“Freedom”

2 selkies swimming

Created from 2 linocuts I carved and printed by hand! Turned into digital art stamps that I used to create this composition! The characters were carved separately on 2 different blocks. I printed them and then scanned them to create this!

male selkie 🦭 💙

Anne Carson (2009)

Arthur S. Way (1898)

George Theodoridis (2010)

Ian C. Johnston (2010)

E.P. Coleridge (1910)

Theodore Alois Buckley (1892)

John Peck, Frank Nisetich (1995)

R. Potter (1906)

M. L. West (1987)

William Arrowsmith (1958)

Philip Vellacott (1972)

Michael Wodhull (1782)

Kenneth McLeish (1997)

David Kovacs (2002)

Andrew Wilson (1993)

The last line is a beautiful demonstration of the efficiency of which ancient Greek is capable, and definitely the sort of thing that makes translators tear their hair out.

In the most literal sense, it says: not for me, you. The sentence structure of the sentence above is projected into this one, such that we can understand “not for me [to touch] you.” But everything else has been stripped out except the pronouns, the negation, and one single ge, which serves as an emphasis marker on me. The “for” is not even a word, just a grammatical case.