Found in Translation
BY RICK DAVIS
In some sort of ideal world, language would not be a barrier to cultural understanding. Literature, scholarship, sacred texts, jokes, journalism, nuance and even subtext would flow across actual and virtual borders. Difference would be celebrated without being flattened out. Access to rhythms of words (and life), patterns of thought, hopes, dreams, and fears would be as transparent as it is among sophisticated users of a common language. Art would know no bounds.
While the race in the arena of commerce is still on, Latin, Esperanto, English, Arabic and Chinese have failed so far to become universal languages of arts and science, so the task of authentic cultural expression falls where it probably belongs: in our world’s dazzling variety of native speeches. How then can we ever hope for a truly global artistic culture, with its implicit promise of bridges built, understandings arrived at, peaceable even celebratory coexistence advanced?
Widespread foreign language learning is one possible answer. A quick mental mapping exercise, however, reveals that broadly global access to word-based culture can never be achieved that way, notwithstanding the many other benefits of learning multiple languages. If each person on earth could speak two or three languages—and of course many do, outside of the Anglophone USA—there remains still a vast terrain of incomprehension to be conquered. No, there is only one way to tackle the problem of global verbal artistic culture: translation, of large bodies of work in every genre from every relevant source language to every target language where there is a willing audience.
But what a set of problems that introduces. First there is the widespread and historic suspicion of the translator’s art and craft. “Traduttore, traditore” said the Italians long ago, apocryphally decrying French versions of the Divine Comedy. A translator is a traitor, perhaps inevitably, if the original work is Dante or Shakespeare or the Song of Solomon. And there is a kind of delicious, inescapable etymological connection between the two words: a translator, from Latin “translatus,” carries or bears something across from one side or place to another; a traitor, from “tra- or transdare,” gives or hands something over. The differences are all in usage, context, intention, and execution. The matter (the crime?) is serious enough that some would deny the very possibility of faithful translation of complex or nuanced literary work.
What do we mean when we speak of a faithful, or even accurate, translation? Some make a distinction between the “spirit” and the “letter” of the original text, just as they do in distinguishing levels of compliance with a law. A given translation might capture something essential about the source text—and the cultural conditions from whence it springs—and yet omit, change, or embroider exact correspondences of denotative meaning. Conversely, a flatly accurate translation may miss the verbal energy and metaphorical reach of the original.
So what is a good, accurate, or faithful translation? Should a verse translation keep to the meter and rhyme scheme of the original at the expense, if necessary, of clarity? Should a translation explain an ambiguous or densely invested phrase in order to gain clarity at the expense of nuance and original intent? Should the translation’s verbal style, including evocation of period, attempt to replicate the source, with its attendant dangers of stodginess? Should it live in the translational present, and run the risk of slang and anachronism? Or build a kind of language bridge between the past and present, just as any translation bridges linguistic and cultural signs?
Different eras have favored different solutions. Here is a snippet from the opening cadences of Alexander Pope’s Iliad, begun in 1715, rendered in the exacting heroic couplets of the Age of Reason:[1]
Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove![i]
Pope’s Iliad, serialized over five years, became an instant classic of English poetry, and the rhyming iambics trip easily off the Anglophone tongue; but how close is it to the feeling of Homer’s pounding dactylic hexameters, his pleading to the muse of poetry to help him tell his tale? Here is a late-20th century version by Robert Fagles, generally considered faithful:
Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.[ii]
These stanzas tell the same story with the same cast of characters, but their essence is strikingly different. Where Pope is elegant and organized, Fagles is raw and tumultuous, using verse lines of varying lengths, with the permissiveness of modern prosody. In both cases, the reader gets the basic idea but comes away with divergent feelings about the scene the two translator-poets are setting.
A reader may call upon some reserve knowledge of the original context to translate the translation, reading past Pope’s balanced eloquence to the dark and dangerous world the lines describe but do not evoke; and, conversely, past the edgier, more speech-like utterances of Fagles to the rolling beat of the Homeric dactylics. Anyone who really wants to have The Iliad in full had better really learn Ancient Greek, or, more practically, read a few translations and let their nuances, and mistakes, accumulate and average out. Only thus will the cultural bridge between times and places and peoples bear the traffic of understanding.
Another example of comparative translation may illustrate a second significant aspect of the question: the role of technical fidelity. The siglo de oro, or Spanish Golden Age, saw an explosion of artistic achievement. Roughly dating from 1580 to 1700, this is the period of Cervantes and his innovative novel Don Quijote de la Mancha; in drama, of Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca; and in painting, of El Greco and Velazquez.
The literary glories of this era were more honored by reputation than reading in the English speaking world until a burst of translational energy in the 1850s from poets such as Edward FitzGerald—he of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam— and Denis Florence Mac Carthy. Suddenly Golden Age drama was given an English voice; but that voice was, as all translations are, bound by time and talent, by context and approach.
A feature of Golden Age drama is a remarkable variety of verse forms and rhyme schemes used, each deployed in service of a particular kind of scene to create a specific effect. English has no so such tradition, but the intrepid Mac Carthy valiantly matches line lengths and rhyme schemes throughout his translations of Calderón. Here is an example from The Constant Prince (1629), in which a Moorish general, Muley, offers his Portuguese captive and friend Fernando a chance at freedom:
MULEY
I know not how first to speak of,
How to think of, such a crime!—
How to tell the pain I’ve suffered
From this fickle frown of Time!
For this ruin, this injustice!
This dark boon that Fortune grants,
This, the world’s most sad example,—
This inconstancy of chance!
But I run some risk if people
See me speaking here to thee,
For, without respect to treat you
Is the King’s proclaimed decree;[iii]
Mac Carthy grants the English reader access to some of Calderón’s arsenal of poetic technique, his verbal fireworks. Yet engineered rhyming in English can seem constraining, sometimes even comical as the line is maneuvered to place a rhyme at a suitable line ending. In Calderón’s Spanish, the effect is effortless and fluid, the sense of one line frequently carrying over to the next with the rhyme quietly dropping in as a kind of musical punctuation mark. Muley begins the speech by answering a question from his friend Fernando: “what do you wish, noble Muley?”
MULEY
Que sepas que hay en el pecho
de un moro lealtad y fe.
No sé por dónde empezar
a declararme, ni sé
si diga cuánto he sentido
este inconstante desdén
del tiempo, este estrago injusto
de la suerte, este crüel
ejemplo del mundo, y este
de la fortuna vaivén,
mas a riesgo estoy si aquí
hablar contigo me ven,
que tratarte sin respeto
es ya decreto del rey.[iv]
In an act of hubris, and having waited strategically until the end of this piece, I will now reveal my own faults as a translator of this passage. The attempt here is to capture first the dramatic action and meaning, next the emotional tone, and third the rhythm of the original, leaving rhyme out of the tool kit in respect of its differing traditions and uses between the two languages:
MULEY
I want you to know that in my heart—
In the heart of a Moor—there’s loyalty and faith.
I don’t know how to begin my story.
I’m not sure I can describe how I’ve felt
The wild swings of fortune in the world,
The unjust devastation, the inconstant disdain,
The cruel example of the times.
And there’s grave risk to me
If I’m seen talking to you here;
Because the King’s decree is that no one
Is to treat you with respect.[v]
This version is not quite literal but I would claim that it is, at the partial expense of obvious lyricism, faithful in that it allows a reader—and, crucially, an actor—to understand the essence of the moment in language that lands on the ear with something of the same emotional temperature as the source, revealing thereby both the thought process and the feelings of the character of Muley—for here, for now, until something better comes along.
Returning to our master theme: translation, as fraught with peril (even treason!) as it is, offers the only real mechanism for the accomplishment of an undeniable good: the opening of a window—or more evocatively, the flickering illumination of a long passageway—into the heart, mind, and soul of another culture. As these few examples have shown, no single translation is perfect or even sufficient; yet each one adds something to the store of understanding among the peoples of the earth. We who work in the higher education business should do what we can to encourage the study and practice of translation in order that more of those dark passages may be lit.
Rick Davis (rdavi4@gmu.edu) Professor of Theatre at George Mason University (http://www.gmu.edu/cfa/), and also holds the positions of Associate Provost of Undergraduate Education, Associate Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts , Artistic Director of the Center for the Arts Artistic and Director of the Theater of the First Amendment.
ENDNOTES
[1] Astute readers will note the presence of a six-beat final line, a rare nod to the hexameters of the original.
[i] Homer, The Iliad, tr. Alexander Pope. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/6130-h.html
[ii] Homer, The Iliad, tr. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1990.
[iii] Calderón de la Barca, The Constant Prince, tr. Denis Florence Mac Carthy. In Barrett H. Clark, ed., World Drama, Vol. Two. New York: Dover Publications, 1933.
[iv] Calderón de la Barca. El príncipe constante. Ed. Vern G. Williamsen and J. T. Abraham, Association for Hispanioc Classical Theatre.
http://www.trinity.edu/org/comedia/calderon/princo2.html
[v] Calderón de la Barca, The Constant Prince, tr. Rick Davis. In Four Great Plays of the Golden Age, Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2008.
August 1st, 2009 at 3:01 pm
As a neophyte both to the art of translation and to “The Constant Prince” I will nonetheless opine that your interpretation of Muley’s lines gives a far greater sense of the tensions and realities of his situation than does Mac Carthy’s.
Excellent article and thank you for sharing with OLLI members last week your insights into the complex choices facing the translator.