TRANSLATION

Jerry Harkins

Translation is the art of failure.

                                                                         –Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco was onto something important but in an admiring not a pejorative sense.  Translation may always end in failure but it is glorious failure, the kind that propels fellowship and culture itself forward.  It encapsulates Robert Browning's insight that, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?"

Sic fatur lacrimans classique immitit habenas  /  Et tandem Euboicis Cumarum adlabitur oris.  At the end of Book V of The Aeneid, Aeneas leaves Sicily where the ghost of his father, Anchises, has told him they must consult together in the land of the dead before Aeneas goes to meet his destiny at Latinium.  These two lines are the opening of Book VI.  They inform the reader that the hero leaves Sicily in tears and comes ashore at Cumae near present day Naples.  Cumae is inhabited by Greeks from Euboea, the second largest of the Aegean islands.  At his father's urging, he intends to ask the Sibyl who lives there what he must do to gain passage to Hades.  Seamus Heaney, possibly the greatest-ever translator of classical poetry, rendered the two lines in three:

In tears as he speaks, Aeneas loosens out sail

And gives the whole fleet its head, so now at last

They ride ashore on the waves at Euboean Cumae.

The extra line – rendering the twelve lines of Latin into 29 words of English – is consistent with the fact that Latin is a much more concise (and therefore less precise) language than English.  

But there are several problems in Heaney's translation which reflect decisions he made and highlight a class of decisions all translators face.  To begin with, "he speaks" and "they ride ashore" are both present tense even though the leaving was in the past and the arrival is not really in the present but in a more recent past relative to the time he is writing about.[i]  A sailor would probably "let" out sail rather than "loosen" it out and the idea of giving "..the whole fleet its head" is awkward.  A good editor would have questioned him about his choices (and I have no doubt he would give persuasive answers).  In deference to Heaney's standing as both a poet and a translator, I might have proposed something like this:

In tears as he speaks, Aeneas lets out the sails,

Urging the fleet fast forward, until shortly,

They came ashore on the waves at Euboean Cumae.

The syllables in each line are the same (12, 11 and 14) although the stresses are slightly different.  Neither translation, of course, is literal.  This would be closer if less poetic:

Muttering through his tears, he gives the fleet free rein

And at length they are brought ashore at Euboean Cumae.

This more literal version restores the passive voice of adlabitur, something that modern English stylists might object to.  Heaney's "ride ashore" is active but he nods to the passivity of the original by inserting "on the waves."  Aeneas is not the actor, the waves are.  It's a good solution.

Interestingly, Robert Fagles, another excellent poet in his own right, comes closer to the literal than Heaney:

So as he speaks in tears, Aeneas gives the ships free rein

And at last they glide onto Euboean Cumae's beaches.

If you've ever beached a boat, you might take exception to "glide" although that is the most common meaning of the verb adlabor.  "Lurch" would be more like it and Latin has a perfectly good verb meaning to lurch or to wobble, titubare.  The error is Virgil's  not Fagles'.  The poet may never have been near a boat, certainly not one that was being beached.  More importantly, as the following lines make clear, the boats did not actually come up on the beaches.  They remained in the water, firmly anchored, prows facing outward.  But he does solve the tense problem by inserting at last.

Very few translations can or should be straightforward.  One of my favorite examples occurs in the first line of Homer's[ii] masterpiece, The Odyssey.  He invokes the aid of the Muse in describing his hero to whom he assigns the epithet, polutropon.  The line in literal translation would be:

Sing to me, O Muse, of the man of many turnings who

[wandered] far and wide[iii]

Polutropon does literally mean "of many turnings" but, as used here, it is much richer and more layered.  It refers first to Odysseus' many wanderings on his way home from Troy and then to his brilliant but slightly devious cast of mind.  Many translators have opted for the English word "wily" which is too negative.  Fagles says "the man of twists and turns" and Robert Fitzgerald renders it "skilled in all ways of contending."  Even in the first line, the translator's decision is important because polutropon is one of the few places that the reader is given a clue that there is a darker side to Odysseus.  It is an important epithet and Homer immediately switches to polumetis, of many counsels, so the reader should grasp its subtle implications right here in the first line.  Twists does the trick with the same subtlety as the original.

A similar problem occurs when we have lost the colloquial senses in which expressions were used.  The word cool, for example, has several contemporary connotations that have nothing to do with the temperature.  Among other things, it can mean laid back, popular, awesome or merely okay.  A future translator who knew these variations would have to choose one while another who knew only the formal meaning would be puzzled.  We can turn again to Seamus Heaney for an example.  The first line of Beowulf in Old English is:

Hwæt wê Gâr-Dena in gear-dagum[iv]

Literally this means, "What we Spear-Danes, in [the] old days."  The problem is that as far as we know, Hwæt is an adjective meaning what which makes no sense.  Clearly the Anglo-Saxons used it in a sense or senses that have been lost, leaving modern translators with the problem of imagining what they meant.  Heaney renders the line:

So.  The Spear-Danes in days gone by

J.R.R. Tolkien translates Hwæt as "Lo!" and others have used "Listen."  I particularly like "listen" although I can find no basis for it other than it seems appropriate as an attention getter at the beginning of an epic poem.  "Lo" is similar.  It means something close to "behold" as in the gospel account of the first Christmas ("And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them…" Luke 2:9 from the Latin Et ecce).  I can't think of any justification for so which derives from the Old English swa.  The term has always been rich in connotations.  I can imagine a bard saying "So" in the sense of "So let's begin the story by saying…"  But if that bard were speaking Old English he probably would have used Swa and he probably would not have punctuated it (Hwæt is not followed by a period).

In contemporary rhetoric, so is frequently used at the beginning of a statement to command attention.  In his foreword, Heaney says, "But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention."  The same can be said of Tolkien's Lo.  But it still leaves the question of what the original was implying by Hwæt and why it did not resort to Swa.

None of this is to dispute any of the decisions made by any of the translators whose work I have cited.  I can have my preferences but I cannot dispute Heaney's preference for So.  I can certainly appreciate the difficulties he faced and I have a strong impression that So is part of what gives his translation the feel of Old English in spite of its purported contemporary origin in "Hiberno-English Scullion-speak" (which seems to refer to what my Irish grandparents would call "kitchen talk" implying the conversation of kitchen workers behind closed doors).  It sounds right to me.  And that, of course, is another objective of the translator – to give the text the feel of the original.  I have a similar belief about the title Marcel Proust gave his famous novel, À la recherche du temps perdu.  When Scott Moncrieff's translation was published between 1922 and 1930, the title was Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase borrowed from Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 30.  Ever since, English translations of Proust have carried the more literal title, In Search of Lost Time.  The Moncrieff version does not correspond to a single word of the French original and completely loses the sense of lost time.  But I prefer it and I suspect Proust would have too.  He, after all, took his French title from Voltaire's translation of Shakespeare's sonnet and Voltaire translated "remembrance of things past" in the second line as "à la recherche du temps perdu."

The feel of an original is important and the feel is embedded largely in the meter.  Homer sang in dactylic hexameters:  each line has six feet, each foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.  In Greek (and to a slightly lesser extent in Latin) this is a robust architecture.  It can work also in English as in the first line of Longfellow's Evangeline:

                        THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

But, because English is so readily rhymed, it can also sound sing-song.  To avoid this, Fagles' Odyssey is written primarily in iambs, mostly hexameter but with frequent excursions into three, four, five and seven feet.  This strategy gives the English a robustness it would lack if the translator simply imitated the original meter.

In poetry as in music, rhythm or meter is the most important mark of the culture of its origin.  This is why a prose translation is often unsatisfying and why Alexander Pope's rendition of The Odyssey does not work at all.  His opening lines are typical:

The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,

Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;

This is unsatisfactory for several reasons not the least of which is the heroic couplets are so forced and sound so British.  The translation itself is awkward but it does very roughly approximate the original.  Not so the attempt by George Chapman who basically re-wrote the story.  Here are his first four lines:

The Gods in council sit, to call

Ulysses from Calypso's thrall,

And order their high pleasures thus:

Grey Pallas to Telemachus[v]

In an author's preface, Chapman claimed that word-for-word translations "lose the free grace of their natural Dialect" which, of course, is true.  Translators including Cicero and St. Jerome have written scathingly of  such "pretension" and have promoted instead what they refer to as "idea-for-idea" renderings.  But to be faithful to the idea does not mean creating an alternative narrative.  The opening of The Odyssey is an invocation asking the Muse to inspire the poet.  True Calypso is the Muse of epic poetry but that is virtually the only connection Chapman has to the original.  The invocation is a prayer, not a scene setter.

Translation is an art, not a science.  It seeks to move ideas from the mind of an author to that of the reader.  The translator is an intermediary mind, a bridge builder working in a minefield of uncertainties.  Nowhere is this more evident or more important than in attempting to translate the Bible.  The difficulties are amplified by distance. Beowulf was composed no more than 1,200 years ago.  The Odyssey and The Aeneid were written about 2,800 and 2,000 years ago respectively. It is thought that the Hebrew Bible was written down beginning around 3,500 years ago and was completed about 2,500 years ago.  The earliest "writings" were fragmentary and were mainly transmitted orally.  For our purposes, it can be said that the two most important versions of the canonical Bible are Jerome's Latin or Vulgate edition completed around 385 CE and the King James English version published in 1611.

Many Christians still believe that the Bible, by which they usually mean the King James version or the Revised Standard Version, is the inerrant word of God "without error or fault in all its teachings."  Some such believers apply strict inerrancy only to the "original autograph" books which do not exist and did not exist at any point shortly after they were written.  The fact remains that every Bible ever circulated contains a substantial number of major errors and contradictions.  For example, it is a major error to think that the world or the universe was "created" in six days of twenty-four hours only six thousand years ago.  The earth was never flooded to a depth of thirty cubits and Jesus did not walk on water.  Such stories are myths and metaphors which have had profound influence in Western culture but which are not "true" in any literal sense.

In 1862, Robert Young, a self-taught Scottish printer, published a remarkable Literal Translation of the Holy Bible, not to displace commonly used translations but to "place the reader in the position…side by side with the writer to think as he does, to see as he sees, to reason, to feel, to weep and to exalt along with him."  At first blush, the modern reader may feel that Young has simply made the Bible less accessible and many simply disregard his work.  But once you are able to relax into it, you can be rewarded by the illusion that you are indeed at one with the writers.  Take for example the first two lines of Genesis.  Young's version is: 

In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth – / the earth hath existed waste and void and darkness is on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters

Compare this with Everett Fox's masterful rendition:[vi]

At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of the Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters

Another contemporary, Robert Alter, says:[vii]

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters

And compare these with the original King James version:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Or with my favorite modern Bible:[viii]

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

The crucial question, of course, is exactly what did God create?  Young clearly says that at least the earth pre-existed (hath existed) the first day.  Certainly it was a dark and empty wasteland but the land and the sea were not created by God.  Fox implies the same thing and so does Alter although less explicitly.  You can read pre-existence into the King James but the New International is more ambiguous.  What does being "formless and empty" mean?  The way I read it is that on day one, God created a formless and empty earth.   Again, no one is trying to deceive the reader.  But Young is perfectly clear:  On the first day God set about preparing both the pre-existing heavens and the earth (by creating light and separating the night from the day as we will learn shortly).  Preparing, not creating.  You cannot avoid feeling that you have come very close to the thinking and the sense of the author.

This sense of being in tune is what Harold Bloom admires in the David Rosenberg's translation.  He adds a great deal of ornamentation to the first two verses of Genesis:[ix]

Before a plant of the field was in earth, before a grain of the field sprouted – Yahweh had not spilled rain on the earth, nor was there man to work the land – yet from the day Yahweh made earth and sky, a mist from within would rise to moisten the surface.  Yahweh shaped an earthling from clay of this earth, blew into its nostrils the wind of life.  Now look:  man becomes a creature of flesh.

This is obviously not the Genesis we know but a re-write or reconstruction of a precursor to Genesis that Bloom attributes to a woman historian, J, at the court of King Solomon.  In Bloom's telling, our received version is in part an edit of a text very much like this.  It is a conceit but a brilliant one.  It belongs in the fiction section but, then, so does most of the Bible.

It is true that many translators are biased and, therefore, unreliable.  The same thing is true of authors and, if a reader is not literate in the author's language, a biased translator is in the business of shooting sitting ducks.  A good example is Martin Luther's German translation of Jerome's Vulgate.  As all four evangelists report, Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of the Passover.[x]  The word in Hebrew is Pesach and it is the basis for the word used in other languages.  The German is Passah.  But that is not the word used by Martin Luther when he translated the New Testament into German.  His word is Ostern or Osterlamm which, among other things, means Easter.  He had to know it was absurd to think Jesus was about to celebrate Easter a week before the resurrection but Luther was an anti-Semite.

Fortunately most translators work faithfully to transmit ideas from person to person, place to place and time to time.  Many are more careful than the author and more solicitous of the reader.  Their work is intellectually heroic and should be more honored than it often is.

Afterword

A surprising number of readers have taken me to task for failing to mention the blank verse translation of The Odyssey published in 1871 by William Cullen Bryant.  Shame on me!  It is, in fact, an excellent and very readable telling of the story and a good example of the point I was trying to make about the decision-making processes of all translators.  The problem for me concerns the specific example I have been interested in since I first encountered the poem, the epithet polutropon.  Bryant has it as "sagacious" which is simply inadequate even if it is often used to convey the idea of shrewdness.  "Wily" comes closer to suggesting something less admirable, something that I think is clear in polutropon, of many turnings.  Indeed I might make a case that he misses entirely the less appealing aspects of Odysseus' personality.  (I also admit that I went to a lot of trouble memorizing the equivalent names of the gods and goddesses in Latin and Greek and it annoys me that Bryant uses the former in a poem written in the latter.  At least he does not call the poem "Ulysses.")

Still Another Afterword

Since publishing this essay, I have encountered a new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2018) and am happy to report it is a masterpiece, maybe the best version I have ever read.  She renders it in contemporary American English idiom without sacrificing the robustness of the Greek and while remaining faithful to the narrative choices Homer made.  Here are her first three lines:  Tell me about a complicated man. / Muse tell me how he wandered and was lost / when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy.  That complicated is perfect.  It makes me think polutropon may not have been intended as an epithet and that would explain why Homer switched to polumetis which means of many counsels.  It may also be that both Dr. Wilson and Homer think more highly than I do of Odysseus' character.  In any event, she discusses her choice of "complicated" at fascinating length in "The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English" by Wyatt Mason in The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2017.

And A Third Afterword

I am not the only writer obsessed by the word Hwæt as it occurs in the first line of Beowulf.  Ruth Franklin, in her review of the new translation by Maria Dahvanna Headley ("A 'Beowulf' for Our Moment," The New Yorker, April 31, 2020) devotes two paragraphs to dealing with her rendition of it as "Bro!"  Headey, she writes, sees it as "not only humorous and attention-grabbing" but as consistent with her belief that, "The men of "Beowulf" –– not least the protagonist –– are preoccupied with definitions of masculinity:  what makes a man, or how a man can make himself."  Headley's focus is on Grendel's unnamed mother in a way reminiscent of the treatment of Elphaba in the modern Broadway musical, Wicked.  Speaking of her choice of Bro, she asserts it forces us to think of "...the ways that men can afford (or deny) one another power and safety by using coded language, and erase women from power structures by speaking collegially only to other men." 

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Notes

[i] It is about 250 miles by sea from Sicily to Naples.  With favorable winds, ancient sailing ships could make about 6 miles per hour so we're looking at a minimum of two days.

[ii] Let's not waste time discussing the academic theory that Homer never existed.  The Greeks, including Plato, thought he was not only real but a great poet, the "first teacher" of the Greeks.  Every copy of The Odyssey and The Iliad I've ever seen attributes the work to a fellow named Homer.  Like all good stories, these probably improved with time but the underlying style seems remarkably coherent.  There are very few passages that stand out as anomalous.  Like Shakespeare's soliloquies, Homer's epithets seem to be all of a piece, suggesting, to me at least, common authorship.

[iii] The "wandered" in the original is the first word of the second line.  Fagles renders it, "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course…"  The placement of Muse after man seems awkward in English.  The "driven" off course is very different from "wandered far and wide" and is more accurate because the hero's wadering was not voluntary.  The Greek word is plagxthe which does carry the impression of roaming.  The word odegete means driven.  Finally, twists and turns is closer to what I imagine Homer meant but the twists part is not obvious in polutropon. 

[iv] Not exactly.  Anglo-Saxon was not written in the Roman alphabet until the eleventh century, probably after the Norman invasion.  Beowulf was probably composed long before then.  Also the circumflex accent was not used and both shown here should be macrons or straight lines.

[v] Chapman's Odyssey was published in 1598 and is the version that opened the eyes of John Keats to the glories of ancient Greece.  In his famous sonnet, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" he tells us, "Oft of one wide expanse had I been told / That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; / Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold."

[vi] The Five Books of Moses, Schocken Books, 1995.

[vii] The Five Books of Moses, W.W. Norton and Company, 2004.

[viii] New International Version, International Bible Society, 1973

[ix] The Book of J, Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg, Interpreted by Harold Bloom, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

[x] Matthew 26:18, Mark 14:14, and Luke 22:8 actually put the word Passover in Jesus' mouth.  John 13:1-2 uses the same word but not in a quotation.