Lost in translation

Emily Wilson opens Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature with a quote from Louis MacNeice’s 1938 poem Autumn Journal, written in the looming shadow of the Second World War. Wilson highlights MacNeice’s meditations on the value of looking back to antiquity in such dark times — or, perhaps, at the futility of such an endeavour.

And how one can imagine oneself among them

I do not know.

It was all so unimaginably different and all so long ago.

MacNeice’s poem contrasts the difference between viscerally imagining the ancient world, and teaching it within the constraints of the 1930s educational system, as well as contemplating the prejudices and idealisations through which we may view the past. Despite the unimaginable gap in time, Wilson believes there are elements of the ancient world that she can clearly imagine. How a translator can bring alive this tension between the strangeness of the complex human beings and alien cultural practices from millennia ago and their strange familiarity is the core question that runs through her book. Is it possible to do so without projecting ideas from our time and place, and even the translator’s own personal experience? Can their words be brought back to life in a new language — or must the dead stay dead?

The book is a collection of Wilson’s essays she has unwoven and re-weaved, before stitching together as a coherent whole, so each chapter that explores a different aspect of ancient literature and culture and its journey into the present, adds to our understanding of the translator’s challenges. The chapters include a skewering of the modern “watered-down form” of Stoicism (it is a spiritual path for people who want to hold on to their sense of self and their own power: a fancy, rationalised form of egoism), a reminder of the invective and eroticism of Catullus, the fight over ownership of fragments of Sappho and fascinating essays on the comedies of Aristophanes and Terence, and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. Wilson also traces how Ancient Greek and Roman literature assumed its revered place in Western culture (in the US, Wilson claims this is in large part down to the work of Edith Hamiliton, whose stylistic “highly Americanised, vaguely Christianised” translations remain popular almost one hundred years after first being published and contribute to the belief in the continuity of a Western cultural superiority from Greece to modern-day America). 

The last, longest essay, is the most fascinating. Wilson compares single phrases from the Odyssey across several translations. The different choices of not just words and phrases, but style and structure, each translator makes, shows the rich variety of options translators have. Wilson believes it is important to also translate the musical rhythms of ancient metrical verse. Many modern translations ignore this challenge and translate into English free verse or prose (Wilson’s version uses iambic pentameter). Wilson feels that by failing to do so you do not convey the artfulness of the originals, which is a major component of their strangeness for the modern reader. In both this book and her translations Wilson makes a strong case for this to be so. Through sharing the anguished and long debate Wilson had with herself in how to translate a single Greek word — polytropos — she draws back the veil on how a brilliant scholar approaches her work. After many twists and turns Wilson translates it as “complicated.” Others have used “man of many ways” (Richmond Lattimore), “that man skilled in all ways of contending” (Robert Fitzgerald), “man of many twists and turns” (Robert Fagles), and “resourceful man” (E. V. Rieu). Wilson describes the process that took “many hours, days and weeks” to eliminate countless other options before landing on “complicated” for a combination of syntactical and semantical reasons (from the number of syllables to liking the concept of complexity as a positive quality in the world of the poem). 

Wilson states that the, “juxtaposition of ancient and modern languages, literatures and lives reminds us that it is through our words that we are remembered and understood, long after our deaths, and that even the most minute differences of language or phrasing may make all the difference.” With the increasing use of artificial intelligence applications and models to craft communications, this is a timely point to make. Many are now speaking through translators, when they outline the gist of what they want to say leaving technology to select specific words. Wilson’s explanation of her choice of “complicated” is an insight into the thought processes involved in translating and a reminder of the importance of what we are relinquishing to technology. It is also a justification for her deeply thought out choice. 

Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey was the first by a woman into English. Inevitably, as the first woman, some critics argued that her approach at times distorted the original text by overlaying modern feminist ideas that would have been alien to those in Homer’s time. Her choice of “complicated” was the focus of some of that criticism. Supporters praised her for removing archaic, “imported” misogyny and challenging established interpretations. Wilson recognises that, “Language is never a neutral tool by which we represent the world: every word and phrase carries with it a tangle of cultural assumptions and connotations.” If Wilson is guilty of overlaying modern ideas, have not all previous translators been guilty of similar? 

George Chapman, the first man to complete a full translation of the Odyssey and Iliad into English (published together in 1616 after decades of working on them), claimed that he was visited by the ghost of Homer. This, he believed, gave him unique insight into the poet’s true intentions. More believably, his interpretation of Homer would have been influenced by the philosophical currents of the Elizabethan Golden Age. In the introduction to her translation Wilson notes that Chapman transformed Odysseus into “a true soldier and a gentleman, a proto-Christian and a proto-Stoic, whose greatest virtue is his ability to endure suffering”. In translating the Greek into English, he translated Odysseus’ characteristics into those of a hero of his day. Whole passages of Aristophanes and Catullus were omitted by prudish Victorian translators, due to the moralities of their era.

In the same introduction Wilson announces that, “I try to avoid importing contemporary types of sexism into this ancient poem, instead shining a light on the particular forms of sexism and patriarchy that do exist in the text, which are only partly familiar from our world.” Wilson discusses the scene where Telemachus hangs the slaves (others have translated dmōai less literally as “maids” or “maidservants” which subtly suggests they would have had more agency in an elite household of that time than they would have). Most translations introduce derogatory language that suggests these women are justifiably punished due to their sexual digressions, yet original Greek does not contain such language. Their punishment is as likely motivated by wider dynamics of honour and the loss of face caused by the suitors’ breaches of etiquettes of hospitality (xenia) as for their promiscuity. 

Wilson is not the first to challenge the orthodoxy of established translations or to use comparative analysis across multiple translations of Homer to do so. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1932’s The Homeric Versions conducted a similar exercise. The heart of the essay is a close reading of a single passage of the conversation between Odysseus and Achilles’ ghost, about his son Neoptolemus, across six English translations; “Buckley (literal prose), Butcher & Lang (literal but archaicizing), Cowper (1791, Miltonic blank verse), Pope (1725, heroic couplets with lavish amplification), Chapman (1614, vigorous and idiosyncratic), and Butler (1900, ironic bourgeois prose).” 

Borges treats them as equally legitimate “perspectives on a mutable fact”. He asks and answers, “Which of these many translations is faithful? my reader will want to know. I repeat: none or all of them.” For Borges there is no “definitive text”: the concept corresponds only to “religion or exhaustion.” He argues that every text, including Homer’s, is mutable; what we take to be fixed and sacred is merely the product of familiarity and habit. He goes further and claims that translations are not inherently inferior to originals. A good text seems invariable only because we have read it many times; we mistake repetition for necessity. In his 1936 essay The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights, he declared: “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

In The Homeric Versions, Borges discusses the famous 1861–62 exchange between Francis Newman (who advocated literal translation) and Matthew Arnold (who advocated eliminating distracting details in favour of Homer’s essential qualities: syntactical simplicity, flowing rapidity, and loftiness). Borges argues that both positions are valid. Wilson has also engaged with this debate on several occasions. Whilst acknowledging Arnold’s snobbery towards “poor Newman”, she has described his translation as unreadable, and in conversation about her Iliad translation, stated that she feels, “fairly directly inspired by Matthew Arnold’s discussion of what a Homeric translation should aim for — rapidity, plainness of thought and diction, and nobility.” Today, the debate is also between those who believe a good translator should be invisible, creating work as easily accessible as if it was not originally in a different language, and those who believe a translation should embody the strangeness of the original language and culture, not disguise it. The latter believing the former, “colonises” texts into English creating a false kind of homogeneity. Wilson believes that the creation of a more reader-friendly translation does not necessarily imply a desire to appropriate or “colonise” the foreign original, but wants the shock and surprise of a foreign text to be preserved as much as possible.  

In life sometimes literal translations are essential. In his translation of the Odyssey, Alexander Pope interprets Odysseus’ single black ship as a fleet. In Afghanistan, the interpreters I worked with needed to be more precise in the numbers of foreign fighters or IEDs on the road ahead. Errors in basic vocabulary could lead to the targeting of a wedding party over Taliban jirga. The coalition used service personnel who had often only been through less than a year’s worth of language training for the roles that required access to sensitive conversations, and for many other roles hired urban, Dari-speakers from the north to serve as interpreters in the rural, Pashtun-dominated south. The former would not be able to untangle the cultural assumptions and connotations and communicate past the words to the meaning of what each was trying to say. The latter often possessed marginal English skills and would fail to do the same in the reverse direction. Consequently, conversations between politicians, leaders, soldiers and elders were reduced to a dialogue conducted on the level of children pointing and naming when trying to navigate sensitive and complex cultural issues. 

A tragicomic example was provided during the 2006 siege of Musa Qala in Helmand Province. British forces were using an interpreter who had been raised in Birmingham, UK. The local soldiers working alongside the British suspected that he was adding his own words and interpretations to the dialogue between them. Concern over mistranslations escalated into a physical confrontation, with the local soldiers chasing the interpreter around the compound. A British officer had to draw his pistol to stop the chase. In Afghanistan, at times the gulf between allies and enemies; between Western notions of democracy, liberalism and individualism and those of tribal loyalty and the values of the Pashtunwali honour code, felt as vast as that between the modern West and Homer’s Greece. We did not have interpreters with the depth of knowledge, eloquence and intellectual rigour as Wilson and her fellow translators of Homer. Even if we did, would we have understood the heroic code of the Pashtunwali as well as Odysseus might have?

Borges shows us that the reader is also complicit in the act of constant reinterpretation. In his 1939’s Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Menard sets out to immerse himself so thoroughly in Cervantes’ masterpiece, Don Quixote, that he can spontaneously “re-create” it, word for word, in the original seventeenth-century Spanish. (Initially, he considers achieving this by becoming Cervantes through learning Spanish, returning to the Catholic faith, fighting against the Moors, and forgetting the history of Europe 1602-1918. He ultimately rejects this approach as too easy). At the time of his death, Menard had successfully produced the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote, along with a fragment of chapter twenty-two. The narrator compares a passage from Cervantes’s text with the identical passage from Menard’s text. Despite the words being exactly the same, the narrator argues that Menard’s version is infinitely richer, more subtle, and more complex because it was written by a modern man with the weight of three centuries of history behind him. Menard’s achievement is not that he wrote the same book again but that he wrote another book. 

Anticipating post-structuralism, Borges implies that the meaning of literary works depends on the historical and social contexts in which they are read. The act of reading becomes the primary site of meaning creation. Each generation rewrites the classics by reading them through the lens of their own contemporary experiences as much as each translator does. We did not arrive in Afghanistan as blank slates, but as the products of a civilisation that traced itself back to Ancient Greece on a mission to convert those we found there to the pinnacle of a superior culture and way of being: western liberal democracy. Unable to think outside of our own paradigm, we could not understand that even if we could deliver what we were claiming we were going to (without the resolve and resources to do so) it was what few wanted. Afghanistan was not a military failure; it was a failure of translation.  

These ancient texts can help us to see the air we breathe and the water in which we swim

In the challenge, though, there is also opportunity. Wilson claims that it can be as difficult for us to see the cultural assumptions of our own time as for a bird to see air, or fish water. Yet, these ancient texts can help us to see the air we breathe and the water in which we swim. Reading translations of both past and present foreign works can help us see that some of what is normal to us is alien to others. They can give us a sense that another way of being is possible. The evidence of this can be found in the smallest nuance of one translated word in the changing layers of translations over time. As Wilson states “it is more valuable than ever to remember that the world has not always been as it is now.” We are living through a time of social, geopolitical and technological transition. 

MacNeice’s Autumn Journal is both a panorama of his era — capturing the anxieties of the Munich crisis, the Spanish Civil War and the looming shadow of another global conflict, as well as the disintegration of his personal life — and a situating of his time against the people and thinkers of the past. As MacNeice did in his time of uncertainty, we should meditate on the flux of the present, the fleeting moment between past and future, and try to imagine ourselves amongst those so unimaginably different yet strangely familiar. Their anxieties were not our anxieties, but also not wholly different. We cannot simply mirror their solutions but understanding them may help open us up to the possibilities of our complicated times, and knowing that they endured should give us comfort that we may too. 

Wilson’s book is a timely reminder that that selection of words and phrases is key to the richness of human interaction and explaining what we really mean. We may not ever be able to fully understand the dead, but in trying to do so we may understand ourselves a little better.