ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the ‘innovative’ verbal and visual literary techniques associated with Western modernist concrete poetry have their origins in ancient Greek pattern poems. These poems offer challenges to readers and translators. To illustrate the nature of these challenges, the discussion focuses on different modern translations of ‘Syrinx,’ attributed to Theocritus. The poem details specific ways in which the translators Anthony Holden, José Paulo Paes, Armando Zárate and Félix Buffière have addressed these challenges in their translations of this semantically opaque poem into English, Portuguese, Spanish and French, respectively. If ‘Syrinx’ engages us in new ways of reading, it also invites us to devise new ways of translating.
