Teaching and the Scene of Translating

Essay by Kristina Chew

Asked “what do you do?” I say, “teaching and translating.” I teach ancient Greek and Latin languages and poetry, ancient history and mythology, and the Greek and Latin etymological roots of modern medical and scientific terminology. I translate archaic Greek poetry — fragments by Semonides, Archilochus, Solon, and others — and Latin poetry by Vergil (but not the Aeneid) and Catullus (everything that survives). And I teach students who are, for the first time, translating an ancient author’s writing, an activity I find myself referring to alternatingly as “reading” and “translating.” Reading, because of the aspiration that my students might some day find themselves approaching an ancient Greek or Latin text as just that, as a work of literature rather than a word-forest to hack their way through. Translating, because to take the words and idiom of a source text and change them into the words and idiom of another language takes the kind of energy and effort that can make it seem to be more of a task, Aufgabe, as in the title of Walter Benjamin’s essay, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, “The Task of the Translator.”

Not that such a careful delineation is the chief concern in a first-year language class. Do you want a literal translation or what the Greek/Latin says? is the kind of question I often field from students; or, how literal a translation do you want?

Students’ quizzes reveal what they understand a “literal translation'' to be. One student has written word definitions in the exact same order as a line of Catullus without regard for the rules of English, or Latin:

Because to be so many praying continuously for that, but perish unless love

is one student’s version of Catullus c.92.3-4: quia sunt totidem mea. dēprecor illam / assiduē. vērum dispeream nisi amō. On another quiz for an ancient Greek poetry class, the English definitions of most of the words of Sappho fr. 1.6-8 (τὰς ἔμας αὔδας ἀίοισα πήλοι / ἔκλυες, πάτρος δὲ δόμον λίποισα / χρύσιον ἦλθες) have been assembled into a sentence that retains the article “the” as its first word:¹

the ear I listen with far, out father but house leaves, a gold wishes. 

Shuttling students through lines of Greek and Latin composed centuries ago is a job — no, a profession — no, a vocation — that I know how lucky I am to still call my own after thirty-odd years. In that time, I have again and again been reminded that, being faced with a quiz whose directions are to “translate” without notes or a dictionary or Google is anxiety-inducing at the least for students. Often, it portends panic. A literal translation, or what a student understands that to be, is just fine, I assure my students.

But there are moments when, without any coaxing, a student goes beyond the basics of a literal translation.

“Nuggets!” one student once proclaimed as our Latin class was working on the fourth line of Catullus c. 1 (meās esse aliquid putāre nūgās) and struggling for an English word that would convey the nuance of its final word. That word may not be the most “accurate” way to translate nūgās but for the legions of college students who have eaten their share of (Mc)Nuggets, it works—and “nuggets” sure sounds like… nūgās.

The Latin word nūgae does not mean “nugget,” but, thanks to my student, I cannot think of a better way to translate that word in Catullus c. 1. That is why I think of what happens in my classroom as a scene of translation. The shared effort of going through the Latin or Greek together turns a class into a place and an occasion where just the right way to say another language’s words in English can happen. Translating is so often a solitary activity between a poem and me at my desk but, when teaching students around a table, it becomes a communal enterprise. Endless self-musing about when being a little less than faithful to the original is allowed to evaporate in class as students’ expressions signal how the meaning of an ancient text is emerging for them.

That languages have their own ways of saying the same thing, and that rare are the times when an exact one-to-one correspondence between languages exists, is a truism that students too intone. In this issue of Ancient Exchanges, Jia Self makes this clear in her distinction between a translation that strives to stick as closely as possible to the source text and one that, in the name of expressing the sense, does not. Borrowing John Dryden’s terminology of “metaphrase” and “paraphrase” in translating Ariadne’s speech from Catullus 64 (his long hexameter poem), Self offers a demonstration of both of these modes to point to the “intersection between translation studies and creative writing.” Self’s metaphrase of lines 64.120-3,

To all of these, she preferred sweet love of Theseus. 
Or how after a ship carried her, to the foaming shores of Dia 
he came, or how, her husband, departing with a forgetful heart, left 
her while her eyes were still sealed with sleep?

becomes as paraphrase:

deferred to the fleeting
love of Theseus, which burns
hot and quick.

And the after?

Ship at foaming shores, the woman
forsaken, her eyes laden with sleep
while husband slinks away, his
word disregarded.

Self’s choice of “pseudo-Sapphic stanzas” in the paraphrase could be seen as a swerve away from the poem’s original form, as a “mini-epic” or epyllion. But the use of a more lyric meter accords with a certain static quality in the poem’s temporality — Ariadne’s speech occurs in the ekphrasis of a coverlet on the marriage bed of Peleus and Thetis — and is a nod to Catullus’ own use of Sapphics elsewhere in his work (in cc. 11 and, especially, 51, his translation of Sappho fr. 31).

Matthew Stokdyk’s Troades (abridged), as a distillation of Euripides’ tragedy about Troy’s destruction at the hands of the victorious Greeks, might also be seen as a metaphrase in its adherence to the original Greek, but one that works paraphrastically with the original text, as Stokdyk selects one hundred out of the play’s 1332 lines for his abridgement. Presented without reference to characters’ names, Troades (abridged) melds the voices of the Trojan women who find themselves widowed, stateless, and facing enslavement into an anguished text of “miserable urgency”:

woe—woe—bitter weeping—
the earth, o child, will receive you—
wail, mother—woe—
sing for the dead—woe—

Just as Euripides left it up to his audience to connect the mythological events of the Trojan War to their own lived experiences of tragedy, Stokdyk’s translation does not overtly connect Troades to events today. But the glaring parallel between an ancient catastrophe during the Peloponnesian War and one today are made explicit in his translator’s note: “Look, reader, on Troy; on Melos; on Gaza.”

Dan Byam Shaw’s translation of the very title of Aeschylus’ play ῾Ικέτιδες (Hiketides) suggests how not being overly tethered to dictionary definitions opens a new vista onto an ancient text. Shaw uses not the literal “suppliants” to translate ῾Ικέτιδες, but “Asylum Seekers,” a phrasing that makes it impossible not to think of this 5th-century BCE tragedy in our 21st-century context when, as Shaw reminds us, “the number of people displaced across the globe has topped 100 million.” Shaw’s translation of ῎Επαφος (the name of Io’s son by Zeus) as “Touch” might at first ring awkwardly — yet it does so aptly, as his monosyllabic name becomes a clanging reminder of the violence inflicted upon her:

night months later came
the fruit of Zeus’s touch [ἔφαψιν, ephapsin] —
and so she named him ‘Touch’ [Ἔπαφόν, Epaphon]

Recognizing how crucial the structure of the choral songs is to their import, Shaw places the Greek text’s corresponding stanzas into columns set side by side. Besides working “to bring out some of the wonderful echoes that exist in the Greek original and to suggest ways in which they might come to life on stage,” this layout encourages both vertical and horizontal readings, as in these lines from the “Hymn to Zeus”:

Other translators adopt additional strategies to evoke sense and sound. Keeping the “sonic richness” of poems by the medieval Hebrew poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol at the fore leads Dan Alter to “privilege the music over form and precision of content,” in the service of keeping the former “as immediate as possible” in 21st-century language. This stands out in his choice of color words and the couplet form employed to recreate Ibn Gabirol’s word music in English:

Wrote a letter on the grove in lilac & indigo,
     like no mind could dream up or derive

                    ...

As it goes down you'd think the sun
     is bowing earthward to its maker

& hurrying off it seems as if
     God has dressed it in lavender.

Evoking the distinct sonic registers of the cí (詞) poetic form is a complex feat heightened by the scale of dissimilarities between tonal Middle Chinese and 21st-century English. Marie Orise’s free verse renderings of four cí by Li Yu, last ruler of the Southern Tang, maintain a rhythm that works in English by omitting punctuation (so the placement of individuals words bears more weight in rhythm-creation), not adhering to the original form’s rhyme scheme (to avoid a “mock-Victorian style”), and maintaining what Orise calls “poetic stylisation” through alliteration and repetition: 

Try cutting it off
it will not sever
Try sorting it out
it tangles more
Parting sorrow
a peculiar sensation

剪不斷 理還亂
是離愁
別有一番滋味在心頭

In contrast, Diane Arnson Svarlien translates French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Latin Ver Erat in the same meter (dactylic hexameter) in which it was originally composed, citing as her reason: “for this piece, form was all-important.” Rimbaud’s Latin poem is a poetic epiphany in which a student, freed from “the boredom, the work, the corrections” of the classroom, is carried away by doves who turn out to be the Muses:

Time to play. I set out for the laughing woodlands and pastures,
all assignments forgotten. The effortless joys of the country
proved a wondrous balm for my cares and my mental exhaustion.
Hard to describe, this sweetness. It stole in and took my heart captive. 

Arripui tempus: ridentia rura petiui
Immemor: a studio moti curisque soluti
Blanda fatigatam recrearunt gaudia mentem.
Nescio qua laeta captum dulcedine pectus

These fifty lines of Latin dactylic hexameter that end in being hailed as a vates (a term, Arnson Svarlien tells us, that carries the meaning of both “poet” and “seer”) after escaping from the regimen of school were, ironically, composed as a classroom assignment to “expand in Latin verse upon a few lines from Horace, Odes, III. 4 (9-13, 18-20)” in three and a half hours.

In contrast to Arnson Svarlien’s care in keeping Rimbaud’s dactylic hexameters, Alice Ahearn has “chosen to lose the metre” in her translation of one of Ovid’s Heroides, “Oenone to Paris” (Oenone Paridi) because, as she writes, “due to English literature’s own constellation of associations, it is all too easy for a metrically regular English verse translation of these poems to sound mannered, sincere and romantic. The Heroides, and especially Oenone’s letter, are none of these things.” Instead, Ahearn employs blank verse and intentionally contemporary language to craft an Oenone who explains to Paris that he has got some explaining to do, having left her for pastures more divine. Rather than prettifying the nymph’s speech into that of some damsel in distress (as has more routinely been the case with Heroides translations), Ahearn’s translation maintains the roughness of Oenone’s speech (123-4):

Cassandra, you were a prophet too true for me.
Look. That cow [illa iuvenca] has my turf [saltūs meōs].

Nik Gunn’s translation of a section of the medieval Icelandic Sólarljóð, a work that “fuses” the two genres of wisdom literature and visionary Christian poetry, is also in free verse — though you may on first reading think otherwise, thanks to the measured clang and cadence of each line:

It was on that one night,
when I lay aching on the straw,
that taught me how God speaks,
how man and mulch are much the same. 

This translation, in which the first-person speaker has an “overwhelming vision” of the sun, reminds us that the sense of a poem’s words is just one dimension of a poem. Meaning arises from the sound of the words as captured in the final line, each of the eight one-syllable words punching out a rhythm.

“How startling and powerful poetic language can be,” Kate Needham writes about Dē Rērum Nātūrā, in which the Roman poet Lucretius delivers Epicurean philosophy and atomic theory in the trappings of dactylic hexameters. “Honey on the Cup,” her translation of lines 921-950 of Book 1, hones in on a passage when Lucretius himself acknowledges the particular uses of poetry to teach. In this passage, Lucretius compares his poetry to honey smeared on a cup’s brim to mask the “disgusting draughts” of atomism and atheism as something more readily palatable — albeit with a little sinister kick, as the child-reader-as-child is “duped, but not misled” (dēcepta nōn capiātur 1.941). “Honey on the Cup” demonstrates how instruction can be pleasant, pleasurable, and good for you too.

Just as a didactic poet like Lucretius knows he can present his precepts more effectively by not always sounding so serious, so can a teacher swerve when she finds herself being too didactic and doctrinaire, the better to show students the limits of the literal translation. Horace’s saying that poets wish to “instruct and delight” (prōdesse aut dēlectāre, Epistula ad Pisones [Ars Poetica] 333) applies as well to teachers and translators presenting a paraphrase in lieu of something more literal, choosing “nuggets” over “trifles” to translate nūgās and “asylum seekers” instead of “suppliants” for ῾Ικέτιδες. In teaching students how to translate ancient Greek and Latin poetry, the one lesson I refuse to give up on involves showing how the desire for an exact equivalence between the words of one language and another is a dream, and as fleeting. The world we live in now — in which the hyperlinked Greek and Latin texts on Perseus and other websites create the sense that what a word means is one click away, and in which the kit and caboodle of software, apps, and bots foster the mirage that translating is a task accomplished through Artificial Intelligence rather than ars (drop in your data, crunch it, copy and paste) — makes this lesson harder and harder to communicate to students, and more and more necessary of a task to take on.

To learn to ride the pull and casting back of the flow from the original text to your translation, to let yourself into the current so you are not fighting with it but using its force to propel you, gets learned in the doing, in the sortie after sortie back into the waves.

Teaching and translating; it is what I do.

Notes

¹   While my examples resemble work by previous students, they are not the actual answers of anyone.