Άπόλλωνος

Oh I love when translators do this, when it works—writing with an accent, by echoing the voice of a historical period. Marguerite Yourcenar did something similar with Memoirs of Hadrian—it's not a translation of a classic text but she wrote it in French as if it were, so it would feel authentic as the autobiography of a Roman emperor. Translation was an integral part of it: she would translate her first drafts from French to Latin or Ancient Greek (as Hadrian spoke both), which allowed her to notice phrasings that sounded wrong, too modern, and then she'd edit the French sentences accordingly.

It was translated in English by Marguerite Yourcenar's gal pal life companion Grace Frick, but I've not read the English version. It would be interesting to see how she made the archaisms work, considering English and French haven't preserved the same words from Latin and Greek. (To say nothing of Swedish or other translations!) For example the word "janiteur" appears in the French text to refer to a servant or guard; it comes from Latin ianitor and is meant to sound archaic or odd in French as we don't have this word; but American English does have janitor from Latin so the "classic" feel is lost and you'll have to use a different word and compensate for it elsewhere...

(Yourcenar couldn't predict this but since French has a lot more English loanwords nowadays than when she started writing her book in the 1920s, janiteur now sounds like an anglicism rather than a latinism. I wonder if she'd feel upset or intrigued if she knew that a modern-sounding word has sneaked into her carefully-chiselled text simply because another modern language we often borrow from has kept it alive)

• bella plus quam civilia

• ius datum sceleri

• populus potens in sua victrici conversus viscera dextra

Wounds of the Earth

Death is an evil.

That’s what the gods think.

Or they would die.