by David Grant
THE SACRIFICE OF LINGUISTIC COMPROMISE
Commercial publication pressures eventually demanded that translations from Greek and Latin into vernacular languages were more readily available. If Aristotle had captured something of the essence of modern grammatical theory in his Peri Hermeneias, On Interpretation, neither he, nor Cicero and Horace who had been conscious of their methodology when undertaking translations, could have anticipated the shifting linguistic sands that would give rise to an industry of hermeneutical controversy. As John Dryden, Poet Laureate and celebrated translator, eloquently explained:
‘… the Words; when they appear (which is but seldom) literally graceful, it were an injury to the Author that they should be chang’d: But since every Language is so full of its own properties, that what is Beautiful in one, is often Barbarous, nay sometimes Nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a Translator to the narrow compass of his Author’s Words: ’tis enough if he chuse out some Expression which does not vitiate the Sense.’241
Dryden penned an illuminating preface to Ovid’s Episteles in 1680. In it he ‘reduced all translation to three heads’: metaphrasing (word by word), paraphrasing (translation with ‘latitude’) and imitation (‘the liberty to forsake’ both ‘words and sense’), a necessary means with which Dryden planned to tackle Latin texts: ‘Tis almost impossible to Translate verbally, and well, at the same time; for the Latin (a most Severe and Compendious Language) often expresses that in one word, which either the Barbarity, or the narrowness of modern Tongues cannot supply in more.’ Ovid wound up his Metamorphoses with a bold claim about the immortal nature of the work ‘… that nothing can destroy… not Jupiter’s wrath, nor fire nor sword, nor devouring time.’242 But Ovid had not factored in the challenges of translation.
Dryden’s edition of Virgil (published 1697) and Alexander Pope’s Homer (the Iliad was published between 1715 and 1720 and ‘its wife’, the Odyssey in 1726) became the authoritative and representative English classical texts of their era.243 The latter followed Chapman’s first English translation from Greek of 1611, which superseded an earlier attempt by Hall (who spoke no Greek) from Spanish in 1581.244 Yet the classical scholar, Richard Bentley, scoffed at Pope’s efforts: ‘It is a pretty poem Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer.’245
Bentley had already gained notoriety when William Wotton (1666-1727), an accomplished linguist and classical scholar, requested that he expose the Epistles of Phalaris, whose authenticity had been long debated, once and for all. The Epistles, most likely an Alexandrian production of the 3rd century BCE, is purportedly a corpus of 148 Greek missives written by the ruthless tyrant of Agrigento in Sicily, who, according to the lyric poet Pindar, had a bronze bull made in which he roasted criminals alive.246 Lucian suggested the bull’s creator, Perilaus, designed it so the cries of agony could be heard like ‘melodious bellowings’ through pipes placed in the nostrils.247 And though the Epistles painted Phalaris as a gentle ruler and patron of arts, he suffered a gruesome death when his subjects, seeing none of those worthwhile traits, finally revolted.248
Bentley’s haughty scientific paper on the subject published in 1697 (which ‘violently’ exposed the corpora of the Letters of Themistocles, Letters of Socrates and Letters of Euripides at the same time) saw the eruption of a literary dispute with Charles Boyle and Francis Atterbury in the style of Scaliger and Scioppius; it was satirised by Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books.249 Some years later, in 1742, Pope caricatured Bentley in The Duncaid, referring to the lack of humanity in his scholarship that led to his being satirised earlier.250
Alexander Pope’s original handwritten draft of his Iliad translation published between 1715 and 1720, written on the back of a letter.
Dryden’s translation of Virgil too was termed nothing less than ‘alchemy’; in the words of Sir Walter Scott, Dryden managed to explain the ‘… sense … with the eloquence in his own tongue, though he understands not the nice turns of the original.’ In Scott’s view, Dryden ‘… cared not if minute elegancies were lost, or the beauties of accurate proportion destroyed, or a dubious interpretation hastily adopted on the credit of a scholium.’251 He nevertheless concluded generously:
… many passages that are faulty, many indifferently understood, many imperfectly translated, some in which dignity is lost, others in which bombast is substituted in its stead. But the unabated vigour and spirit of the version more than overbalances these and all its other deficiencies.
In the age of Dryden and Pope, the rhyming couplet was the standard choice for reconstruction of Homeric hexameter, whereas in more modern translations a six-beat line or iambic decasyllabic structure is employed, though any rigid adherence to method requires necessary liberties with structure to avoid what the Greeks termed logoi pezoi, ‘pedestrian wording’, where the spirit of the original gets lost.252 Archaic poetry remains a conundrum because its metre may simply not exist in the target language, and perhaps this is why almost all Greek and Roman lyric poetry disappeared in the Dark Ages. A recent translator of the Homeric Hymns commented on early hexameter verse: ‘As the Greek language operates very differently from English using a system in which the function of a word is generally signalled by its ending, rather than by its position in the sentence, a strict literal translation is often impossible or unsatisfactory.’253 The result, as with the case of the Alexandrian attempts to modernise Pindar, is that the lilt, flow and formula, and ultimately the very essence and mood of the hymn in the mind’s ear, is interrupted by the need to reposition the words.
Dryden had himself compared the translation of a classical work to a ‘drawing after life’, and yet one that should nevertheless retain recognisable facial features. He further proposed a middle methodological ground in translation, shunning both verbum pro verbo and imitation. John Denham had already proposed a similar approach in his 1656 preface to the Destruction of Troy though neither scholar’s method was well defined. Dryden went on to admit: ‘I am ready to acknowledge that I have transgress’d the Rules which I have given; and taken more liberty than a just Translation will allow.’254 In contrast, Bardon’s approach to reproducing Curtius has been described as ‘misguided conservatism’ in that it maintained corrupted Latin even when it made little sense.255
Any scholar who has read parallel translations of the classics can understand the challenge, and especially so in the case of Tacitus. Michael Grant remarked of the Annals when introducing his 1956 edition: ‘The more prudent translators preface their efforts by apologetic reminders that Tacitus has never been translated and probably never will be.’256 The translators were, and always are, faced with what has been termed ‘the art of the correct sacrifice’.257
The above retrospections highlight the challenges posed to literature through the ‘ages’ that revolve around cosmetic chronological classifications with which we attempt to tidy up the past. Yet the terms ‘modern’, ‘classic’ and ‘antiquated’, are, of course, temporally relative.258 Along with Teuffel’s Silver and Golden Ages of Latin we bundle history into the ‘Classical Period’ and ‘Late Antiquity’, Droysen’s ‘Hellenistic Era’ and the Roman ‘Second Sophistic’, a period first labelled by Philostratus (ca. 172-250) in his Lives of the Sophists. We have also established the label of a so-called Third Sophistic in the 4th century when Christian rhetoric found a string of brilliant rhetors and philosophers inspiring Augustine to his De doctrina christiana.
We gather up later events through Petrarch’s ‘Dark Ages’, the ‘Middle Ages’, the ‘High Medieval Period’ and the enlightened ‘Renaissance’, the epithet coined by Jules Michelet in his 1855 Histoire de France which rather unsurprisingly claimed it was a French-inspired movement. We even have a ‘Macedonian Rennaisance’ for the dynasty based at Constantinople (broadly spanning 867-1056 CE) which ruled the Byzantine Empire. Commonly attributed to Basil I ‘the Macedonian’, but born in fact to a Thracian peasant family of alleged Armenian origin, the period saw a reinvigoration of arts when th
e iconoclasms of the Amorian dynasty were reversed for a while.259 Yet these periodisations are too broad in breadth and too shallow in depth for such tentacular processes, which neither commenced, nor ended, with the succinctness we like to attribute to them. We have simply observed a cluster of cultural vintages originating from a common terroir and then deemed them an appellation.
It is said that every language and every era does have a different view of the world, synthesising its cultural background into idioms with unique connotations that may not necessarily be compatible with the originating archaic, or the modern target, language. ‘The vocabulary of ancient languages reflects a cultural context that modern Europe left behind a long time ago.’260 Take, for example, the Hippocratic Oath assigned to the famous doctor from Kos. Though Hippocrates would recognise the relics of an original in its modern form, the wording has evolved to cope with new ethical and technological practices. Gone are the pledges to share medical knowledge free of fees and the oath of non-violation of ‘free’ women ‘or slaves’; the vow not to provide lethal drugs is today caveated with – most pertinently in countries permitting euthanasia – ‘I tread with care in matters of life and death.’
Taking all this into account, what chance is there that Arrian, Diodorus and Plutarch accurately captured the intent of their earlier sources, no matter how well (or ill) meaning their attempts? How faithfully did Cleitarchus transmit the essence of his eyewitness sources, and how successfully did Curtius convert Cleitarchus’ Greek construction and the underlying thought processes into Latin? We may equally ponder how accurately their interpretations have been preserved in the centuries since with the attenuation of time. For a subtlety unappreciated, an inflection misused, sarcasms and witticisms taken too literally (any translator of Lucian’s works, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses would appreciate the dilemma), each diffuse the focus and nuances of the original.261 Moreover, ‘fiction, true, false or free-falling, is intimately bound up with figures of discourse such as metaphor and irony, and with speculation and hypothesis’, all the elements vulnerable in translation.262 Alongside them we find deep-lurking lacunae, scribal cut-and-pastes, scriptorium pastiches and the text-amending prejudices of pious distaste; and each, or any, one of them may have changed our very interpretation of history.
What of the limitations and even the errors of the ancient authors themselves that stemmed from their rudimentary working materials? For where a modern writer might ponder his prose and commit to words knowing he can instantly correct and erase, the classical writer could not readily do so. Where we have limitless scope to improve paragraphs, reintegrate chapters and replay syntax until the publication button is pressed, the ancient author committing to papyrus or vellum had almost no latitude for amendment. It is perhaps why the Homeric epics, optimised with each oral recounting, attained such poetical heights, whereas written texts, handcuffed to ink, essentially remained a ‘first attempt’.
Cato, via Cicero, unwittingly articulated the overall challenge while commending the order stoicism brought: ‘What is there, which is not so linked to something else, that all would collapse if you moved a single letter?’263 This sounds like a premonition of the uncial script that caused so much confusion in scriptoriums, and the early Semitic languages that had no vowels at all.264 The analogy helps explain the mistransmission of book titles, names, numbers and dates, and how, for example, Alexander’s Will bequests could have become a part of the so-called last plans that were so curiously revealed in Babylon (T25), and why the lacunae that permeated Curtius’ last chapter were sewn up with such poor stitching.265
But perhaps the better answer is Alexander’s ‘last words’, which were his supposed response to questions on kingship. For the Vulgate-genre reply – toi kratistoi, ‘to the strongest’ – is suspiciously akin to toi Krateroi, ‘to Craterus’ (Greek, Krateros), Alexander’s senior general who was entrusted to oversee the entire kingdom of Macedonia in the Will along with the dowry of an Argead wife, an observation not lost on historians (T6, T7, T8, T9).266 If not exactly the point Cicero was making, when this is juxtaposed beside the stoic argument of Chrysippus, which proposed that ‘every word is naturally ambiguous’, we appreciate just how far removed we may be from the original testimony of the eyewitness historians who followed Alexander at the dawn of the Hellenistic Age.267
NOTES
1.Collected Works of Erasmus, Letters 1-141 (1484-1500) Vol. 1, p 252, translation by RAB Mynors and DFS Thompson, University of Toronto Press, Toronto-Buffalo, 1974.
2.Collected Works of Erasmus, Letters 1-141 (1484-1500) Vol. 1, p 134, translation by RAB Mynors and DFS Thompson, University of Toronto Press, Toronto-Buffalo, 1974.
3.Momigliano (1954) p 22.
4.Whether it was actually nailed to the door, rather than being distributed by hand, is disputed and may be myth; the Latin title of Luther’s work is Disputatio pro Declaration Virtutis Indulgentarium.
5.The original full title of Utopia was Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia. Blackburn (2006) p 22 for the dating of Plato’s Republic.
6.Quoting Russell (1946) p 7.
7.First published as Collatio Novi Testamenti in 1453. By his death in 1457 Valla had revised and improved the work now titled In Latinum Novi Testamenti Interpretationem Annotationes; it was first printed in 1505. Erasmus found a copy in the abbey of Parc outside Leuven in summer 1504; discussion in Rummel (2008) pp 18-22.
8.Quoting West (2008) Introduction viii. The ‘erratic’ nature of the early manuscripts Erasmus had to work with is discussed by Metzger (1992) p 102. Instrumentum was changed to Testamentum from Erasmus’ second edition onwards.
9.Erasmus later drew from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible to improve his 4th edition text.
10.Erasmus Adagia (III, IV, 96) ‘collection of proverbs’ published first in Paris in 1500.
11.Quoting PG Naiditch and R Resinski Philodemus and Greek Papyri: an exhibition 1 April – 31 August 1994, UCLA, University Research Library, Dept. of Special Collections, April 1994. Following Grafton-Most-Settis (2010) p 30 for Petrarch’s treatment of Alexander.
12.Momigliano (1977) p 109.
13.Quoting Highet (1949) p 113 for Gibbon’s prose. Gibbon (1776) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire chapter 8, quoting Petrarch Epistlolae Familiaries 9.2.
14.Gibbon (1776) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire cited in Highet (1949) Introduction p 17.
15.Highet (1949) Introduction p 16 for the first professor of Greek.
16.Highet (1949) pp 106-111 for the impact of purer Greek and Latin on the vernacular languages and following his observation on the reasons for the ‘poorer’ vocabulary and p 85 for ‘positive paganism’.
17.Discussion of the significance of the Divine Comedy in Highet (1949) pp 70-80.
18.Quoting Tyndale’s alleged defiant words when confronted by an ordained clergyman.
19.It is estimated that some eighty-four per cent of the New Testament and seventy-five per cent (of the first five chapters) of the Old Testament of the King James Bible stemmed directly from Tyndale’s translation, as had Miles Coverdale’s English bible edition for Henry VIII before it.
20.Quoting Momigliano (1977) p 76.
21.Quoting Highet (1949) Introduction p 15, following Bracciolini. Highet (1949) pp 91-92 for Boccaccio’s visit to Monte Cassino.
22.Highet (1949) pp 17-18 for the Vatican Library.
23.Quoting from the Preface (line 1) to Tacitus and Bracciolini, The Annal Forged in the XVth Century by JW Ross, originally published anonymously in 1878.
24.Quoting Tacitus and Bracciolini, The Annal Forged in the XVth Century chapter 2.3 by JW Ross. Also Hochart (1889). The popular title Annals is in fact 16th century. Tacitus published his works as Historiae in fourteen books, and then wrote sixteen books titled Ab excessu Divi Augusti.
25.Following Diogenes of Sinope in Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 65-66. The riposte was
in response to Diogenes hearing a handsome youth talking in an unseemly fashion; in other words the words or claims do not do justice to the source from which they emanate; thus the ‘lead blade from the ivory scabbard’.
26.Quoting Homer Odyssey 11.362-6.
27.Annius was made Master of the Palace by Alexander VI. Ligota (1987) p 50 for discussion of Annius’ claim to read Etruscan. Etruscan is not an Indo-European language and has not been fully deciphered. The Pyrgi Tablets, written in both Etruscan and Phoenician (Punic), have helped translate some rudimentary phrases and vocabulary. According to Suetonius Claudius 42.2. Claudius wrote a history of the Etruscans in twenty books; this has led some people to assume he spoke Etruscan but there is no corroborating text.
28.Chapter titled The Reborn Wrath of Peleus’ Son for more on Alexander’s alleged cosmopolitan views.
29.Full discussion of Annius’ methods is given by Ligota (1987) chapter 3 footnote 11 – for reference to Cyme. Annius’ Antiquitatum Variarum was first published under the title Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium, Eucharius Silber, Rome, 1498; discussed in Temple (2002). Also a series of essays on various aspects of Annius’ career and his influence on Renaissance myth and the first interest in the Etruscans was collected in Annio da Viterbo, Documenti e ricerche, Multigrafica Editrice, Rome, 1981.
