Emily Wilson: A Response to Alex, Musings on Style, and a Call to Love the Premodern

Emily Wilson: A Response to Alex, Musings on Style, and a Call to Love the Premodern

Dina Famin

 

I’d like to respond to Alex’s comment in his post: Emily Wilson said “that a literal translation is not the most truthful version of the text. Is this not a paradox, since the most truthful form of the text should be the direct translation?” It is not a paradox. What a “literal translation” is—to translators—is a translation that follows syntax to the letter, often at the expense of literary style and effect.

Take, for example, this translation from Russian (an example stolen from Michael Katz’s introduction to his translation of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground):

Dostoyevsky’s novel begins with these three three-word sentences in which he moves the adjective from the third to the first position:

“I [am a] man sick. I [am a] spiteful man. Unattractive [am] I [a] man.”

No English translator, no matter how diligent, can recreate this structure. But they can recreate the effect of the syntax, the movement of the adjective and thus the foregrounding of the self, in a number of ways, all of which create a multiplicity of readings that amplify individual traits or thought processes. (If you’re wondering about the brackets, it’s because Russian foregoes “to be” in the present tense and has no articles.)

Most translators, in fact, exist beyond the literal/non-literal binary, as she suggested, at least outside of disciplines where literal translation is a teaching tool for language acquisition.

A literary text is more than its syntax. It may be using the syntactic tools of its language to enrich its rhetoric and style, but the syntax of one language doesn’t have the same effect in another language, and may in fact be unreplicable. It is the translator’s job to parse out which formal elements of a text are due to its language’s rules, and which are due to its author’s manipulation of those rules. It is the translator’s job to replicate, however they see fit, that chasm between language and choice: literary style. They can mix standard English syntax with foreign syntax, they can foreground mood and tone, they can choose their metric form to either suit or challenge their host audience. The possibilities are endless.

What Emily Wilson reads in the Odyssey and Iliad is their mass appeal to their original audience, the fact that the Greek is lively and—not simple, but not archaic. It is a literary language, but not an obscure one.

What many translators and audiences have come to expect from classical epic, however, is incomprehensibility. They expect that an old text is hostile (thank you, classics gatekeeping), that it is their failing to understand that impedes engagement, rather than translation style.

I’m not a classicist. I’ve never been too interested in the Iliad. I knew it, I’d read segments, but I never had the drive to read it myself. Hearing Emily Wilson recite and emphasize that the Iliad is a lively work, that it challenges and engages people on a tangible and accessible level, has definitely made me want to read it! She said that the Iliad was not a modern text when it was written, but I think that’s not quite correct. Maybe it wasn’t a modernist text, but it wasn’t archaizing; it wasn’t exclusive. Reading and reengaging with premodern literature can remind us that humans have always been humans, that the world did not spring into being one or two hundred years ago, that it doesn’t take years of specialist research to even begin to engage with a field of study.