PrintDante, Descartes, Dostoevsky—they are all authors we read as part of our Core Curriculum, but more specifically, they are just a few of the authors that we read in translation. Although much of our Core Curriculum relies heavily on translated texts, the role of the translator is hardly examined—and understandably so. Unless a whole class speaks, say, fluent Spanish, it is impossible to fully dissect Edith Grossman’s translation of “Don Quixote.”
Seamus Heaney, a Nobel-laureate poet, has dealt with the thorny issues of translation firsthand. After reading Robert Henryson’s “The Testament of Cresseid” and “Seven Fables”, written in Middle Scot, he was struck with “an urge to get it into [his] own words” and translate it into English. “Fundamentally, I was operating on what Wordsworth called the grand elementary principle of pleasure. I loved the combination of the somber and the sympathetic in the Henryson voice,” he says.
He describes the process of translating the two works, both of which were published this past October.
“What’s unique about translation,” he relates, “is the fact that you don’t have to find the makings of the thing for yourself. They’re already there in, as it were, kit-form. You don’t sit down to a blank page, you have to match up rather than make up.”
However, the translation of a literary work, especially the translation of poetry, is not just a simple replication of literal words, a tracing of the elements and sounds. There is also to be considered what is lost in translation. In such cases, the translator must bring his or her own voice and judgment to sew up the seams that inevitably exist between different languages.
“In many passages I was able to keep the word for word order and the same rhymes. But that was by no means always possible, and in fact, the more I trampolined off the original the more I enjoyed the job,” he says.
“Doing a stanza of one of those fables—it’s like being a kid again, inflating a leather football. You’d pump it up so tight that it seemed to get lighter, then you’d lace it and bounce it hard and quick and be delighted by the sheer buoyancy and trimness. It was that kind of satisfaction, stanza by stanza, that kept me going with the fables.”
In “Cresseid,” Heaney’s phrasing and locutions smooth out awkward phrases and anachronisms as any good translation should, but further demonstrate a bluntness and vividness of expression that is reminiscent of his own poetry. Heaney’s vivid language often evokes a strong engagement of both the abstract and the earthy, such as his yoking of physical labor with intellectual thought in his poem “Digging.” Even in “Cresseid’s” most simplistic couplets, Heaney’s keen poetic sense shines through.
At a crucial moment in the poem when Cresseid, a beautiful Trojan woman exiled by her Greek lover, is punished by the gods after placing blame upon them. She weeps, “All welth in eird, away as wind it weiris; / Be war, thairfoir, approchis near the hour: / Fortoun is fikkill quhen scho beginnis and steiris!”
Heaney’s rendering shifts it to “All wealth on earth is wind that flits and veers; / Beware therefore in time. The hour draws close / And fate is fickle when she plies the shears.”
He deftly balances Henryson’s meaning and presentation by communicating “Cresseid’s” sorrow while forming a rhyme that captures the work’s original lyricism. Nevertheless, the alterations he makes, though subtle, are powerful. The characterization of wind is enlivened by both “flits” and “veers,” diction that is suggestive of its caprice and elusiveness. Furthermore, Heaney echoes the notion of time twice, with “time and “hour,” strongly emphasizing its inexorable passing. His final insertion of the image of fate plying “the shears” is perhaps informed by vivid agricultural imagery, a common theme in his poetry, that recalls his childhood on a farm in County Derry, and is even evocative of Robert Penn Warren’s Evening Hawk, “His wing / Scythes down another day, his motion / Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear / The crashless fall of stalks of Time.”
Differences in translations are inevitable, necessitated by varying rules of grammar and limitations of vocabularies—highlighting why the translator, who must decide how to handle his or her “infidelity,” plays such a crucial role in determining the final shape of the texts we read. Constance Garnett, translator of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky among others, has been praised for her clear prose but also condemned for excising parts of the original author’s work, behaving more like a play director heading a singular production than a craftsman transfusing words from one language into another. Translators are people, as fallible, fickle and temperamental as each one of us, susceptible to obstinacy, obsession and error. They are interpreters much in the way of everyday readers, bringing a set of prescribed values to a text and unconsciously applying them.
“I have been unfaithful to the original,” Patrick Marber writes in the introduction to his translation of August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” “but conscious that the infidelity might be an act of love.”
How significant, then, are the translator’s changes? Does Heaney’s voice augment or diminish that of Henryson’s? Should we treat a translated text as the translator’s work or the original author’s?
These are the questions that we must consider, and perhaps the ones that Heaney wants his readers to consider as well. In the publication of “The Testament of Cresseid” and “Seven Fables,” Henryson’s Middle Scots and Heaney’s modern English translation are presented side-by-side. Heaney is practically hiding in plain sight. Every divergence is visible. Though we can track Heaney and contest whether his poetic sentiment improves or detracts from Henryson’s original, what is to be done in the case of Allen Mandelbaum’s “Dante”? Bantam Classics has supplied the original Italian verse of “The Divine Comedy” but how is it of any help if the reader cannot read Italian in the first place?
However, it should be considered that gaps between an author’s original intent and the final text we read also exist in works written in English. In one of Romeo and Juliet’s most famous soliloquies, Juliet states, “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” This very line is a patchwork of various quarto and folio sources strung together by an editor, not by the Bard himself. Shakespeare’s plays might not have been as messy or as tedious to compile as, say, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” but the process has been similarly haphazard, complicating the “definitiveness” of the final text. Clearly, it is more than just language that poses a barrier to translators; time periods matter as well.
“I’ve done one of the ‘Eclogues’, but domesticated it,” Heaney relates. “Since then I’ve been having a go at Book VI of ‘The Aeneid’ and am more and more conscious of the distance and difference between that world and mind and ours. I believe I’m realizing that because I know enough Latin to arrive at the frontier of literal meaning but can only gaze across into the heartland of deeper apprehension.”
Even if Virgil originally wrote in Latin, students read his work through a prism invariably colored by the limits of not only their linguistic capacity, but also those of their culture and individual perception. And translations are also tinted in the same way, perhaps reflecting particular values that not everyone will share.
This is not to suggest that the Core’s translations are, by virtue of being translations, inaccurate and should thus be dismissed. It is always possible that the Core’s chosen translation would not be your own, that the Dostoevsky we read isn’t the “right” Dostoevsky for you (with all due respect to Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). But at the core of the Columbia education is not simply the texts themselves, but what they convey. As Heaney says of the “Fables,” “It is the stories that keep their charge and hold the interest of contemporary readers most.”
“Classical tragedy, Greek myths—they’re like lines of longitude and latitude that help to locate us in history and consciousness,” Heaney says. The texts of the Core hearken back to the very roots of human experience and perception. Literature Humanities stresses how these works are transformed into a collaborative effort, a medley of perspectives that mesh and clash, not merely by the author, translator and editor, but also by your professor and classmates; the Core experience perhaps ought to be measured by how far other views take you and stretch your own. So maybe the spare elegance of Richmond Lattimore is a student’s dry poetry, and if that student is you, consider giving Robert Fitzgerald a shot. And if Homer has intrigued you enough to search him out in another pen’s rendering, then maybe Literature Humanities has done its job.