Then hiss a long hissing, then make a popping sound with your lips, saying: 'proprophengē morios prophyr prophengē nemethire arpsenten pitētmi meōu enarth phyrkechō psyridariō tyrē philba.'

Here the text is almost pure stage-direction for the mouth. Between the words there is a syrigmós, a long snake's hiss, and a poppysmós, the lip-pop used to soothe horses — sounds with no meaning at all, only production. The rite has said it plainly before: the power is in the sounding, not the sense. Even the 'name' that follows keeps one foot in meaning and one in noise. Proprophengē and prophengē are built on phéngos, radiance, light — you can almost hear 'fore-shining, fore-radiance' in them — but they are bent past the edge of Greek into incantation, and the rest (morios, nemethire, phyrkechō…) is language dissolved into pure utterance. This is what a translation cannot give back and what this reader can: the actual acoustic shape of the rite, the hiss and the pop and the half-Greek names, restored as the sequence of sounds a body once made in the dark before dawn.