The Twists and Turns of Translation
Why Classics’ Relationship With Translation Is Complicated
Classicists have a strange relationship with translation.
Translation is what makes Greek and Latin texts available to the public, and if texts are available to the public, that helps to encourage and justify their study in the original languages. Translation is also, as Diane Rayor recently wrote, “essential for classical outreach” — I have little doubt that we’ll have Emily Wilson and her Odyssey largely to thank for upticks in Greek enrollments over the next few years. On the other hand, translation is the bread and butter of language competency assessment in the Classics classroom, from first-year courses to graduate programs.
Yet our pedagogical reliance on translation habituates us to thinking about language learning in strange ways. In a brief overview of the history of translation, Juliane House observes that “At the end of the eighteenth century the teaching of Latin had turned into a highly formalized ritual, the idea being to instil discipline into students’ minds.” Two and a half centuries later, not much seems to have changed. I remember sitting in high school Latin class with a copy of Mandelbaum’s Aeneid under my desk, feeling like a kid in the outfield praying the ball never flies her way. For me, the “ritual” of in-class translation became linked early on with fear of humiliation.
This kind of pedagogy also hinders the development of real comprehension, since, among other things, it encourages students to translate Greek and Latin into their native languages even when they read on their own. We know that’s not how you learn a language; it’s also a hard habit to break.
Wilson herself has gotten to the heart of the problem by making a distinction between translation and “translation.” Translation is a flexible, creative exercise, whereas “translation” — what most of us do in class — is one in cryptography, “a tool that stands in for comprehension.” As she points out, most Classics students are still
encouraged to think of what they’re doing as learning “to translate,” as opposed to learning to understand. The original text is seen as a problem to which a clunky “literal” translation is a solution; as if there were a ‘right answer’ to what it means, and it’s something ugly in English, even if the original is beautiful.
These days there aren’t many places where you’ll hear teenagers saying “lest” or “in order that he might,” but a Latin classroom is one of them.
I had long been guilty of viewing the translation that students do for my classes, and even the bits of translation I’d done for my own work, as “translation.” It took something drastic for me to see things differently, and that something happened a little over a year ago when I found myself submerged in two very different translation projects at once: of short stories from (Modern) Greek and of Athenian speeches from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. During that time, a day spent learning from experts in (Modern) Greek translation completely changed how I read and rendered Thucydides. It also helped me see how odd — and counter-productive — it is that Classics still places such a premium on the archaic ritual of “translation.”
In 2015, I met a journalist named Konstantinos Poulis in Greece. Poulis is also a talented fiction writer who had published a well-received collection of short stories called Thermostat the previous year. When I read the first story, “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia,” I was so compelled by the narrative that I wanted more people to be able to read it too. Over the next couple of years, Poulis and I spoke often about finding an English-language translator for his work. When that proved difficult, I decided to try for myself.
As much as I had loved reading “Leonardo,” translating it was another story. This was the first time I had ever attempted a literary translation, a translation stripped of quotation marks. Before, when I had “translated” Greek and Latin passages as part of my scholarly work, I had mostly been concerned with showing readers how — and even simply that — I understood the texts. But with Poulis and Thermostat, something more was at stake. I wanted to do justice to my friend’s writing and help him to build his reputation in the Anglophone literary world. Euripides and Plato had never needed anything like that from me. And while I could communicate comfortably enough in Greek, I worried that I didn’t know it well enough to have the sharp sense of idiom and register that the project demanded.
That meant that I wound up relying too heavily on Poulis and his exceptional English. He would leave me generous amounts of corrections and queries on various drafts, and I waited to earn his stamp of approval on the final version. In the end, it was my contentedness with the finished “product” that allowed me to forget, temporarily, my dissatisfaction with the “process” —that is, with the mental work that I had done while translating.
Soon after “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia” appeared in English, I met Rob Tempio, an executive editor at Princeton University Press, and he suggested to me that something from Thucydides could work well for the Press’s “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series. I was heartened to hear him agree that he, too, was puzzled by the exalted position that Thucydides’ Athenians enjoy in American political discourse. The prospect of retranslating and reintroducing Pericles’ funeral oration and the Melian Dialogue — and of gently subverting the “ancient wisdom for modern readers” concept —did seem like a productive and creative way of encouraging people to revisit their assumptions about the text.
But I was also put off by the obstacles. No woman had yet done a book for the series, and the idea of translating Thucydides into English seemed like a strangely masculine enterprise (a “blokey” thing to do, the British might say). Thucydides’ Greek is so difficult that even ancient native Greek speakers struggled with it; even so, there are plenty of good English versions already. Fortunately, the work with Poulis had primed me for a new challenge, and the splash that Wilson had made with her Odyssey inspired me to want to realize another, if less ambitious, female translating “first.”
A few weeks after I started working on Thucydides, I saw a call for applications to a workshop at Princeton in literary translation from (Modern) Greek to English, designed for early career translators. This would be a chance to find out more about the contemporary Greek literary landscape and to learn from superb, theoretically-informed professionals about translation praxis. The directors of the annual workshop, Peter Constantine and Karen Emmerich, are celebrities of literary translation; classicists might know Constantine from his translations of Augustine’s Confessions and Sophocles’ “Theban” plays.
I applied, and was as surprised as I was excited to get a place. As I read the whole of the directors’ email, however, I started to get nervous: acceptances came with instructions that we prepare works-in-progress to circulate in advance of the workshop. Last spring, with two tight deadlines on the horizon, I found myself on an unforgiving daily schedule of translating Thucydides after breakfast and Poulis after lunch.
Even though I was spending all day translating Greek, mornings and afternoons felt very different. Greek has changed quite a bit since 400 BCE, and while Poulis’ characters do live in Athens, they have else little in common with Pericles. Depending on the hour, I found myself consulting different kinds of resources. For Poulis I mostly used Glosbe and Linguee, sites with dynamic digital corpora that show you how words have been translated in various contexts. Thucydides required a more analogue strategy, and soon I’d amassed two shelves’ worth of commentaries, grammars, scholarly books, and other translations. I looked to those translations when I got stuck or wanted to check that I’d understood the Greek, but also to make sure that my version wasn’t sounding too much like anyone else’s. In my most frustrated moments, I started to sympathize with Socrates’ argument in Plato’s Protagoras that there is little point in trying to understand a literary work if you can’t ask the author about it. When I really had trouble with Poulis’ text, I could always find him on Messenger. Thucydides wasn’t nearly as available.
In both cases, I had expected that comprehending the Greek would occasionally present a challenge. What I hadn’t anticipated was that I would still be caught in the same lack of method that had made me feel so frustrated when translating “Leonardo.” I proceeded linearly through both texts, no vision in mind of the finished products that I hoped to produce. All I knew was that I wanted the translations to be good, but I lacked a clear idea of what “good” meant or how it could, and would, be judged.
When the translation workshop convened in May, I was a little relieved to realize how uninformed my practice had been, because that meant there was hope I could get better at it. Naturally, I’d made the mistake of preparing for the workshop like a classicist: I printed out everyone’s drafts and checked them against the originals, noting where I thought that I’d found “errors” as if they were student exams. But over the long, intense, and exhilarating day, the directors led us in conversations that had almost nothing to do with grammatical structures and lexical slip-ups. In other words, that workshop looked nothing like my high school Latin class.
Instead, we talked about the varieties of choices that a translator might make in different situations. I learned that almost any choice is valid— as long as it is a reasoned and informed one. I was also surprised and interested to hear that, despite Socrates’ thoughts on the subject, too much contact with “your author” can muddy the waters and should usually be avoided.
One new set of concepts particularly caught my attention: the distinction between “foreignization,” defined by House as a “procedure in translation where the translated text is translated in such a way as to maximally resemble its original,” and “domestication,” “where a text is adapted to the norms of a target culture.” Food is a category that offers good illustrations. One of the stories that I had circulated, “Untimely Love” (“Ἔρως ἀνεπίκαιρος”), is about a perpetually-foiled romance between characters named Nikos and Maria. Toward the beginning, Nikos comes home from a disappointing day at work and heats up leftover fasolakia, a Greek green bean dish. Later, the manager of a taverna complains about groups of teenagers who take up prime tables for hours but only ever order “a herring.” The members of the workshop urged me to think in both cases about whether I was aiming for a foreignizing translation, perhaps even with “footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers” (as Nabokov famously desired), or a domesticating one that would allow the reader to imagine that Nikos and Maria’s romance had unfolded just around the corner. I’m pretty sure that few American kids these days would spend an evening out picking over a herring.
Back home after the workshop, the pre-circulated drafts of our translations were sent back to us with extensive markup from the directors. Their comments were sharp and constructive. “Untimely Love” is a story informally told, so why was I awkwardly avoiding the use of contractions? I had mixed American and British idiom, and translated the same phrase differently in some places. I had also over-adhered to Greek structures at the expense of English fluency and style. I read in my draft’s margins: “I keep feeling like maybe you’re too tight in the harness of Greek syntax and vocabulary?” All of this helped me to see just how conditioned I had been by Classics to fear the imagined criticism that haunts so many of us: “her Greek really isn’t that good.” In this case, my eagerness to prove that I “understood” the language had only served to expose my shortcomings as a translator.
Now, though, I was armed with a new vocabulary that allowed me to think more confidently and explicitly about what I was trying to do. I decided that my target for “Untimely Love” would be near the midpoint between foreignization and domestication. Fasolakia became “lentils” (a food common enough in the U.S., but one that still seems a little “Greek”), and the herring “an appetizer.” After careful thought, I decided to remove the “foreignness” of the herring but to leave it up to the reader to imagine what exactly the kids had ordered (to my mind, mozzarella sticks). But I also chose to stick to calling the taverna a taverna, and not to “domesticate” so far as to abandon the specific atmosphere which that word evokes in favor of the more neutral “restaurant.”
What I hadn’t expected was that the workshop would energize me enough to revisit my entire Thucydides draft just two weeks ahead of the deadline. Given that my purpose with Thucydides was to make the speeches more accessible, I resolved that with him I would apply a consciously domesticating approach. I loosened up unreadably tight sentences and made other adjustments. Cleon’s disdainful characterization of his fellow citizens as “theatai seated before sophists” (3.38) became “disciples gathered at the feet of gurus.” In Greek, a θεατής is more than just an “audience member,” but I was trying to avoid footnotes of any height. “Guru” seemed to be a way to capture Athenian suspicion of the sophists —their methods, promises, and often foreign origin — in American idiom. It’s something I could see Cleon saying in Congress today.
My experience at the workshop even changed how I thought about an old question: “Which Thucydides can you trust?” In an essay with that title (an NYRB review of two books on Thucydides), Mary Beard discusses a line from Richard Crawley’s translation of the Melian Dialogue (“The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must,” 5.89) that today has become a kind of slogan of political realism. She noted the common classicist’s complaint that the line is “in part at least, the work” of Crawley: in other words, that it’s not really Thucydides. With the workshop behind me, I reframed this debate for myself not as one about how “well” Crawley had understood the Greek, but as one about translation. No translation of Thucydides will ever be “pure” Thucydides; as Emily Greenwood writes, “translation is the degree-zero for all Thucydidean receptions.” So what does that English version tell us about Crawley’s method, and his interpretation of this author?
In short, one day with the professionals had brought me around to seeing other translators of Thucydides not as competitors, but as classmates and teachers.
Toward the beginning of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, Emmerich writes:
Give seventy translators an identical swatch of text and, unless divinely inspired, they will produce seventy different translations that accord with their diverse understandings of what the text means, and of the relative importance of its various features.
Emmerich’s observation alludes to an ancient Greek text: the “Letter of Aristeas,” which tells a story of how, over seventy-two days, seventy-two scholars from Jerusalem translated the Septuagint into Greek at the Library of Alexandria, under the supervision of Demetrius of Phaleron.
As authentically ancient as it might be, this inviting and inclusive view of translation is difficult to reconcile with the “right answer” approach that Wilson rightly calls out in Classics pedagogy. The Workshop in Literary Translation showed me how the translator’s toolkit of concepts — product and process, foreignization and domestication, and so on — can enrich the way that we approach ancient texts and the varieties of “meaning” preserved in them. I chose a domesticating approach with Thucydides, but also constantly kept in mind what alternative renditions based on different approaches would look like. This allowed me to read and think about the text in multiple ways at once.
I’ll admit that there sometimes are right answers in the classroom, and that “translation” can be a useful way of checking in with students — especially since (most) classicists don’t use spoken Greek and Latin as their method of instruction. Grammatical analysis is also a tool of the trade that students need to be taught. There is no one right pedagogy, nor do I think methods of instruction should be the same for modern and ancient languages. But I do believe that there are ways that we classicists can become better informed about translation and less reliant on “translation,” and start thinking about bridging the gaps between them.
First, we might move away from “translation” as a primary means of assessing linguistic comprehension. The most rigorous language tests that I have ever taken are the Ellinomatheia exams, which are used for certification in (Modern) Greek. These exams never require that candidates translate. The “comprehension of written language” section on the beginner’s test consists mostly in “true or false” and multiple-choice questions; on the most advanced test that section is far more complicated. Passing the highest levels of the exam allows people to prove their knowledge of Greek is good enough to, say, practice medicine in the language. So there must be similar ways of demonstrating, without recourse to translation, that someone’s (Ancient) Greek is good enough to advance them to candidacy.
Second, we can start actively teaching about translation: both its ancient practice and modern theory. The last few years have seen exciting new scholarship on translation in antiquity, such as Elizabeth Marie Young’s Translation as Muse and Denis Feeney’s Beyond Greek. When I’m better informed about these things, I hope to teach an undergraduate course that combines the study of translation in antiquity with forays into modern translation theory and student translation projects. I’m sure that such classes already exist, but I would like to seem them enter the field’s mainstream.
At the professional level, we could also start to recognize that to produce a translation of a classical text is to produce classical scholarship. Wilson has flagged the problem of the “devaluing of translation in the academy”: translations typically count little toward tenure and promotion, which helps to explain “why the tiny number of qualified women who might potentially want to do this work wouldn’t feel encouraged to do so” (see also here). The SCS has a Committee on Translations of Classical Authors, which organized a popular panel, “A Century of Translating Poetry,” at the 2019 meeting in San Diego. By publishing an account of the remarks that she made at the panel, Rayor (one of the panel’s co-organizers) has continued the good work of advocating that translation “count” for more. Classics as a whole stands to benefit if it did, for “A call for more literary translations by a more diverse population of translators could bring to light a greater variety of interpretations.”
Finally, wouldn’t it be exciting to have an online translation journal, similar to the University of Iowa’s Exchanges but dedicated to new translations of ancient texts (not only Greek and Latin) along with essays on the issues and challenges specific to translating dead languages?
The comparatist David Damrosch famously defined “world literature” as “work that gains in translation.” Classicists already seem quite convinced that most Greek and Latin works belong in that category. It is probably time, then, that we also follow Wilson’s lead and think more carefully about what the field could gain by shifting its views on translation. Certain corners could benefit from more of it, while others could do with much less.
Johanna Hanink is an associate professor of Classics at Brown University. Her translation of select speeches from Thucydides, How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy, will be published tomorrow by Princeton University Press. Her translation of another of Poulis’ short stories, “Kilometer Zero,” appeared in the fall 2018 issue of Exchanges.
