A Note on Translation

A Note on Translation Reading literature in translation is a pleasure on which it is fruitless to frown. The purist may insist that we ought always read in the original languages, and we know ideally that this is true. But it is a counsel of perfection, quite impractical even for the purist, since no one in a lifetime can master all the languages whose literatures it would be a joy to explore. Master languages as fast as we may, we shall always have to read to some extent in translation, and this means we must be alert to what we are about: if in reading a work of literature in translation we are not reading the “original,” what precisely are we reading? This is a question of great complexity, to which justice cannot be done in a brief note, but the following sketch of some of the considerations may be helpful. One of the memorable scenes of ancient literature is the meeting of Hector and Andromache in Book VI of Homer’s Iliad. Hector, leader and mainstay of the armies defending Troy, is implored by his wife Andromache to withdraw within the city walls and carry on the defense from there, where his life will not be con stantly at hazard. In Homer’s text her opening words to him are these: daimo´ nie, fui´sei se to`so`n meńo␵ (daimonie, phthisei se to son menos). How should they be translated into English? Here is how they have actually been translated into English by capable translators, at various periods, in verse and prose: 1. George Chapman, 1598: O noblest in desire, Thy mind, inflamed with others’ good, will set thy self on fire. 2. John Dryden, 1693: Thy dauntless heart (which I foresee too late), Too daring man, will urge thee to thy fate. 3. Alexander Pope, 1715: Too daring Prince!... For sure such courage length of life denies, And thou must fall, thy virtue’s sacrifice. 4. William Cowper, 1791: Thy own great courage will cut short thy days, My noble Hector. 5. Lang, Leaf, and Myers, 1883 (prose): Dear my lord, this thy hardihood will undo thee.... 6. A. T. Murray, 1924 (prose): Ah, my husband, this prowess of thine will be thy doom.... 7. E. V. Rieu, 1950 (prose): A1 A2/ANOTE ON TRANSLATION “Hector,” she said, “you are possessed. This bravery of yours will be your end.” 8. I. A. Richards, 1950 (prose): “Strange man,” she said, “your courage will be your destruction.” 9. Richmond Lattimore, 1951: Dearest, Your own great strength will be your death.... 10. Robert Fitzgerald, 1979: O my wild one, your bravery will be Your own undoing! 11. Robert Fagles, 1990: reckless one, Your own fiery courage will destroy you! From these strikingly different renderings of the same six words, certain facts about the nature of translation begin to emerge. We notice, for one thing, that Homer’s word meńo␵ (menos) is diversified by the translators into “mind,” “dauntless heart,” “such courage,” “great courage,” “hardihood,” “prowess,” “bravery,” “courage,” “great strength,” “bravery,” and “fiery courage.” The word has in fact all these possibilities. Used of things, it normally means “force”; of animals, “fierceness” or “brute strength” or (in the case of horses) “mettle”; of men and women, “passion” or “spirit” or even “purpose.” Homer’s application of it in the present case points our attention equally— whatever particular sense we may imagine Andromache to have uppermost—to Hec- tor’s force, strength, fierceness in battle, spirited heart and mind. But since English has no matching term of like inclusiveness, the passage as the translators give it to us reflects this lack and we find one attribute singled out to the exclusion of the rest. Here then is the first and most crucial fact about any work of literature read in translation. It cannot escape the linguistic characteristics of the language into which it is turned: the grammatical, syntactical, lexical, and phonetic boundaries that con- stitute collectively the individuality or “genius” of that language. A Greek play or a Russian novel in English will be governed first of all by the resources of the English language, resources that are certain to be in every instance very different, as the efforts with meńo␵ show, from those of the original. Turning from meńo␵ to daimo´ nie (daimonie) in Homer’s clause, we encounter a second crucial fact about translations. Nobody knows exactly what shade of meaning daimo´ nie had for Homer. In later writers the word normally suggests divinity, some- thing miraculous, wondrous; but in Homer it appears as a vocative of address for both chieftain and commoner, man and wife. The coloring one gives it must therefore be determined either by the way one thinks a Greek wife of Homer’s era might actually address her husband (a subject on which we have no information whatever) or in the way one thinks it suitable for a hero’s wife to address her husband in an epic poem, that is to say, a highly stylized and formal work. In general, the translators of our century will be seen to have abandoned formality to stress the intimacy; the wifeliness; and, especially in Lattimore’s case, a certain chiding tenderness, in Andromache’s appeal: (6) “Ah, my husband,” (7) “Hector” (with perhaps a hint, in “you are possessed,” of the alarmed distaste with which wives have so often viewed their hus- bands’ bellicose moods), (8) “Strange man,” (9) “Dearest,” (10) “O my wild one” (mixing an almost motherly admiration with reproach and concern), and (11) “reckless one.” On the other hand, the older translators have obviously removed Androm- ache to an epic or heroic distance from her beloved, whence she sees and kindles to his selfless courage, acknowledging, even in the moment of pleading with him to be ANOTE ON TRANSLATION /A3 otherwise, his moral grandeur and the tragic destiny this too certainly implies: (1) “O noblest in desire, . inflamed by others’ good”; (2) “Thy dauntless heart (which I foresee too late), / Too daring man”; (3) “Too daring Prince! . / And thou must fall, thy virtue’s sacrifice”; (4) “My noble Hector.” Even the less specific “Dear my lord” of Lang, Leaf, and Myers looks in the same direction because of its echo of the speech of countless Shakespearean men and women who have shared this powerful moral sense: “Dear my lord, make me acquainted with your cause of grief”; “Perseverance, dear my lord, keeps honor bright”; etc. The fact about translation that emerges from all this is that just as the translated work reflects the individuality of the language it is turned into, so it reflects the individuality of the age in which it is made, and the age will permeate it everywhere like yeast in dough. We think of one kind of permeation when we think of the gov- erning verse forms and attitudes toward verse at a given epoch. In Chapman’s time, experiments seeking an “heroic” verse form for English were widespread, and accord- ingly he tries a “fourteener” couplet (two rhymed lines of seven stresses each) in his Iliad and a pentameter couplet in his Odyssey. When Dryden and Pope wrote, a closed pentameter couplet had become established as the heroic form par excellence. By Cowper’s day, thanks largely to the prestige of Paradise Lost, the couplet had gone out of fashion for narrative poetry in favor of blank verse. Our age, inclining to prose and in verse to proselike informalities and relaxations, has, predictably, produced half a dozen excellent prose translations of the Iliad but only three in verse (by Fagles, Lattimore, and Fitzgerald), all relying on rhythms that are much of the time closer to the verse of William Carlos Williams and some of the prose of novelists like Faulkner than to the swift firm tread of Homer’s Greek. For if it is true that what we translate from a given work is what, wearing the spectacles of our time, we see in it, it is also true that we see in it what we have the power to translate. Of course, there are other effects of the translator’s epoch on a translation besides those exercised by contemporary taste in verse and verse forms. Chapman writes in a great age of poetic metaphor and, therefore, almost instinctively translates his understanding of Homer’s verb fui´sei (phthisei, “to cause to wane, consume, waste, pine”) into metaphorical terms of flame, presenting his Hector to us as a man of burning generosity who will be consumed by his very ardor. This is a conception rooted in large part in the psychology of the Elizabethans, who had the habit of speaking of the soul as “fire,” of one of the four temperaments as “fiery,” of even the more material bodily processes, like digestion, as if they were carried on by the heat of fire (“concoction,” “decoction”). It is rooted too in that characteristic Renaissance e´lan so unforgettably expressed in characters such as Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus, the former of whom exclaims to the stars above: ...I,thechiefest lamp of all the earth, First rising in the East with mild aspect, But fixe`d now in the meridian line, Will send up fire to your turning spheres, And cause the sun to borrow light of you.... Pope and Dryden, by contrast, write to audiences for whom strong metaphor has become suspect. They therefore reject the fire image (which we must recall is not present in the Greek) in favor of a form of speech more congenial to their age, the sententia or aphorism, and give it extra vitality by making it the scene of a miniature drama: in Dryden’s case, the hero’s dauntless heart “urges” him (in the double sense of physical as well as moral pressure) to his fate; in Pope’s, the hero’s courage, like a judge, “denies” continuance of life, with the consequence that he “falls”—and here Pope’s second line suggests analogy to the sacrificial animal—the victim of his own essential nature, of what he is.

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