see also below under noises) for very big things (used sparingly). Menander was a great source for conversational style, as were the Letters of Alciphron.

Problems

Proper names Less of a problem than I thought they'd be. I followed Herodotus' principle of trying to make outlandish names seem native to Greek - some were easy: Auntie Marge becomes *margh/ (= the mad woman in Greek), Malfoi becomes *ma/lakos (= soft,wuss in Greek - not an insult to be used lightly even today: this explains why everyone laughs at his name), Crabbe and Goyle become *ka/rkinos kai\ *ke/rkwy (recalling the Kerkopes, dim-witted brothers caught by Heracles). Ron becomes *(ro/wn (rather charmingly, the Greek for a pomegranate orchard), Muggles become *mu/galoi (Greek for field-mice, quite appropriately), McGonagall becomes the homophonous *magonwgale/a (witch-sweetie - also contains gale/h which is a word used for a small pet animal, like a cat?) and Dumbledore is *dimplo/dwros (double = diplo-, therefore dumble = dimplo- !). Similarly Quirrell becomes *ki/ouros (Greek ski/ouros = squirrel). The house names had to fit into iambic verse, for the Sorting Hat's song, but still end up sounding vaguely Greek. Sirius Black become *sei/rios o( me/las . And some names are already Greek (Draco, Hermione) and some could just be translated (Bane becomes *athro/s, Fang becomes *da/kos). Hagrid - *(agriw/dhs suggests Greek a)/grios (= wild, savage). Voldemort rather nicely becomes *folido/mortos = Scaly Death (folido- being Greek for scale, as in snake, and the mort- root means fate - same as Latin mors, mortis death.) Hogwarts I'm particularly proud of - not only does *(uogoh/tou sound much like the original (by the way it's in the genitive case on the analogy of *(a|dou, Hades, standing for the house of Hades. I imagine their must have been an eponymous Hogwart, like Tiffin or Bancroft or Blundell), but it also derives from u(/o- the root for hog, and goht- the word for wizard. JKR's cunningly punning Diagon Alley becomes o( stenwpo\s dia/gwn - "the lane that leads one through". And Harry Potter is *(/areios *poth/r - a)/reios means "belonging to Ares", the war god - appropriate for the young warrior, and poth/r is a Greek word for "cup" or "goblet" - presumably the cup of wisdom from which Harry must quickly learn to drink deeply.

Special vocabulary - Quidditch becomes i)karosfairikh/ (on the analogy of podosfairikh/ for football and kalaqosfairikh/ for basketball- with which Quidditch is compared). Lucian calls Menippus the philosopher Icaromenippus after his alleged trip to the moon - that's where I got the idea. The quaffle has the near homophone (with the sort of metathesis that Greeks often applied to foreign words) kolofw=n which means a ball in Greek, and a bludger is r(opalosfai/rion, reminding us of a ball which acts like Heracles' club! The snitch is fqaste/on, meaning "that which must be anticipated" from fqa/nw, a fantastic Greek verb with no English equivalent, meaning "I do something before someone else realises that I'm doing it". The philosopher's stone (why the apostrophe before the s, I asked myself?) becomes h( tou= filoso/fou li/qos - if you are worried about the gender of l/iqos, I assure you it becomes feminine when referring to a special stone.

Modern terms Train I've already mentioned - other modern phenomena such as rifles, bombs, computers, tape-recorders, watches, racing-bikes, motor-cycles, traffic lights and so on were dealt with similarly, using the oldest modern Greek I could find - preferably with obvious classical roots - like a(macostoixi/a, where the Greek evokes carriages or waggons in a line. Sometimes - in the manner of Herodotus explaining strange ethnic customs - I sometimes have a short digression which might help an ancient Greek to understand a totally unfamilar object (like a parking meter). I'm sure - like modern Greeks - he'd be quite happy to call a car an au)toki/nhton, a self-moving something, and assume that the word o)/xhma, chariot, was understood. The Howarts Express becomes w)ku/poros u(ogohtikh/ , with a(macostoixi/a of course understood, and it leaves from *stauro\s *basi/leios, of course.

Cultural problems There were many, one of the more obvious being relationships - the patriarchal Greeks not really concerning themselves with relationships like mother's sister (very important for Harry of course) because once married a Greek bride would have little contact with her former family. There does exist a word for aunt (mother's as opposed to father's sister), but it's rare - although the Greeks had a word for "women whose husbands are brothers" - ei)na/teres - because this might be important if one of the brothers died.

Time was another one - Greeks had little interest in "telling the time" although they did have devices for measuring how much had elapsed (water clocks for timing speeches, for example). Nor did they care about minutes, let alone seconds! The nearest we get to specific times are Thucydides' phrases for "at about the time the market-place begins to fill up", or "at about the time the oxen begin to head home from pasture". (I'm reminded of the remark that "There is no word in Gaelic that quite conveys the urgency of mañana.") Likewise months and years - "Ollivanders, wand-makers since 382 BC." The year 382 BC translates into "when Evander was archon" quite neatly, but dates AD have had to be done more conventionally. Each Greek city had its own system of months - so I've used the Roman ones we are familiar with to avoid complete confusion!

And colours - it's little appreciated how languages divide up the visible spectum of light in their own way - our red orange yellow etc is of course completely arbitrary- the spectrum is a continuum. The Greeks had very few real colour-words- Homer's "wine-looking, wine-faced" sea is a typical circumlocution (if it in fact means that - the traditional "wine-dark" is a romantic suggestion). So you will have to judge how I've dealt with the various yellows, blues, greens and other colours that JKR is so fond of - especially pink (the Romans invented the word - it comes from puniceus, the Carthaginian/Punic colour - which was the result of dyeing cloth with a sea mollusc whose identity is now unknown! But it was the "purple" of the emperors - inappropriate surely for a blush or or Dudley's baby photos!)

The natural world of the Mediterranean: this surfaces right at the start - there is no Greek word for privet as in Privet Drive, so I have had to substitute an equally uninteresting Mediterranean shrub - myrtle. (Nor of course did Greeks number their house or name their streets - the first sentence is the most problematical in the entire book!) Tawny and Snowy Owls are unknown in Greece - but they had a dozen or more words for owl which it's difficult to assign to particular species: the scientists call the Little Owl - the symbol of Athens - "Athene" in her honour. Hedwig is called glau=c, the commonest ancient word, which does probably apply to Athene noctua, the Little Owl (Athena is called glaukw=pis by Homer, meaning probably "owl-faced", rather than "grey-eyed" or "bright-eyed". A Little Owl might have caused the Muggles on the Underground less excitement!). Hewig becomes *(hdui+kti-n "sweet kite" which I quite like. There seems to be no word in Greek for "badger" - tough on the Hufflepuffs - they seem to have used the word galh= indiscriminately for all small to medium size wild animals. And they don't distinguish between mice and rats - mu=s has to do for both (sorry, Scabbers!). There also seems to be a gender problem with some animals - all cats are masculine (as all bears are feminine) - which makes the surprise even greater when McGonagall reveals herself to Dumbledore. Mrs Norris' gender remains undisclosed (certainly not neutered!).

And also noises: an ancient Greek got by with one or two words which did duty for every kind of noise from a snap to a crackle to a pop to a bang to a rustle to a toot to a creak to a clunk to a click - this makes life difficult, and I had to avoid over-using comparisons with Mount Etna - probably the only really loud noise ever heard in the ancient world! Somewhat bathetically, I do use it for the wizard cracker in chapter 12 which "went of with blast like a cannon". But we just take it for granted in English how many words we have for different kinds and intensities of sound.

Towards publication

On 1st February 2004 our local newspaper, Bedfordshire on Sunday, had as its lead story "From Plato to Potter", describing how a retired Bedford schoolmaster had translated Harry Potter into ancient Greek. This had come about from a chance encounter in the Wellington Arms pub with a former pupil, Jonathan Stewart, now an editor of the paper, who had heard rumours of my activities over the past year or so: he arranged for an interview. The story was picked up by local radio (BBC Three Counties, who did a live telephone interview the following morning). This in turn was picked up by Anglia TV, and BBC Look East, who conducted a prolonged interview at home and with me reading extracts in Greek to some nine-year-olds at Scott School,the local primary. They also talked to the children: one little girl had read all the books and was looking forward to mine, but felt she might need a Greek dictionary! An article with pictures was posted on the BBC website. Local exposure led to contacts from Greece - a news item to be followed up with an article in Epsilon, and in the Sunday magazine of Eleuthrerotypia on February 22nd - Canada, the US - I did a telephone interview with Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition on February 14th - and, amazingly, Russia - a TV crew from NTV - that's HTB in Russian - spent a morning filming and interviewing for a programme on 16th February. Incidentally Harry becomes Gary in Russian! Bedfordshire on Sunday did a follow-up article yesterday. Today (18th February) a Greek photographer sent by Eleutherotypia, the Greek newspaper, spent the afternoon doing a series of portraits. He led me to believe that I'd soon by the most-recognised Englshman in Greece: unfortunately the effect of this was somewhat undermined when I asked him if he would be buying it. "Of course not, Ancient Greek is like Chinese to us!"

On 24 February there was a small snippet in the Times (see below), which led to an appearance the same day on BBC Radio 4's "Front Row" being interviewed by Mark Lawson. I was especially pleased to be sharing the bill with Derek Walcott, the St Lucian poet and Nobel Laureate - author of Omeros - whose work I've always venerated (and who happens to be my late mother-law's godson!).

You can access most of these media events:

• Bedfordshire on Sunday article 1 February

• BBC Look East - article on BBC website

• Article on the Eleutherotypia newspaper website, Greece

• Intervew on Scott Simon's Weekend Edition Febrary 14th (sound clip) Includes an extract from the Quidditch game chapter.

• Bedfordshire on Sunday follow-up 15th February 20

• Reuters 20 February - interview with Tim Castle

Other articles that have appeared:

• The Hindustan Times February 9 2004

• CBC Net (Canada)

• The BBC website in Greek

• Mugglenet News Archive (leading Harry Potter website)

• Macedonian Web Agency

• Sofia News Agency, Bulgaria

• Greece Now

• HPANA (Harry Potter News) - reactions of fans to the news that Latin and Greek translations are on the way.

• Hellenic News of America

• Outside of a dog - comments on the book

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