Hot-spots in a Love/Hate Relationship: Conflict and Conversations between
Greek and Roman Texts and their Translators
Lorna Hardwick
Translation in History UCL Lectures, 17 January 2013.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Dr Geraldine Brodie and Dorota Goluch for convening this lecture series and for
inviting me to participate. Warm thanks also to the graduate students at UCL for their help today.
Abstract:
Translation of the texts of ancient Greece and Rome has a long and sometimes contentious relationship
with subsequent literatures and cultures. In this short talk I shall identify some key examples and explore
how the models used to characterize them cover a spectrum from transmission to rewriting. These in turn
have implications for the practice and theory of translation studies as an international and interdisciplinary project as well as for the cultural politics of antiquity and modernity.
Introduction:
In the title of my talk I’ve alluded to love/hate relationships. This is because key issues and moments in
translation history often involve some kind of tension between strongly held attitudes and arguments. And
discussions of classical texts and their interpretations, translations and use certainly evoke that.
Sometimes there are even quasi-erotic charges – from passion for the ancient texts to infatuation with the
new. Sally Humphreys has referred to ‘the erotics of the discipline’ (Humphreys 2004). I suspect that’s
true both of classics and of translation studies.
‘The study of translation is the study of textual voyages’. Thus Susan Bassnett has described a multifaceted and contested area (Bassnett 2011, 8). She went on to elaborate:
‘Some of those voyages have led to extraordinary discoveries…other voyages have been journeys of
rescue, ensuring the salvation of abandoned or lost works, while others have been transforming or lifeenhancing’.
The image of the voyage is a potent one for classicists; from Homer’s Odyssey to the present day the
journeys undertaken by Greek and Roman texts have intermingled the illusory idea of the return journey
home (nostos) and the aspiration for the transformative. The issues that generate and complicate
translations of Greek and Latin texts often revolve round those extremes on the spectrum.
I’ve divided my talk into 3 sections. In the first I will take a look at how the activity and purposes of
translation was discussed in antiquity; from this you can see how it has fed into more recent debates. In
the second I will look at some examples of how translation from Greek and Latin has been crucial in
shaping literatures and ways of thinking through the centuries. In the final section I will discuss some of
the key debates of today and comment on how they are informed by and sometimes challenged by
translation from classical languages. In conclusion I will offer you some thoughts on why translation of
Greek and Roman material continues to be important and suggest some ways in which it provides a
sustaining thread in global cultural encounters.
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Section 1:
Approaches to Translation in Antiquity – theory and practice:
In antiquity there were important debates about the theory and practice of translation. These are closely
related to many of the debates in the recently developed modern discipline of Translation Studies. Cultural
practices associated with translation in antiquity have equivalents in many of the more recent contexts that
we study and research. However, as with many modern approaches to texts and ideas from ancient
Greece and Rome, it is also the case that modern commentators tend to allow their interpretation to be
shaped by their own concerns. Ancient debates were sophisticated not simplistic. I shall therefore try to
bring out the ambivalences in the ancient texts that I discuss.
It is also important to be aware when looking at approaches to translation in antiquity that there were
layers of bi-lingualism, some of which shaped the texts that have come down to us today. For example,
the historian Herodotus who wrote about the wars between Greeks and Persians in the 5th century BCE
probably knew only Greek and tells us that depended on Persian and Egyptian interpreters (Herodotus
2.8). In Ptolemaic Egypt, although Greek was the language of administration some individuals had double
names, one Egyptian, one Greek and there were scribes fluent in both demotic and Greek. As Rome
became hellenised, educated people from the 1st century BCE increasingly became bi-lingual in Latin and
Greek. Indeed there were some reactions against this, from both traditionalist politicians such as Cato,
who resisted the intellectual flexibility and new ideas provided by Greek, and the satirist Juvenal, who in
his poems lampooned the melange of languages and multi-cultural environment brought about by
immigration. The historian Suetonius tells us that the emperor Tiberius (1st century CE) unsuccessfully
discouraged the use of Greek in the Senate (Suet. Tiberius 71). I give these examples to show that
translation of various kinds was both part of culture and the politics of power and could become a source
of contention.
Now to some specific examples:
The Romans categorized different approaches to translation. One of our most important sources is the
politician, orator and philosopher Cicero (106 - 43 BCE). He was a learned man who himself produced
translations of Greek philosophical texts as well as transplanting Greek ideas into Roman contexts and
forming a Latin philosophical vocabulary. In his introduction to his translation of speeches by eminent
Greek political orators of the 4th century BCE (Demosthenes and Aeschines), Cicero drew on his own
experience of translating to distinguish between translation word for word (verbum pro verbo) and
translating in a way that communicated style and (most importantly) effect.
Here is an extract from Cicero De Optimo Genere Oratorum iv.13-v.14 (the Best Kind of Orator, 46 BCE)
PASSAGE 1
‘I propose to undertake a task useful for students, but not completely necessary for myself. For I have
translated into Latin two of the most eloquent and most noble speeches in Athenian literature, those two
speeches in which Aeschines and Demosthenes oppose each other. And I have not translated as a mere
hack, but in the manner of an orator, translating the same themes and their expression and sentence shapes
in words consonant with our conventions. In so doing I did not think it necessary to translate word for
word, but I have kept the force and flavour of the passage’
Tr. L.G. Kelly (in Weissbort and Eysteinsson, 2006, 21)
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In giving you this passage I need to note that the translator, Kelly, is a translation scholar. It is useful to
compare his translation with that of a Latinist with a special interest in Cicero’s life and thought (H. M.
Hubbell, 1949, in the Loeb edition). The choice of words is slightly different:
‘And I did not translate them as an interpreter but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and forms, or as
one might say, the ‘figures’ of thought, but in language which conforms to our ways’.
There is a big difference in the terms ‘mere hack’ (Kelly) and ‘interpreter’ (Hubbell). Kelly’s choice of
words resonates with modern debates about the status of the translator; Hubbell focuses on the purposes
that were in the ancient translator’s mind. The differences in the two renderings provide a salutary
reminder that many of the sources that we may be using are themselves translations.
What are the main points we can take from Cicero’s example?
Firstly, he assumes that ‘Romans like him’ can read Greek and therefore are less in need of a translation.
His is directed at students. However, he assumes that the students will need it for a particular purpose – to
acquire skills in oratory, the necessary basis for a public career in law and in politics. Thus, the emphasis
is on how the translation is to be used, in this case for public speech that has to persuade. It is a
performance context. In aiming at ‘language that conforms to our ways’, he anticipates the approach that
requires a translation to imply that the work was written in the receiving or target language. The
alternative strategy, to distance from the audience by archaizing or foreignizing would undermine the
rhetorician’s main purpose, which is to persuade the audience that his words address their own current
situation. This is in contrast with the approach set out in some of Cicero’s philosophical works when he
accepts that Greek words can be imported into Latin when there is no pre-existing Latin term – or indeed
concept.
The implication that I have drawn out from Cicero about the need to recognize the audience’s sensitivity
to language is elaborated in a letter written by a Roman writer from the following century, Pliny the
Younger (61?-112?CE). In Epistle VII.ix.1-6, addressed to Fuscus Salinator, dated to 85 CE (and advising
on leisure activities) Pliny wrote:
PASSAGE 2:
‘A translator cannot ignore the responsibilities of a reader. From this comes understanding and critical
sense’
It is perhaps pushing things too hard to claim that Pliny is the ancestor of Reader Response Theory but he
does stress activity (the reader is not regarded as passive). Furthermore, Pliny advocates translation
practice from both Greek to Latin and Latin to Greek (perhaps he is one of the ancestors of the practical
translation seminars recently revived in Oxford by Professor Oliver Taplin?)
‘By this type of exercise one becomes sensitive to the properties and richness of vocabulary, to the wealth
of figures of speech, to effective exposition; and moreover, by the imitation of the best models is learnt
the power of writing on the same subject matter’ (tr. L.G.Kelly)
Imitation (from the Latin imitatio) is a key word that became influential in translation categorisations and
to which I will return later in my talk. Note that Pliny links this with the ability to write well on similar
topics; it has a creative function.
Pliny concludes his homily on the benefits of translation practice with an admonition: ‘because of its very
difficulty, it bears fruit in bringing you new fire, and giving you new drive when your enthusiasm has
flagged’.
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A different perspective on translation is given by the Roman poet Horace who was writing in the last part
of the 1st century BCE. Like Cicero, Horace also rejected ‘word for word translation’, but for different
reasons. In his Ars Poetica 133-4 (?20 BCE), he emphasised that translators should aim to produce work
that was both aesthetically pleasing and had a creative impact on the receiving language. This introduces
the idea of translation as an agent of literary change. Many different metaphors have been used to
describe this. St Jerome (4th century CE, to whom I will return in a few moments) suggested that the target
language takes over the source language in the same way that a conqueror takes over a prisoner. That is an
aggressive image that has persisted in translation analysis right up to the present (notably in metaphors of
rape and cannibalism).
Horace, however, also suggests a more nuanced perspective. This is evident in his comments on the
introduction of Greek literature to Rome, which are quoted and discussed in Roman Drama: A Reader by
your Professor of Latin at UCL, Gesine Manuwald.
PASSAGE 3
‘Captured Greece captured the savage victor (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit) and brought the arts to
rustic Latium. Thus that rough Saturnian metre ran dry and good taste put the foul odour to flight’
(from Epistula 2.1. 145-67, tr. in Manuwald, 2010, 47)
Horace’s claim is important for two reasons. The first is that that it provides an early example of the idea
that classical culture (and specifically Greek culture) is civilizing, that it offers an aesthetic lift to the
rustic (analogous to the rhetorical example that Cicero found in the Greek orators and philosophers).
There are variants on that argument of uplift to be found through the centuries, in terms of class, and in
terms of the relationship between classical languages and vernaculars. But even more interestingly Horace
also addresses the question of different kinds of power. Rome might indeed be the conqueror of Greece in
terms of military might and administrative power but that very situation brought Greek culture to Romans
and it proved more powerful that the indigenous Roman rustic traditions. The question of the sometimes
ambivalent relationship between classical languages, imperial power and cultural authority and hierarchy
will return later in my talk.
My final example of discussion of translation in antiquity comes from a figure that I’m sure is well-known
to the students among you, the Christian translator and theologian St Jerome (348?- 420 CE). In 395 CE
Jerome cited Cicero’s approach as an authority for his own approach to translating the Septuagint (the
Greek version of the Hebrew Bible). Jerome was supposed to have had a dream in 375 in which he was
accused by God of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian. Doubtless this expressed a tension between
his pagan classical learning with its emphasis on intellectual and artistic flexibility – he was versed in the
works of Cicero, Virgil, Horace and other Latin writers - and the emphasis made by religion for the
accurate and unchanging transmission of meaning. In his writings on translation Jerome kept the
distinction between sacred and non-sacred texts.
PASSAGE 4
From Letter 57 (To Pammachius, ‘On the Best method of Translating’, tr. L. G. Kelly)
‘Not only do I admit but I proclaim at the top of my voice, that in translating from Greek, except from
Sacred Scriptures, where even the order of the words is of God’s doing, I have not translated word for
word, but sense for sense’
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However, in the same letter when discussing the difficulties of literal translation he also claims that ‘it is
clear that, in their use of the Septuagint translation, the Apostles sought the sense, not words’.
Interpretation of Jerome’s comments and situating his work in the history of translation of sacred texts is a
specialist topic and I shall not attempt to discuss this. However, I would like to make one observation and
that is that the tension between literalist approaches to meaning and the challenges of translocating texts
across languages and cultures, with their different semantic and aesthetic norms are not confined to sacred
texts. Analogies are to be found in cases where devotion to classical authors combines with resistance to
literary and hermeneutic theory to give the Greek and Roman texts a quasi-sacred status. You might also
sense that Jerome’s often vitriolic tone masks deep conflicts.
Section 2:
I want now to turn to some of the most interesting ‘staging posts’ in translation in history. I have chosen 3,
each of which relates to a different kind of thread in the histories of practice and of theory.
The themes are:
Migration of Greek and Latin texts.
Creative translation
Models of Collaborative translation
(I would like to have included historiography, especially because of the light it throws on constructions of
narrative, but time forbids.)
For each of my 3 themes I have chosen one example - I am sure that you will be able to add examples of
your own. I would like to have included a discussion of historiography, but time forbids – another lecture
needed! All of the examples contain elements of ‘Translation as Transmission’, what Susan Bassnett has
described as ‘a process of textual continuity’ (Bassnett 2004, 54). Her perspective on this is upbeat, a
conscious opposition to the notion that translation is an endless story of loss. Of course, as Bassnett
concedes, textual transfer will involve loss, since ‘what can be said in one language cannot be rendered in
exactly the same way in another, but it also involves gain, not only on account of new readers but also
because each language context adds something unique in itself) (ibid. p 54 where Bassnett discusses
Sapir’s point that no two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same
social reality).
What all these examples will have in common is that the translation process is in some way mediating as
well as transmitting the Greek or Latin text and that the effects may be not only on the translated text but
also on the mediating language and culture. After all, as well as being pervasive these are diasporic texts,
moved from their own places and circumstances of origin and transplanted, across time and place as well
as language, into other cultures which reread and retranslate them through the lens of the subsequent
contexts through which they have travelled and in which they are now re-encountered (Hardwick 2006).
Migration:
An important example of the translation/transmission/mediation nexus can be seen in late antiquity and
the medieval period. Translations of material collected in Alexandria and other libraries were vital in
preserving Greek medical, mathematical and philosophical texts. In the Abbasid period (second and third
centuries H., equivalent to the 8th and 9th centuries CE) these were translated into Arabic, sometimes with
Syriac as an intermediary language. This activity was epitomised in the work of the Wisdom House in
Baghdad (Etman 2008). Together with the work of the 12th century Cordovan physician and philosopher
Ibn Rushd (Averroes), which was often mediated through Hebrew and Latin translation, this led to the
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recuperation of Greek science and philosophy and opened the way for their incorporation into the western
intellectual tradition during the Renaissance. Two main translation methods have been identified – a
literal approach in which if no equivalent existed the Greek word was transplanted into Arabic, sometimes
as neologism rather than a transliteration, and a ‘sense for sense’ approach. The texts also benefited from
the explanatory notes and commentaries of the translators, who acted as a bridge between the ancient
authors and the successive communities of readers that are also a part of transmission.
A different form of mediation from the scholarly work of the translators into Arabic was creative
rewriting. An example of this is the practice by neo-classical dramatists in France (notably by Racine and
Corneille in the 17th century) and by epic poets in the Scottish and English literary traditions. This
borrowing, translating and returning of texts has been given the metaphor of the ‘European Lending
Library’ by Lynne Long (Long 2009) and many scholars would extend this to a World Lending Library.
Creative Translation:
I’ll now focus for a moment on a key example of this symbiotic relationship between translation and
literature. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, the responses to Virgil by John Dryden (1631-1700) and to
Homer by Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) produced literary works that became canonical in their own
right but also fuelled debates about the relationship between the source text and the target language.
Equally influential was Dryden’s discussion in his Preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680) of the tri-partite
division of translation approaches (metaphrase or word for word, which makes it difficult to convey the
artistic quality of the source; paraphrase, faithful in that it observes the contours of the original and
conveys sense for sense; and imitation, a free approach that shades into a new work).
PASSAGE 5
Dryden, From Preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680):
‘ All translation, I suppose, may be reduced to these three heads.
First, that of metaphor, or turning an author word by word and line by line, from one language into
another…the second way is paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by
the translator so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that too is
admitted to be amplified, but not altered. The third way is that of imitation, where the translator (if now
he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake
them both as he sees occasion…’
I have emphasized Dryden here because he is a good example of the importance of para-material – the
translator’s perspective on what an individual was trying to achieve and why. He’s also interesting
because, like Jerome, he didn’t always follow his own stated priorities – an appeal to what might have
seemed the conventional wisdom was accompanied by practice that pushed boundaries. Paramaterial is, of
course, only one piece of evidence to be taken into account by the translation scholar. However, in the
case of classical texts, with the long diachronic and the substantial synchronic analysis that is needed, it
does provide one window among many on how a particular translator perceived the dynamics of the
ancient text and its role in current literary practice. In Dryden’s case it also provides an example of how
reflection and proto-theorizing about translation becomes part of the frame for future debates and provides
an influential thread in them. Of course, Dryden is only one example of this – I could have made a further
digression into the use of classical material by modern poets such as Pound and T.S.Eliot or the poetics of
excerpting of classical material within new work (Pound began his Draft of XVI Cantos, 1925, with a
passage of translation from the Odyssey, Reynolds 2011, 212; the present–day classically trained poet
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Michael Longley frequently includes close translations of Greek and Latin within his lyrics, Hardwick
2009).
However, creative literary translation or indeed sometimes any translation at all continued to be
problematic for critics. Opposition to the notion of translation took a number of forms. Translation of
Greek and Latin texts was criticised as involving a slavish use of the vernacular, putting it in thrall to ‘old’
work and thus preventing it from creating its own literary strength. Of course, there is another side to that
debate in that development of vernacular translations and versions of classical material can be argued to
give status and bring linguistic enrichment to the vernacular (cf for Scots see Gavin Douglas’ 16th century
version of the Aeneid (1513) right up to modern Scots version of Aeschylus, Euripides and Racine
(theatrical Scots and for an example of the vernacular itself taking on classic status, consider Dante).
Arguments against translation of sacred texts (Robinson in France, 2000, 105) - that meaning would be
distorted and that the original was too powerful and therefore potentially dangerous for the untrained
reader/listener – found their equivalent when applied to Greek and Roman texts. For example, the
obscenity in authors like Catullus was considered acceptable only if confined to readers who could access
the Latin, and – as Deborah Roberts has shown- ‘translators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
regularly suggest that they are sparing their readers material or language that would be shocking (or
repulsive or distasteful) to the translator’s contemporaries (Roberts in Lianeri and Zajko 2008, 285). But
who was it who needed to be protected? The reputation of the ancient author? A particular class or gender
of readers?
In 1748 the English aristocrat the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son that: ‘Classical knowledge, that is
Greek and Latin, is absolutely necessary for everybody…the word illiterate in its common acceptance,
means a man who is ignorant of these two languages’ (quoted by Hall in Lianeri and Zajko 2008, 318). By
that criterion, most of the population was – and is - illiterate. That was the kind of assumption that
resulted in English translation of Aeschylus being delayed until the late 18th century (Hall, 2008, 321).
Not until the development of the 19th century popular series of translated ancient classics were Greek and
Latin authors widely available to Anglophone readers (for example, Bohn’s Classical Library, founded in
1848 and available at 5 shillings or less [25p in today’s money], see Hall, 2008, 332). These series were
the precursers of Dent’s Everyman’s Library (1906) and eventually Penguin Classics, in which the
founding volume, E.V. Rieu’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey sold over 2 million copies between 1946
and 1964. (That was by no means a temporary phenomenon. I have been told that following the showing
of the film Troy in Glasgow a few years ago, translations of the Iliad went to the top of the best-seller
lists.)
Even among those who wanted to encourage wider cultural ‘literacy’, access to classical texts and ideas
raised problems. For example, in the early 19th century the public official R.L. Edgeworth recommended
in a report on Irish education that Greek material that might encourage democratic ideas among the Irish
should not be allowed. Edgeworth was actually correct in thinking that access to Greek and Latin authors
could be used to challenge and undermine power and authority as well as to impose it – witness the
considerable role of historiographical, poetic and dramatic translations and versions of classical texts in
the recent history of resistance and anti-imperial movements in (to take a few) Ireland, Cyprus, South
Africa, West Africa, Greece, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America (this has become a heavily
researched area in recent years, see for example Greenwood 2009). In battles over language authority, it is
significant that an imperial language such as English takes on a subaltern status when it is seen as
subservient to the Greek and Latin of the classical authors (Hardwick 2007).
Thus the histories of class, gender and cultural exclusion and threads of power control and authority that
recur and recombine in attitudes to translation of Greek and Roman texts is multifaceted. I have only been
able to touch on it here; it would merit a whole series of lectures on its own.
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Collaborative translation:
This existed in antiquity – for instance the team of 70 scholars who produced the Septuagint. In recent
times has developed in response to a combination of circumstances: recognition of the need to
communicate the aesthetic quality of the source and changes in the educational background and linguistic
knowledge among creative writers. There is also the question of the sheer difficulty of translation from
classical languages.
PASSAGE 6:
As Carne-Ross put it:
‘Ancient literature must always be re-created. There is no middle way between poetic re-creation and a
crib. Faced with a different organisation of language, a great many idioms which approach familiar
experience with an unfamiliar strategy, a set of key words – particularly in Greek – for which there are no
precise or constant equivalents, the translator’s work begins many stages further back than with a modern
language. The sentence, sometimes the word, has to be dissolved, atomized, and its elements then
reconstituted in a new form’ (Carne-Ross, 2010, 238.
The multiple vulnerabilities of the translator undertaking this demanding task are well illustrated by the
academic, poet, BBC radio producer and translator Louis MacNeice in his devastating review of the
translations of Greek drama by the Oxford Professor Gilbert Murray (which were staged in west end
theatres in London in the first part of the 20th century and were so popular that they caused traffic jams).
Louis MacNeice is probably best known as a poet but he also lectured in classics at the University of
Birmingham and translated and rewrote Greek plays. MacNeice’s critical writing also addresses some
aspects of translation practice. His discussion of Gilbert Murray’s translation of Aeschylus’ The Seven
Against Thebes was damning. (Spectator 10 May 1935, a review probably written while MacNeice was
working on his Agamemnon):
Passage 7
‘Professor Murray is our leading Hellenist and no one would impugn either his scholarship or his
enthusiasm. But as a verse translator of the Greek dramatists he is, though readable, neither a good
translator nor a good poet. That he is readable is shown by his sales…
‘Those who have a little Greek will most likely want a fairly exact crib; this Professor Murray does
not provide. Those who have no Greek will want either a version which ‘puts across’ the original or
something which will stand on its own feet as a work in English. Professor Murray, I take it, wishes to
put across his original; he takes liberties not for their own sake but in order to save qualities in the
original which he regards as more important than word for word accuracy’. (italics added)
MacNeice went on to give his own views on translation practice:
‘a translation should start from the Greek, preferably line for line. Diction and rhythm will then
differentiate’. Then the poetry can be infused [MacNeice recommends Gerard Manley Hopkins] – so
‘we improve both rhythm and diction and so make the whole more real’.
Then comes MacNeice’s key claim:
This is perhaps when the non-scholar may translate better than the scholar. (italics added)
MacNeice ends his discussion of Murray – ‘His Greek original is so real to a scholar like Professor
Murray that it is probably never out of his mind and so he cannot see what the English looks like just
as English’. MacNeice, like T.S.Eliot, cringed at Gilbert Murray’s pre-Raphaelite poetic echoes.
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I take from these examples the problem that, in the making of translations, scholarly knowledge does not
always sit easily with poetic and dramatic skill.
Yet, as a counterpart to literary outrage, the threat of the enraged classicist critic still lingers. In the 18th
century Richard Bentley attacked Pope on the ground that his poem was pretty but it was not Homer. In
the 21st century the academic Dr Ian Ruffell was commissioned to provide a close translation to be used
by a dramatist creating an acting script for the new National Theatre of Scotland to perform at the
Edinburgh International Festival in 2007. Ruffell told me in an interview that the literal translation of
Euripides’ Bacchae that he made for the dramatist David Greig was ‘the most footnoted translation in
history’. This was because the dramatist (Greig) and the director (John Tiffany who had studied classics at
Glasgow) ‘were very anxious that it would get trashed by classicists in some ways. There was a certain
sense that they wanted “a clean bill of health”….or at least if they were going to get into trouble for it then
it was for things they were prepared to get into trouble for’. (Source: Interview with Ian Ruffell, 3 April
2008, Hardwick 2010).
In the event, Ruffell and Greig worked closely together to reconcile the impact of Euripides’ word order
and line structure with Greig’s wish to focus on aspects of the play that are readily translatable into
modern sensibilities. Audience response was triggered through the resonances of accent, costume, gesture
and body language. Some of the references to Greek mythology were removed where it was felt that they
would confuse a modern audience because they are not part of modern cultural frameworks of orientation
and understanding. Underlying this is a specialist sub-field of classical translation studies – the constraints
and opportunities offered by translation for and to the stage.
Multiple collaboration: Translation for and to the stage
The question of relationship between source and target texts, cultures and readers takes on an additional
dimension in the case of translation for and to the stage. This is because actors use their bodies as well as
words and the set design, costumes, properties, music, soundscape and other theatrical features are
integrated in framing the audience’s response. So the somatic, the semiotic and the verbal come together
to create the whole performance ‘text’. (Susan Bassnett has rightly pointed out that the requirements of
performability are at least as volatile as problems of ‘fidelity’ and accuracy.) I will resist an excursus into
yet another sub-field except to say that translation for the stage involves relationships and tensions
between verbal and non-verbal aspects of performance and brings in a further team of performance
creators (actors, directors, set designers, lighting designers choreographers, musicians, properties
managers etc). (A forthcoming Special Issue of the journal Target will explore this aspect of translation.)
‘Collaborations’ in translation for the stage are of different kinds. The contemporary dramatist Frank
McGuiness has commissioned close translations (eg for his Hecuba) made by a classically trained writer
who also has a career as an actor. Seamus Heaney works with existing translations and commentaries for
his versions of Greek plays, using the Victorian commentaries and translation by the Cambridge scholar
Richard Jebb and the more recent Loeb parallel text translations of Sophocles by the Oxford Regius
Professor Hugh Lloyd-Jones.
And of course the versions by Heaney and other dramatists who do not work direct from the classical
texts stretch the scope of the word ‘translation’. (In his study Found in Translation, 2006, J Michael
Walton puts in a separate category those who do not work direct from the ancient text. My query about
that is that it gives insufficient recognition to the fact that much translation activity is collaborative.)
Sometimes publishers call the printed text a translation (for instance Ted Hughes’ Oresteia); sometimes
they describe it as a ‘version’; sometimes they add to the title, for example ‘After Sophocles’. These
variations may have as much to do with the desire to present the star dramatist or poet’s text as new work
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as they do with the nuances of the differences between translations, versions and adaptations. And I
should quote from the recent assertion (in a translation symposium held in Oxford last December) by the
dramatist Timberlake Wertenbaker (who works with the classicist Margaret Williamson) that ‘anything
that involves alteration isn’t a translation but an adaptation’. And alterations are inevitable – and
desirable. As Reginald Gibbons put it - ‘Translation is much like politics in the necessity of compromise;
in fact, translation is very much politics of a cultural kind’. (Gibbons 2000, 239).
The Greek Tragedy in New Translations series is (to quote its founder William Arrowsmith) ‘based on the
conviction that poets like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides can only be properly rendered by
translators who are themselves poets’. This led to a series based on collaboration between poets and
scholars. In a series of thoughtful Translator’s Introductions, Reginald Gibbons, who is a literary scholar
as well as a poet, has discussed his collaboration with the classicist Charles Segal (2000 on Euripides’
Bacchae and 2003 on Sophocles’ Antigone), pointing out that because Greek is an inflected language it
can cram far more meaning into a few words than can English. This, together with the specifics of the
compression of Euripides’ Greek syntax means that a translation into English often requires more words
and lines than did the original. Furthermore ‘ we are also in the odd position of seeing an ancient word not
only as itself but also in the light of all that it has turned into, in later centuries, as it evolved and gathered
round itself meanings and associations that are entirely extraneous to the Greek meanings and
associations’. In that context, Gibbons (2000, p. 235) cites words such as wisdom, happiness, initiation,
sound mind, nature and comments on the ways in which the Greek itself plays on a range of meanings,
sometimes questioning meanings that would have been assumed to be settled in the minds of the Greeks
(that was one of the things that Greek tragedy did). In addition to his discussion of words, Gibbons
comments on the problems of expressing Greek metre and the effects of choral singing because of modern
audiences’ different knowledge of and response to forms and poetic structures. The sequence offers
priceless evidence about how a translation produced in collaboration between a poet and a classicist has
tried to negotiate these difficulties.
In the final section of my talk I now want to move away from my focus on specific practices and consider
how the translation of Greek and Latin material can help to refine some of the more theoretical
formulations in translation analysis.
I have chosen one modern formulation as my ‘test case’ to see whether and how the study of translation
practice and theory in relation to Greek and Roman texts can add special dimensions to theory. George
Steiner’s model of hermeneutic motion is by no means the last word on translation theory but if does raise
a number of issues that my discussion of classical translation in history has had to address.
Steiner’s model is fourfold. It describes what Steiner calls ‘the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer
of meaning’ (Steiner 1975, 296-303)
The first stage is TRUST, the sense that there is a value, a worthwhile meaning to be communicated. As
we have seen the histories of classical translation complicate the notion of trust. Trust bleeds into
authority, into genealogy, but also into belief in linguistic and formal energy and the power of ideas to
transform and be transformed; a sense of potential which it is impossible to tie down or to present as
closure. This first stage is usually the priority in the practices of those translating classical texts for
students. The effect is usually to reassert the dominance of the source language. At a basic level the
beginning student of Greek or Latin has to do translation exercises where her efforts may be judged as
‘right’ or ‘wrong’. At a more sophisticated level there may be a strong element of humanistic aspiration. It
is difficult for students to work simultaneously with both aspects The scholar Seth Schein has reflected on
the question in relation to his own aim to produce translations of Greek tragedy that will be
‘pedagogically effective’:
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‘ For me, this means a translation that is as close to the Greek as I can make it while still being readable, a
translation on the basis of which students can learn to think critically about the play in its historical and
cultural contexts, in more or less the same way in which I think critically about it on the basis of the Greek
text. I want students and other readers to feel confident that the interpretations they generate, however
they may differ from my own, are valid and worthwhile precisely because they are based on a translation
that is accurate and attuned to the distinctive features of [the Greek author’s] style and thought’. (Schein,
in Lianeri and Zajko, 2008, 404). The effect of this is that close translations produced by scholars can act
as bridges between, on the one hand, the Greek text and, on the other hand, the literary, historiographical
and theatre translations that are part of the receiving culture.
Steiner’s second movement is aggression – ‘incursive and extractive’; some theorists take this further and
speak of cannibalism. We have seen how aggressive appropriation can operate; but we have also seen ‘
the biter bit’, both in antiquity and subsequently, how classical translations can become part of a sequence
of text and counter-text, providing sites for struggle. A recent edited volume edited by Jan Parker and Tim
Mathews (another UCL Professor) has examined the interfaces between Tradition, Translation and
Trauma (Parker and Mathews 2011). The relationship between classical translation and trauma of various
kinds (experiential and metaphorical) is going to be a rich field for research in the next few years.
The third movement identified by Steiner is incorporative, on a spectrum that runs from ‘complete
domestication to ‘permanent strangeness and marginality’. Any translation of Greek or Latin has to
struggle with these tensions and in so doing they provide a rich field for the understanding of literary and
cultural hybridity and for comparison between different temporal and spatial engagements with classical
material that provide opportunities for the development of multiple consciousness (not just double
consciousness) and for critique.
Steiner’s final movement is reciprocity, a dimension of loss, of breakage but also of gain. Scholars of
classical translation have explored various ways of characterizing this: David Hopkins’ 2008 essay on
Pope used ‘Colonisation, Closure or Creative Dialogue as possible frames for analysis of Pope’s Homer
(1715-20). More broadly the same critic identifies literary translation as ‘Conversing with Antiquity’
(Hopkins 2009).
In classical reception research one of the buzz words is ‘dialogue’ between ancient and modern and
translations provide key sites for creating the necessary interfaces. The notion of dialogical relationships
is attractive to classicists who desire to see the persistence of the texts as cultural players and yet do not
want to see them changed out of recognition. Later this year (at the Nijmigen colloquium on classical
reception) I will be problematizing the ‘dialogical argument’. However, in terms of Steiner’s hermeneutic
motion of reciprocity I would argue that reciprocity, in the positive sense of exchange rather than simply
as dialogue, can operate at a number of levels in translation. It can operate at the level of engagement with
the two texts and two languages with which the individual translator is dealing (the microcosm), but it can
also operate through translation in history (the macrocosm). An example of this would be the (still
developing) relationship between Arabic translations of classical material and western study of Greek and
Latin texts (Pormann 2006, 2009). Phases include the relationships between the Arab translators and the
Renaissance; the reciprocal impact of European and especially French scholarship on the Arab
Awakening and the subsequent double translations of Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannos, first into Arabic and
then back through the medium of Arabic into English. The collection edited by Marvin Carlson in 2005
‘reciprocated’ by returning work by 4 different writers in Arabic to access by Anglophone readers. Such
reciprocities enable to be dialogues spatial and lateral as well as temporal.
Greek and Roman translation in history embeds commonalities and difference, providing threads of
comparison alongside as fluidity of use. I have described how translations of Greek and Roman texts are
both agents of language hierarchy and agents of its subversion. This makes them significant contributors
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to what the writer and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o has called globalectic reading. (The difference between
globalectics and universalism is that the former preserves difference and the latter suppresses or relegates
it.)
PASSAGE 8:
‘Reading globalectically is a way of approaching any text from whatever times and places to allow its
content and themes to form a free conversation with other texts of one’s time and place, the better to make
it yield its maximum to the human’.
And he concedes that ‘even old classical literatures of different cultures and languages can be read
globalectically’ (Ngugi 2012, 60). You will not be surprised when I say that I would put it more strongly
than that. When Ngugi says that ‘globalectic reading means breaking open the prison house of
imagination…[which has been] open only to a few’ (2012, 61) I would say that the temporalities, spatial
scope and linguistic range of classical translations provide a special contribution to this and enhance the
World Lending Library, not only the European. To return to the metaphor used by Susan Bassnett, the
journey of Greek and Latin translation in history can be read as one of aspiration as well as nostalgia.
Select Bibliography:
Bassnett, S., 2011, ‘Prologue’ in J. Parker and T. Mathews, eds, Tradition, Translations, Trauma: the
Classics and the Modern, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1-9.
Carlson, M., 2005, The Arab Oedipus: Four Plays, New York, Martin E. Segal.
Carne-Ross, D.S., 2010, ed. K.Haynes, Classics and Translation, Cranbury, NJ, Rosemont.
France, P, ed., 2000, The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
Gibbons, R., 2009 [2000], ‘On the Translation’ in The Complete Euripides IV, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 233-241.
Graziosi, B. and Greenwood, E., eds., 2007, Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature
and the Western Canon, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Greenwood, E., 2012, ‘The Greek Thucydides: Venizelos’ translation of Thucydides’, in K.Harloe and N.
Morley, eds, Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the
Renaissance to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 157-177.
Hardwick, L., 2007, ‘Shades of Multi-Lingualism and Multi-Vocalism’ in L. Hardwick and c. Gillespie,
eds, Classics in Post-colonial Worlds, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 305-328.
2009, ‘Is the “silken thread” worth more than “a fart in a bearskin”?, or, How translation
practice matters in poetry and drama’, in S.J.Harrison, ed., Living Classics, Oxford University Press, 172193.
© Lorna Hardwick 2013
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Conflict and Conversations between Greek and Roman Texts and their Translators
2010, ‘Negotiating Translation for the Stage’ in E.Hall and S. Harrop, eds, Theorizing
Performance, London, Duckworth, 181-191.
Hopkins, D., 2010, Conversing with Antiquity, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Humphreys, S.C., 2004, The Strangeness of Gods, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Lianeri, A. and Zajko, V., 2008, Translation and the Classic, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Long, L., 2009 ‘The European Lending Library’, in A. Chantler and C. Dente, eds., Translation Practices:
Through Language to Culture, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 17-29.
Manuwald, G., 2010, Roman Drama, London, Duckworth.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, 2012, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, New York, Columbia
University Press.
Parker, J., 2001, Dialogic Education and the Problematics of Translation in Homer and Greek Tragedy,
Lampeter, Mellon Press.
Pormann, P.E, 2006, ‘The Arab ‘Cultural Awakening (Nahda)’, 1870-1950, and the Classical Tradition,
International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13.1, 3-20.
2009, ‘Classics and Islam: From Homer to al-Qaida’, International Journal of the
Classical Tradition 16.2, 197-233.
Reynolds, 2011, The Poetry of Translation, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Steiner, G., 1998 [1975],
Oxford University Press.
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford and New York,
Walton, J.M., 2006, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press.
Weissbort, D. and Eysteinsson, A., eds., 2006, Translation – Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Journal Special Issues:
Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception, 2010: Special Issue on Translation (e journal)
Target, 2013 forthcoming: Theatre and Translation
Theatre Journal, 2007 (October) 59.3: Special Issue on Translation and Theatre.
© Lorna Hardwick 2013