Paul Woodruff

Like the art of living, the art of translation is about making wise choices in order to produce an admirable and coherent whole. None of us can do all of the good things possible in life. We can’t help all the people near us who are in need; we can’t write all the books that are in us to write or love all the beautiful people we encounter. The art of living is creative and independent; it follows its own vision of loving and caring. But the art of translation puts creativity in the service of someone else’s vision. Translators express, in the medium of a new language, as much as they can of what they believe the first artist expressed.

A translation from ancient Greek is a lifeboat for a work of art that would otherwise sink into obscurity. Translation carries the work of art from a dead language across to one that is living. Translators cannot bring across all of the virtues and beauties of their originals. In a shipwreck, passengers transfer themselves and their most treasured belongings from a foundering ocean liner into a lifeboat. Their lifeboat will not hold all the lovely things they had in their staterooms. Good passengers know the value of their possessions, and they save what they think is best to save, but even good passengers may have different priorities - one chooses to save his diamonds, another her precious books, a third his fine clothes, and a fourth tucks in a supply of food.

So it is with translation; good translators know the many values in an original, so that they are able to make wise choices about what to put into the lifeboat of translation. But they may have different priorities. After my imaginary shipwreck, the passengers may need to pool what they have saved, so that they will all have what they need. Keep this in mind if you depend on translations, and look at different ones for the same play. The second translation you read may have picked up something wonderful that the first one left behind.

Keep in mind, also, that translators may supply things they did not find in the original text. Here the lifeboat analogy breaks down. Suppose a translator wishes to make sure that readers appreciate the lyricism of a passage, and therefore adds rhyme to the ends of lines. Ancient Greek lyric never uses end rhyme as lyrics in English do. So the translator has added one thing (rhyme) in order to bring another thing

(lyricism) across to the living language. This is a good choice in some cases, but an intrusive one. Readers need to be on the lookout for translators’ insertions. Tragic choruses often use internal rhyme (that is, repeating vowel or consonant sounds in assonance or alliteration), and a translator may reproduce this in English - although perhaps in a different place from the original.

Good choices in translation flow from a deep and thorough understanding of a text. To understand a text thoroughly enough to translate it well, you must know much more than a beginning Greek student would know - more than word meanings and syntax. You must be able to appreciate fine points of style - poetic figures, characterization by level of diction, word music, and so forth. To appreciate such points you must see what each contributes to the effect of the play.

Take any few lines from the chorus of a tragic play. Here is a passage from the parodos (entry-song) of Sophocles’ Antigone (134-40):

He crashed to the ground

Like a weight slung down, in an arc of fire,

This man who had swooped like a dancer in ecstasy,

Breathing hurricanes of hatred.

But his threats came to nothing:

The mighty war-god, fighting beside us,

Swept them aside.

(Woodruff 2001, 6-7)

List in your mind the factors that give these lines value. Looking at the original, I would include emotional intensity, concision or brevity, juxtaposition of images, emphasis created by word order, metrical structure, and internal rhyme. In the larger context I would look also at the character of the speakers, their ethical views or arguments, and the tonal level of their language. By ‘‘tonal level’’ I mean the answer to questions such as these: whether the lines are high-toned like a mock epic, or whether they have the lilt of a love-lyric or the reverence of a hymn. Low on my list of the lines’ beauties would be the grammatical structure in Greek - translating a word in subject position as a subject, or a word in predicate position as a predicate.

Already my list of beauties is too long. No translation can carry all of these to a new life in the host language. If you choose to carry Greek lyric metrical structure into English, for example, you will labor so hard on this task that you will lose most of the other values of the lines. Which of these lines’ many beauties and strengths are most important? To answer this you must understand very well both the play and the technique of the artist who created it. But two translators may understand the play equally well and still choose to rescue different elements. That is why prudent readers should consult several translations, unless they know the original language well enough to make their own choices wisely.

There are other kinds of choices to make. Translators must decide where to put their translations on the spectrum from foreign to familiar. You could make a version of Antigone so familiar that an audience would take it for a contemporary play. Or you could make the play so foreign that you would remind the audience at every line that this comes from an era long dead and far away. Anouilh’s marvelous Antigone translates Sophocles’ play into contemporary French existentialist terms. By contrast, many English versions have been so faithful that they use odd and awkward English, in order to bring across the play’s antiquity.

Then there is the choice of audience. High school students in a literature course need a translation they can read and understand without straining. Actors in a production need lines they can speak. Beginning Greek students need an aid to understanding the Greek text. Literary critics need to be informed about any literary feature of the text that might be important to them. Philosophers need to be able to see how an argument works. More advanced Greek scholars simply need a reminder of a text they know well but do not perfectly remember. All of these choices produce translations that are worthy of respect, although none of them can do full justice to the originals.