Does It Translate?
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So I’m reading Robert Fagles’ translation of The Iliad. Just curious, for those of you who know Greek and can read it, is there a major difference between the original and the translations? And more generally, for those of you fluent and literate in multiple languages do you see major issues with translating fiction and poetry?
(Republished from GNXP.com by permission of author or representative)
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Well, in my experience (reading Latin, rather than Greek, originals and translations) a great deal depends on the translator. Some focus most on translating the stylistic flourishes and the prose style first and let themselves play loose with textual detail. Others (generally the translators I prefer) tend to try to ensure textual accuracy and to preserve style only where they can do so without interfering with the substance of the translation.
It seems that, in translating, one sometimes has to choose to preserve either substance OR style.
with poems i prefer style, particularly rhyming versions. esp so with the greeks, i despise novelistic versions of the iliad or odyssey. obviously doesn’t work with the difficult terza rima of dante, and it’s obviously more important to have an accurate non-stylistic version of the commedia because, well, it has strong substance where homer is all over the place, and contains few segments of moral worth.
I love Fagles’ translation of the Iliad. There was a New York Times Book review when his Odyssey came out that addresses your question of textual fidelity. It claimed he was faithful to the text compared to Pope (but that’s not saying much).
If you really want to know, find Lang, Leaf, and Myers’ prose translation of the Iliad and compare Fagles’ with that. I have heard that Lattimore’s translation really captures the ancient Greek. I have his New Testament.
Modern translations are very good. Before the 19th Century had a very poor knowledge of foreign languages and ancient context, and the translations are mostly fantasy. The same for religious literature, only now we are starting to understand Apostolic correspondence. Even the Pater Noster is now understandable and clear. In my opinion, there is no good translation of the Quran, even speakers of modern Arabic cannot make sense of it because of its allusions and metaphors, which literate Hedjazis of the fourth century may have understood, but we cannot get. I hope you can get an idea how the ten year war for Troy was managed, I could not. How the army of the Hellenes was fed?
There are significant differences, stylistic and semantic, between Fagles’ translation and Lattimore’s translation. (I would provide examples if I had the Fagles with me.) Lattimore’s is more awkward to the modern ear but is supposed to be more true to the original. Fagles’ is far more ‘contemporary’ and easier to read.
And of course with translations that attempt to reproduce the meter and rhyme, you inevitably make some semantic sacrifices. I enjoyed reading Chapman’s translation of the Odyssey, but it was obvious at times that he was playing loose with some meanings in order to keep the meter and rhyme.
Homer is a narrative poem and little nuances of expression are not as important as in shorter, denser poems. On the other hand, with prose translations you get the idea that the original was sort of flat and businesslike, whereas epic poetry has a sort of enchanting, hypnotic effect.
Homer is a historical document, but not a source about the things it talks about. A book I recently read (“Warriors and Traders”, Tandy) says that the Mycenean era (?1100 B.C.)described is totally legendary — the war with Troy isn’t a specific historical war, but just a generic war in the distant past. A lot of the detail in the works is more characteristic of the post-Mycenean Dark Age period (which ended in about 800 B.C.) For example, the tempering of iron (post-Mycenean) is used as a metaphor. But the epics themselves were written at the beginning of a new era, and were part of the official myth of the new trader class which was gaining power.
Tandy’s work is relatively new and not tested, but I found it illuminating and persuasive.
Havelock’s “Preface to Plato” talks about the way that Homer, which we read as a story or entertainment, had Biblical authority for the Greeks. When Plato “banned the poets” he was disestablishing a religion, he wasn’t forbidding a form of entertainment.
As everyone else had said, you pays your money and you takes your choice. If you pick a more poetic translation, a significant amount of the poetry will be the translator’s and not Homer’s. If you pick a translation which tries to retain textual accuracy, it will probably not be very poetic in English.
Many moons ago, I was able to read originals in Latin, Greek and Russian, and I would say that even if you can only do so very stumblingly and slowly and with the use of cribs, it’s worth it.
I don’t know any ancient languages, but for poetry, I find that a lot doesn’t carry over for linguistic reasons. You can partition the world’s languages based on how they measure time and rhythm, and because poets are typically obsessed with rhythmic qualities, that gets lost when you move from one class to another.
So, English measures time by stressed syllables, Spanish by syllables of any kind, and classical Latin, Arabic, and Japanese use “moras” (a sub-syllabic unit — it makes them distinguish between long vs. short syllables).
And languages also vary a lot in how free the word order is. In English, it is very restricted, and to emphasize different pieces of a sentence, we use funny intonation — which I’ll try to write as: “Well, I guess I’ll wash the dishes.” Or “I think bla bla bla — what do you think?” The Romance and Slavic languages have more freedom here — they emphasize that one piece is important by moving it to the front typically, or to some other part of the sentence. (Translated as, “And you, what do you think?” with no funny intonation.)
You hear this in old-timer Yinglish. Say the IRS comes to audit a person when his extended family has gathered together. Someone would object: “What, this in front of his kids on the Sabbath you’ve got to do?” English would have it: “Do you have to…?” and just give funny intonation for “kids” and “Sabbath.”
In more pretentious times, English poets did this too. Try rearranging these words from Byron so that it’s plain what he means:
Although her eye be not of blue,
Nor fair her locks, like English lasses,
How far its own expressive hue
The languid azure eye surpasses!
So, phrases like “never again your face to touch” just sound less forced in Italian since the word order is more permissive.
But if you have more macho literary interests than lyric poetry, some of these problems may not arise so much.
I agree with Ponder’s assessment. With Fagles’ translation it is easier to follow the actual narrative. He focuses on translating the substance of the individual clauses, but often significantly changes the grammar and the literal meanings of the words.
Lattimore is closer to the actual Greek both in how literal it is and in its tone. As a very experienced Greek reader (a grad student in Classics), I can very often “recover” the original Greek from Lattimore’s translation. The archaic and more formalized style of Lattimore is also closer to the tone the original Greek of the poem would have had for the its Greek audience. The Homeric dialect is a sort of “literary dialect”: at no time or place did any group of Greeks speak the dialect in Homer, rather it’s a combination of numerous dialects and contains many archaic elements which had long been abandoned in all spoken dialects by the time the poem was being composed. It also contains many pseudo-archaisms: words and forms invented by the poet that sound archaic but had no historical use.
The best analogy for the overall sound of the Homeric Greek to an ancient Greek audience is the sound of King James english to us. It has a marked sort of tone which distinguishes it from common speech and it has a sort of mystical and meaningful aura (I’m not sure quite how to describe it).
Personally, I have always found translations that rhyme quite annoying. Homeric poetry (and indeed all Greek poetry) is purely metrical; the Greeks hated the sound of rhyme and tried to avoid it as much as possible. The Homeric meter is marked off from the natural rhythm of spoken Greek, but not significantly so. Thus, making the poem rhyme or fitting it into a rigid English meter exaggerates the impact hearing the Greek would have on the Homeric audience. The poetic effect is primarily accomplished by the vocabulary and syntax (as well as its formulaic structure) and not so much by the meter.
I enjoyed fagle’s translation immensely, but he is loose in translating the pyschological terms.
IMHO, the story of the Iliad is a bore in any language, verse or prose.
I prefer Ossian. 😉
As someone who’s had the tribulations of years of formal training in Ancient Greek, but also the pleasures of reading the Illiad (and other classics) in their original, I must side with David Roth. The Lattimore is clearly the superior translation, if you want to know what Homer sounds like in Ancient Greek. Of course, one of the fundamental problems with translations of ancient languages is that all the evidence is purely lateral, i.e., other texts whose translation is also open to question; not to mention the not infrequent times when Homer uses a word or construction that occurs nowhere else but in Homer. But if there’s one book that ought to be read by anyone who would call themselves educated, it surely is the Illiad, with the Odyssey not far behind. No one who hasn’t read that great last line (from Lattimore): such was the burial of Hector, breaker of horses (going from memory) and shed a tear can call themselves educated.
As they say, every translation is a commentary.
Shed a tear! Are you sure the New Testament isn’t more your style?
As a polyglot, translating poetry and fiction are the most difficult works to translate. It also depends on which way you are translating – into or from your native language. Translating into your native language is much easier, as you understand the nuances and idioms of the language.
Does anyone have an opinion about Fitzgerald’s translations?
Poetry is what gets lost in the translation- someone good and great said that. Fagles is okay; I prefer Fitzgerald.
This brings up an interesting side question. Since many claim it is better to hear Homer aloud, what are the best audio versions of the Iliad and Odyssey? Librivox seems to have a version of Odyssey but I don’t like a female narrator, especially for an epic poem. Also I am not sure if the Samuel Butler is the best one to hear aloud.
I compared Homer translations here. Fagles, along with Fitzgerald, comes out on top for the Odyssey, but, alas, for the Iliad, I have to agree with those above: Richmond Lattimore is still the way to go.
My thoughts on Virgil and his translators are here.
My general thoughts on translation are here. I have a few more thoughts on translation and a list some of my favourite translations here. I touch on the difficulties of translating comedy here.
Rhyme and plays on words are very difficult to translate. Humour, in general, is hard to get across, and style is almost impossible to convey in translation. Lyric poets tend to suffer the most, but authors who rely on humour, like Jane Austen, or writers who are especially fine stylists, like Virgil, also tend to suffer in translation. Homer is not considered particularly difficult to translate.
One should not make translation sound too difficult though. Literary people tend to overemphasize how much literary merit inheres in a writers style, in how he sounds. While that is important, great deal of literary value inheres in the sense. A strong thought or an interesting observation remains just that in any language. I’m not sure that any literary author is really and truly untranslatable; it is more likely that they have not been found by the right translator.
A sample of my complete translation of Ecclesiastes, the book of the Bible that usually appeals most to the non-religious, is here.
Burton Raffel, a superb translator of many classics, has a couple of good books on translating
prose and poetry
Eminent translator Willis Barnstone has this book.
Major issues with poetry, since it can’t be done. The whole genius of poetry is combining semantics with consonance and assonance, and that just won’t translate. Rhythm and rhyme too, of course, but that’s not so hard.
Luke is right, of course, if you mean by “poetry” anything like what I mean. For what I value in poetry, it couldn’t help but have major issues with translation. I couldn’t get a hooker in Tijuana with my spoken Spanish ability, but I admire Borges because I can read his original with a crude translation and glean enough to appreciate his command of form. And that Rilke is somehow admired by people who only know English translations, is something I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with.
thanks for the responses so far, this is the kind of comment thread i appreciate.
Robert Lowell called his (excellent) volume of loose translations Imitations. I think that’s about right.
When I read a translated poem that is obviously just that, I cringe. What you’re really doing is writing a new poem inspired by one in another language.
The reason that poetry looks stoopid if you remove the linebreaks is the same reason that song lyrics look stoopid if you read them in the liner, especially if you haven’t listened to the CD yet. The textual conventions of verse are a way for the author to control the sound you hear in your head when you read. Lose the sound and you lose everything. You have to start from scratch.
That said, Homer is much easier to translate than most of today’s verse because it’s epic, rather than lyric – the poetic form is still somewhat incidental to the story. I’ve never read any prose translations of the Iliad, but I assume they’re not utterly unreadable, as is any attempt to map lyric to prose.
I have the Lattimore translation, and I really like it, though my only comparison is to the Fitzgerald translation, which I haven’t read in a long time now. My general impression has been that Lattimore’s version is more straightforward than Fitzgerald’s, but I’m pretty partial to directness in general, so maybe that wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste.
Can’t tell you how they compare to the original, though. 🙁
I’m impressed that there are still people out there studying ancient Greek!
It’s worth listening to it in Greek even if you don’t understand it, too.
Potentilla,
One of the problems with the audio Homer, is that there’s no definitive way to know exactly how the ancients actually pronounced it. What scans metrically, as the classicists call it, greatly underdetermines pronounciations. If you took your Greek from Oxbridge types, as I did, you have one way of pronouncing things (example, the English prefer Al(see)ibiades [sometime lover of Socrates and all around rat]), whereas others (frequently Germans) like Al(kee)biades. The same goes for innumerable other words and extends to accent, emphasis, and other phonological phenomena as well. It’s still fun to listen to so long as you give up on any hope of authenticity.
It’s still fun to listen to so long as you give up on any hope of authenticity.
Yes indeed. Also, I think Stanley Lombardo is somewhat unnecessarily melodramatic – he sounds a bit like an old-school Shakespearean. Better than nothing though!
I was taught Greek by an Oxford MA and I think she said Al(kee)biades…..but I may be mis-remembering. Anyhow, she used to read us Homer out loud. She also used to holiday in Greece and speak to the Greeks in classical Greek, which she said caused considerable amusement but worked perfectly well.
Oh, and a very romantic rat – one of my fellow-pupils had a massive crush on him…..
I had thee years of Greek in high school a long time ago and read, with gerat difficulty, the Greek version of The Iliad while my book club was doing the translation. The thing that struck me the most was how onomatopoeiac the Greek often was, compared with the English. That is, the Greek words for, say, crushing someone’s bones actually sound like someone is doing some serious bone-crushing.
I assume this is because Greek was closer to the origins of all language than modern English is, or than any language that has developed since writing with the phonetic alphabet became common. When you are inventing a word, I imagine you do try to make it sound like the thing it means.
That would seem to make Greek and other ancient langauges more naturally poetic, since sound tends to match and reinforce sense, an effect that has to be striven for with English, which has so many more words to choose from. And I suppose one reason the Greeks and Latins avoided rhymes was that they would have been so easy and monotonous, given that inflected languages have so many similar endings. A rhymed Greek poem would sound like a very banal sing-song to a Greek.
I don’t know much about Ancient Greek at all, but I do know enough about it and modern English to say something interesting, possibly.
When old stuff gets translated into English, I think there is a tendency to use English that is somewhat archaic and antique, one might call it literary language where it doesn’t really hit home like it probably did originally. It seems in the Iliad, where there is a lot of descriptions of spear thrusting, head splitting, and disembowelments going on, the poet was aiming at an effect that the makers of movies like “Predator” or “Rambo” might strive for in a film but doesn’t come across as well as it might because the translator will be using English appropriate to ‘high literature’. Stories about Heracles in something like Bullfinch’s Mythology are like this too.
Though not in the Iliad, the story of the judgement of Paris where Venus bribes Paris with ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ might have sounded like ‘the most righteous babe’ to an ancient Greek with the disposition of Wayne and Garth hearing the story.
Even in non ‘story’ stuff, this comes up. A translation of the Latin ‘senator’ and ‘Senate’, if it retained all the earthy connotations that these words held for an ancient Roman, would be translated as ‘Elder’ and ‘The Elders’. The Roman Senate, was ‘The Elders of Rome’. If we translated that literally, the US Senate would be ‘the Elders of the United States’ and along with the connotation that naturally comes, that the Senate was some sort of committee of wise men, it might add an ironic and unintentially hilarious subtext to American political discussion that I’m not sure would be good or bad.
j mct, read my above points on the Homeric dialect. The Homeric poet is most certainly not aiming at at an effect comparable to action movies but is using a purely literary dialect invented specifically to sound weighty and serious (as well as fit the meter, etc.).
In lighter Greek literature (comic poetry and such), pompous characters are occasionally lampooned by being made to speak this artificial dialect and the later Hellenistic poets reacted against its overly serious tone (particularly when employed by contemporary poets).
Thus, even though it may sound funny to our ears, I much prefer translations of the Iliad which use an archaic style of English.
One more general comment (and in agreement with what most others have said), Homer is quite easy to translate at a fairly high level of accuracy. Ancient Greek is a monstrously complex language by our standards (primarily in its number of forms and its manner of expression). This makes many genres (especially of poetry) difficult or impossible to translate. Thus for most of Greek poetry (lyric and tragic, for example), I don’t personally see much point in reading the plays in translation (at least in so far as your interest is understanding the literature of Ancient Greece and not modern reception of it). With Homer, however, you can get quite a lot out of it because of the relative ease of translating Homeric Greek and thus I always encourage people to read it in translation.