In 2017, Emily Wilson became the first woman to publish a complete version of The Odyssey that was translated from Homeric Greek to English. As a prominent classicist, she began her literary translation with: “O Muse, tell us the story of that complicated man”. Reading it, you would not guess that with simply this opening line, the world of classics was taken aback.
Homer uses the word ‘polytropos’ (πολητροπος) to describe Odysseus. In previous translations, historians have transcribed this word into English as ‘many turning’ or ‘resourceful’. The word ‘complicated’ rings entirely differently, imbuing the text with suddenly more nuance — who was this complicated man, why was he complicated? With just one word, Wilson transformed Odysseus, a revered Grecian hero, from a cunning and clever man into one with many intricate layers to his story and character.
The world of classics is a world of translations. In 1946, Penguin published its first translated copy of The Odyssey by E.V. Rieu, suddenly making this discipline of arcane languages previously reserved for the elite, available to the English-speaking public. No longer did you need a grammar or private-school education in order to read texts of the ancients.
Years later, anyone can read any classical text — whether it be the pulchritude of Sappho’s poetic fragments from the island of Lesbos, carried all the way into our modern world, or even hieroglyphics. More recently, the German letters from Kafka to Milena, the sombre Russian novels of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, and Proust’s logorrhoeic À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, are similarly available. Our world of literature is now populated with stories of all ages, of all languages, gaining more readers along the way.
And yet, this begs the question: is there some essential quiddity to the original texts that is perhaps lost as we translate from their original to the English? Do we really get a sense of the whole story, complete with emotions and semantics, when we change the language? What do we lose, that isn’t already lost to history? Andrew Brown, an experienced translator, says that literary translation is not to capture meanings but to release them. I spoke to him briefly about his work — he began as a teacher of language, and has now translated from French, Italian, and German, working with famous novelists, such as Marquis de Sade, Jules Verne, and Théophile Gautier.
Some of the best stories that I have read have been translated works. With English as my first language it is easy to forget that that these books, mass-printed and doled out across the world, read entirely differently in their original forms, varying even between English translations. I constantly remind myself to consume media in different languages, and doing this provides me with vastly different experiences.
Last year, I started a rather ambitious project to translate Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Translation is the sort of discipline that seems easy to an outsider, but, despite knowing the language for many years, it is still difficult. Being a Latin poet, Ovid was profusely verbose, his sentences were rambunctious (in the best way, of course), and his sentence structure — like most ancient verse — is never linear. But that proved to be the easy part.
Being a translator requires creativity, and a harnessing of the art of language. The translator must also be a poet, to capture the essence of a story in one language, and to somehow transcribe it into the next for a fresh audience to read. Not to mention, there is an inherent rhythm to the original form of the poetry that is strenuous work to transmit into other languages. For example, Metamorphoses is written in dactylic hexameter, the same meter used in epic poems like The Odyssey.
Then there is the problem of word choice. When translating the story of Phaethon, I was stuck with how to translate Latin words when there was no corresponding English. For instance, were the mermaids’ hair sea-green, or youthful and blossoming (viridis)? Did the palace of the sun-god look awash with fire or with garnet (pyropo)? Suddenly there is so much pressure on the translator’s shoulders to do the original writer justice while also making the words comprehensible to a modern audience.
This is similar in many works of literature such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, where the reigning dogma is that of maximising what he calls ‘virtù’. This word is widely translated as ‘virtue’ for want of a better, singular English word to sum it up. But it does not really mean virtue at all, in fact carrying with it the meaning of having exceptional ambition, adroitness, and cunning in order to maintain your social standing or to get to where you’d like to be (hence the term Machiavellian). ‘Virtù’ is not ‘virtue’, but something much more powerful and layered, that coloured Machiavelli’s philosophies and the cutthroat society of 15th-century Florentine politics.
It all harkens back to what my grandfather says — languages are colour, and our words should be colourful. We greatly underappreciate the work of translators, particularly when our bookshelves are flooded with novels from sundry origins, and we underestimate how much there is for us to gain when we turn back to the original form of these novels.
Even if you don’t understand Arabic, hearing the poetry of Nizar Qabbani read aloud, the way the vowels and throaty consonants of Arabic form themselves into mellifluous, romantic syllables, feels like music. It’s the same for any other language — the bounce of Italian syllables, the ‘t’s and ‘s’s of Russian, tonal Mandarin. Memorising The Iliad or The Odyssey in its original form provides you with an altogether different feel of how it would have been recited in centuries long ago, when poetry was passed down orally, when stories were entertainment at dinner parties, when prose was performed like songs. The way that the words sit on your tongue is entirely different.
Literary translation, though seeming innocent, is political. By exploring the worlds of different languages, and hearing them spoken in their truly artistic and original form, your mind will thank you for the refreshing new experience that the dichotomies between languages can provide.
