Question

Edmonds' edition of Sappho has great eagerness to fill gaps in papyrus texts. One example of this is fragment 12 (in Edmonds' numbering), which in Edmonds reads:

[Α? δ? μοι γ?λακτο]? ?π???β?ολ’ ?σ?[κε
τω?θατ’ ? πα?δω]ν δ?λοφυν [πο?σ]ε?ι?
[?ρμ?να, τ?τ’ ο?] τρομ?ροι? πρ[?? ?]λλα
[λ?κτρα κε π?σσι 4

?ρχ?μαν· ν?ν δ?] χρ?α γ?ρα? ?δη
[μυρ?αν ?μμον ??τι]ν ?μφιβ?σκει,
[κω? πρ?? ?μμ’ ?ρο]?? π???τ?αται δι?κων
[?λγεσ?δωρο?.

Here is my horrible super-literal English translation:

If to me the paps existed having obtained milk, and the ?ρμ?να made a δολ?φυν of babies, then with not trembling feet I would go to new beds; but now old age already goes around our skin with thousands of wrinkles, and love no longer flies in our pursuit, the pain-giver.

Here is Edmonds' translation:

If my paps could still give suck and my womb were able to bear clnkh-en, then would I come to another marriage-bed with unfaltering feet ; but nay, age now raaketh a thousand wrinkles to go upon my flesh, and Love is in no haste to fly to me with his gift of pain.

Now this question is about the words I left untranslated: what are they? δ?λοφυ? and δ?λοφυν are nowhere to be found in my references, so I thought maybe it was a dialect alteration like κ?νδυν for κ?νδυνο?, which others have reported in Sappho, but δολοφυνο? and δολοφυνον both yield the same result as δολ?φυν. As for ?ρμ?να, all I find is ?ρμενα, which doesn't fit the meter because a long final vowel is required. Thinking again, the κ?νδυν case is reported with -n nominative and -na accusative, which would make δολ?φυν a nominative and probably the womb, and ?ρμ?να maybe aeolic for ?ρμ?νη, "if provided [with what though?]". SO the translation would read "[…] and my δολ?φυν (womb?), if provided [with what?], made …" oh wait, that genitive wouldn't fit then.

So how does this sentence work? What are those two words? Is my second guess right? And if so, what is that genitive doing there? Wouldn't an accusative (direct object), πα?δα?, be better in there then?

Edit

I just reread my own poetic Italian translation of this, and it suggests armena might mean "suitable". perseus doesn't quite confirm this, but this hypothesis brings me to believe poēsei is not a verb, but the dative of the verbal nuon poēsis, and the translation needs to be rewritten as:

If to me the paps existed having obtained milk, and the δολ?φυν were suitable for the making of babies, then with not trembling feet I would go to new beds; but now old age already goes around our skin with thousands of wrinkles, and love no longer flies in our pursuit, the pain-giver.

This leaves the hypothesis on armena to be checked, and the origins and meaning of dolophyn to be cleared.

Answer 1

I woke up this morning, connected to the Internet, and found TKR's comment. I tried to do some more research.

?ρμ?να

I opened my big dictionary and looked for ?ρμενο?, finding a redirect to ?ραρ?σκω after a translation to ?adatto? or the likes, hence ?suitable?. Here is the entry I was redirected to, or rather the relevant part of it:

It gives meanings ?well adapted; convenient; thus pleasing?, and further down ?ready?. The example it gives for "suitable" is ?μ?ρα κο?ρ?σι γεν?σθαι ?ρμενο?, "opportune day for the birth of children". The analogous construction would be πα?σιν δ?λοφυν π?ησθαι ?ρμ?να, which probably has too long a suppletion for the last word, besides a different reading for the uncertain ε?ι, and would probably have a non-Aeolic for (Aeolic would be πα?δεσσιν, right?), so I guess Edmonds went creative and invented a reasonably likely but apparently unrecorded construction.

δ?λοφυν

The entry for δελφ?? only gives Doric δελφ?α, and no Aeolic form. Here is Edmonds' note to the word (wish I'd looked at that earlier):

=δελφ??, cf. κ?νδυν, Φ?ρκυν.

So yeah, Edmonds went creative again, and supposed this Aeolic form, where the -ν ending is justified by those forms, which are recorded by other authors (I know so for κ?νδυνand suppose as much for Φ?ρκυν), but the change in the "root" (δελφ -> δολοφ) is entirely his guess. I mean, perhaps ε->ο can be sorta-kinda justified by analogy with some α->ο changes (like ?ν?α->?ν?α in Sappho 1), but the extra vowel… pure fantasy :).

Update

Quoting TKR's comments to this answer:

The vowel change is not quite that fantastic since (a) for the first ο there is a Hesychean gloss δολφ?? = δελφ?? and an inscriptional variant Δολφο? = Δελφο?, and (b) for the second ο there are occasional, though rare, examples of anaptyctic vowels in similar environments, e.g. Τολοφ?νιο? = Τολφ?νιο?, Σαλαμ?να = Σαλμ?νη. I'm actually more skeptical about the alleged -ν in the nom. sg.; for the alleged κ?νδυν and Φ?ρκυν it seems we only have oblique cases attested, and as third-declension animates the nom. should end in -? (or so I'd assume).

And:

Do you happen to have a link to a scan of the papyrus, btw? I'm curious how secure the reading δολοφυν is.

Concerning the -ν nominative, I don't know about Φ?ρκυν, but here is a mention of κ?νδυν by Choeroboscus in On the canons of Theodosius, possibly a gloss, as reported by Campbell:

κ?νδυν κ?νδυνο?· ο?τω? δ? ?φη Σαπφ? τ?ν κ?νδυνον.

Now this seems an attestation of nominative and genitive to me, and Campbell agrees about the genitive thing, so it could at most be accusative-genitive, which doesn't seem like a sequence that makes sense. So I assume Aeolic has this weird -ν nominative for this word, and this makes δ?λοφυν nominative seem likely.

As for the papyrus, this is P.Oxy. 1231 fr. 10, and no P.Oxy. 1231 is available scanned online (which is a shame since many Sappho poems come from 1231…). However, these papyri were published in vol. 10 of Grenfell and Hunt's P.Oxy. series, which is available online, and gives this raw transcription:

Since δ?λοφυν has no underdots, and is mentioned as an unknown form in the notes:

I assume it's pretty much undoubtable. The same cannot be said for the splitting of the words, seen as Campbell has ]δ' ?λοφυν[ or something like that.

δ?λοφυν line, Campbell version

Further reading

Another comment by TKR:

Interesting. Campbell seems to be quoting a gloss, but it's possible that the author of the gloss reconstructed what they thought the nominative should be; LSJ says "dat. κ?νδυ_νι (as if from κ?νδυν)", implying the nominative is unattested.

The author of the quotation is from the early 9th century, so the gloss hypothesis seems likely, and I guess we cannot know if he had a nominative under his eyes or if he reconstructed it, which gives this form even more mystery. Besides, even Campbell's ?λοφυν, translated to "pity", is mysterious: where is it from? Perseus doesn't have it… Anyways, I guess this form will be uncertain up till we find another papyrus with this poem that gives us maybe the line beginnings and confirms, or destroys (as happened with tons of conjectures for another fragment when this papyrus was found), Edmonds' completion.

Answer 2

What if instead of ?ρμ?να [armena], the restoration is ?ρμ?νη [e?rmene?] > Perfect Participle Middle/Passive Feminine Nominative Singular of α?ρω (airo?, “to carry”)? Then the translation would be "If my paps could still give suck and my womb were able to bear children . . ."

My name is Allan Loder (PhD student at Wycliffe College, UofT). In terms of my research, I am currently working on a revision/update/expansion of Moulton and Milligan's 'Vocabulary of the Greek Testament' (published in 1914-1930). I recently came across an inscription with a similar issue:

IG IX,1 42 (B.C. 200-150)] ε? δ? τι? ?πιλανβ?νοιτο α?τ?ν ? καταδουλ?ζοιτο, ? τε γενηθ?ε??σα δουλαγωγ?α α?τ?ν ?κυρο? κα? ?ρεμ?να (l. ?ρμ?να [armena], “tackle” = ?ρμ?νη [e?rmene?], “to carry off”) ?στω [“and if anyone seizes or enslaves them, let the one who brings them enslavement be without authority and carried off”]. I hope this helps.

Allan