Lost in the Original: Reading Without Translations

When we enter middle age we shed the illusions of youth (such as the merit of keg parties). As we approach the far border of that period we begin occasionally to lose faith in our disillusionment.

When I took Latin in high school, there was a certain unspoken consensus that the main point of dealing with original texts was to allow for translations. Some who read this may remember, for example, the intricate process of turning Latin conditional clauses into English conditionals. Cicero had many merits, but the greatest, it was clear, was to provide a bottomless well of Latin unseens.

As I said goodbye to youth and my waistline, I more and more reacted to this notion.

I began to deprecate translation as such. Real students read without a translation. Really good students never used a translation at all. And there was a fundamentalist school that argued it was better to misunderstand in the original Latin than to understand with the aid of an English crib.

The theory among us classical hardcore types was that the familiarity of English tended to leach reality from the original, and reduce it to a code. This was of course entirely wrong.

Also, it was misleading. Virtue is not the same virtus, after all, and a boat was not the same as a ναυς  (as C.S. Lewis pointed out). To even have the word virtue in mind when reading virtus is to mis-see the original.

In short, English got in the way. Traduttore traditore was our motto.

Now a good deal of this even today

“. . . I most powerfully and potently believe”

But I begin now to fear that it is truth, but not the whole truth. I begin to suspect that on certain narrow but important grounds translation may catch something something lost in the original.

Consider the lines:

. . . αυτους  δε eλωπρια τευχε κυνεσσιν

Οιωνοισι τε πασι , Διος δ’eτελειετο βουλη¹

(Readers may supply their own accents, as an exercise . . .)

Are there advantages in the original?

Πολυ κατα παντα τροπον  (Romans 3:2) ²

Which is to say, “you betcha.”

First, we get the meter, which works in the poem as alcohol in the wine.

Then, we get the sound of the words, not always important, but often a point of art, especially in lyric.

And then, on a more philosophical ground, we meet concepts which do not always map squarely on our own.

Also, we get the fun of trying to bend our mental processes around grammatical machinery very foreign to us.

Finally, we feel the palpable reality of being in foreign circumstances. Which they are.

All these are very good things.

Do we lose something? I suspect we do: the power of evocation.

Consider the word dog, versus canis.

For each of us, in a different fashion, to hear this word is to summon up a complicated memory compounded of all the occasions on which this word was important to us.

The old dog that belonged to your parents;

Your first puppy;

The monster in the yard next door to your parents;

The monster on the bridge;

The dog that won you all that money in Florida;

The old dog you buried last year.

All this goes into the word dog and a cunning poet (the best of them are sly) will use the fact. Kipling was strong on this point, Tennyson even more so, and indeed it is Stephen King’s chief weapon.

Now what Kipling does, and Tennyson, the Latin poets did just as skillfully. They too counted on a cloud of association in their readers to the word canis. For example

The hound belonging to the estate owner.

The dog chained to the door, beside the porter, chained to the door.

The pi dogs in the alley, their hunger, their filth and their independence.

And, as his skill works, this or that poet would be more or less evocative. It was not the only tool in the poetic toolbox, of course, but it added to the effect.

But not for us. It does not work for us, it cannot work for us. We do not share the ten thousand occasions on which the word “canis” was spoken, the ten thousand concrete experiences of which a skilled poet takes advantage.

For us, the word is irrevocably faded.

But, to say dog suggests a host of things foreign to the original intent. It misleads as much as translating pain as Bread. So it does, it does indeed.

We seem then to be stuck between two deficiencies. If we embrace the original, it is only as a bride who is always veiled. If we pick the translation, she is friendly enough, but not entirely honest.

In fact, it resolves into a question of what we are asking from the original, or what we think the author of the original intended.

If Homer was using standard parts out of the epic kit, and meant to rely for his impact chiefly on the story and the pulse of the meter, than the loss of evocation we suffer in reading the original words is regrettable but compensated for by the meter and the brute fact of the Greek as Greek.

But if he meant, along the way, to communicate the horror and outrage that worthy men should come to this, to be food for the animals, and worse, by the will of Heaven, then a translation may have a part in breaking through our reserve to the realities of the situation:

The souls of mighty chiefs, untimely slain;

Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,

Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore . . .

If only by reminding us of similar violations, seen on the daily news.

Notes

1. The Greek translates as “but it (the wrath of Achilles) gave the (heroes) themselves as prey to dogs and all kinds of birds, and that’s what God wanted.”

The dogs involved would be basic pi dogs — all of them a light tan, and more or less the same. But the birds would include vultures, kites, crows and ravens (all kinds of birds). I suppose the last time we saw this in Europe was 1945.

I have always been a little piqued that Voegelin’s insightful and radical (in the good sense) analysis of the Iliad (which I picked up first through Elroy Bundy) has had no effect on classical studies whatever.  None. Zip. Nada.— MA.

2. The Greek translates as: “Much in every way.” The Holy Bible. Revised. Standard Version, An Ecumenical Edition. New York: Collins, 1973.

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