Having addressed the problems of the literal approach in the previous section, I end with the question: What is the role of creativity in translation? At first blush, creativity in translation might seem as undesirable as creativity in basic arithmetic; and yet, there are different ways to frame the creativity of translation beyond the simple scenario of poetic ‘‘liberties’’ taken at the expense of the ravished source text. A first way of framing creativity is with regard to the nature of the translation as a poetic text given in place of another (a ‘‘metapoem’’); the second way of framing it is with reference to the influence of the activity of translation on the whole target literary milieu (the ‘‘leavening’’ effect).
To take the first approach, we can begin with the view put forward by Walter Benjamin, which asserts that the life of the original poem attains in its translations to ‘‘its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering’’ (1969: 72). Rather than seeing the translation as a parasite living off a host text, the Benjaminian scenario would have us see the translation as the ‘‘afterlife’’ of the text, a kind of creative descendant. Here we might benefit from a shift in paradigm, away from the original/copy model toward an essentially dramatic model of script/performance. There are in fact translators of epic who prefer to ‘‘get inside’’ the scenarios and characters of the source and then translate according to their feel for the dramatic situation, instead of according to the word or verse as it stands on the page (see the example ofEickhoffin section 4). Given the performance background for some forms of epic, this would be even more appropriate than a bookish literalism. The original in this model establishes a script that can be variously ‘‘performed’’ or actualized by later translators. Seeing the source/target relation as one of script/performance is one way of framing translation as a creative response without condemning it to the role of being a jejune or inferior copy. Like the performer who interprets a script, the translator must know the target audience and gauge its expectations against his own ambitions visa-vis the material. Hence it is useful to recall James Holmes’s characterization of poetic translation as interpretation not by analysis but by enactment (1988: 11). This dictum nicely links the derivative nature of the content (‘‘interpretation’’ based on a script by another author) with the performative element inherent in encoding the target text.
Besides the script/performance model, there is also the model of ‘‘poem for poem’’; that is, that the translator produces not a copy but a ‘‘metapoem’’ with its own poetic integrity. To be ‘‘equivalent’’ to its source in fully literary terms, a translation must be a whole poem, and therefore, it must be coherent and creative in some sense, and must generate genuine poetic effects. This means that the translation of an original poem must have something new that gives the metapoem its ontological independence (the functional equivalent of the source’s ‘‘originality’’), and this newness can only be articulated with respect to target-culture norms. Indeed, according to this logic, if the source text is itself effecting some rupture or transformation of the genre, should not the target text as well signal this in some way? Lucretius, for example, worked hard to fashion an Epicurean jargon in Latin that would function in hexameter epic, and a poetic translation should reflect the risky nature of his linguistic innovation. So Rolfe Humphries rose to the task, when translating Lucretius’ attempt to find a language for the material basis of reality:
Quae nos materiem etgenitalia corpora rebus reddunda in ratione vocare et semina rerum appellare suemus et haec eadem usurpare corpora prima, quod ex illis sunt omnia primis.
(Lucr. DRN 1.58-61)
Humphries framed this in terms that highlighted the provisional and transgressive nature of Lucretius’ new poetic language:
... These things we call Matter, the life-motes, or the seeds of things,
(If we must find, in schools, a name for them),
Firstlings, we well might say, since every thing Follows from these beginnings.
(1969: 21)
The novelty and provisionality of the vocabulary, however, is not mirrored in the regularity of Humphries’s vigorous iambic pentameter, which helps the translator’s metapoem to mirror the Lucretian synthesis of new content (Epicurean philosophy) delivered in a standard form (dactylic hexameter).
When one attempts to translate a poet like Ovid, whose formal mastery is so exuberant as to be exasperating, one might also consider to what extent the translation can productively transgress the source. The language of the Metamorphoses constantly bristles with brilliant and gratuitous effects of rhythm, word order, and narrative surprise, effects which cannot literally come over into English with the same force. And yet, a translator with the proper Ovidian panache might show his kinship to the ancient poet in the very nature of his playful divergences fTom the letter of the text. See for example the skillful wordplay, assonance and sudden rhymes tossed out by Allen Mandelbaum, whose metapoem might with justice be termed a truly Ovidian translation:
The earth, more dense, attracted elements more gross; its own mass made it sink below.
And flowing water filled the final space; it held the solid world in its embrace.
When he - whichever god it was - arrayed that swarm, aligned, designed, allotted, made each part into a portion of a whole, then he, that earth might be symmetrical, first shaped its sides into a giant ball.
He then commanded seas to stretch beneath high winds, to swell, to coil, to reach and ring shorelines and inlets. And he added springs and lakes and endless marshes and confined descending streams in banks that slope and twine: these rivers flow across their own terrains; their waters sink into the ground or gain the sea and are received by that wide plain of freer waters - there, they beat no more against their banks, but pound the shoals and shores.
(1993: 4)
These nineteen lines render fourteen from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.29-42). Someone unaccustomed to the fireworks of Ovid’s verse might well accuse Mandelbaum of encoding excessive poetic effects, like the end-rhymes that appear and disappear, the rich English alliterations, assonances, and internal rhymes, or the heaping up of words in overwhelming ensembles (‘‘to swell, to coil, to reach and ring’’). While Mandelbaum’s techniques are very English - as is the feel of his skillful iambic verse - the overall effect reproduces quite well the creative verve behind Ovid’s account of the very act of creation itself. We arrive then at the conclusion that an Ovidian translation ought never to be a literal translation of
Ovid; for how can one perform with justice a highly original work in a derivative fashion? This leads us toward the concept of an ‘‘abusive fidelity’’ that prevents the dynamic source text from becoming an all-too-tame and domesticated target text by deploying strategies of creative divergence (see Lewis 2000).
One might object, however, that this kind of metapoetic model only works for source texts that are themselves striving to be ‘‘original’’ in the modern creative sense of the term. It works well for Ovid, who used conventional means to unconventional ends. But does such a notion apply at all to the Homeric texts? Was ‘‘originality’’ even a desirable concept among the singers of tales in archaic Greek antiquity? Would an avant-garde Homer be a complete mistake in conceptualization? Would a ‘‘King James’’ or ‘‘ballad’’ Homer be more appropriate as to register and performance context? Whenever we examine further the issue of “equivalent effects,’’ we will inevitably run up against the basic problem that the source and target literary horizons are incommensurable. Indeed, the very fact that an epic work is still being translated after so many centuries shows that this cannot be modeled on any ordinary target-culture situation of success, like the latest best-selling novel. In cases like Homer and Virgil especially, we must realize that a foundational text is in play, such that translating it may reflect upon the whole previous configuration of literature.
Here the second way of framing creativity in translation can come into our discussion: the ‘‘leavening’’ effect that translation has on the whole target culture ‘‘poly-system’’ of literary texts and values (on polysystem theory, see Baker 1998: 176-9). Translation reclaims and repositions epic within the new game of the target culture, not only by (re-) situating the ancient text within the pantheon of contemporary genres and styles, but also by inscribing the target culture onto the epic. In this way, both the source and target textual systems are locked in a creative pas de deux. When an author undertakes to make a ‘‘modern’’ Homer - a Homer couched in the idiom and style of the modern novel, say, in direct contradiction to the previous strategy of archaizing verse - she not only makes Homer accessible to the target audience, who may be put off by older translations that cannot ‘‘speak to them’’ in a voice of their generation; she also in effect creates a foundation for the modern poetics she deploys, by recasting the alpha of western literature in an omega form, i. e., the latest literary dress. This is one way to understand Ezra Pound’s dictum that ‘‘A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translation, or follows it’’ (1954: 232).
Indeed, though such moments are historically unique, we can definitely say that the translation of epic has been a foundational act for certain target cultures, as in the case of Livius Andronicus’ early Latin translation of Homer’s Odyssey into Saturnian verse (third century bce), or Alexandros Pallis’s translation of the Iliad into demotic Greek (1904) in an age when the very choice of demotic was highly controversial. Thus part of the ‘‘originality’’ in translating epic is not just a matter of linguistic creativity, but also a matter of providing origins and strategies of legitimation for the current literary culture. We might look at the case of Livius Andronicus as the ‘‘primal scene’’ of western epic translation (see Chapter 31, by Goldberg, and Goldberg 1993). What is significant in terms of Roman culture is not simply that he kick-started Roman literature by introducing the story of Odysseus in Roman dress, i. e., in the Saturnian meter that was of general use at the time. It is equally significant that he introduced the poetics of Homeric epic, which the Romans would cannibalize and digest more fully than any other culture, eventually making the dactylic hexameter meter their epic form and founding a chain of epics longer and more varied in style and content than the Greeks’ own tradition: Naevius, Ennius, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus and onward to Petrarch’s Africa and the Christiad (1535) of Marco Girolamo Vida. Only the Germans, through the influential Homeric translations of Johann Heinrich Voss ( Odyssey, 1781;
Iliad, 1793), have come anywhere near the Romans in the total appropriation of a foreign epic form.
It is also very telling that after Ennius effectively established dactylic hexameter as the definitive meter of Latin epic, Livius’ Saturnian Odussia was rewritten into dactylic hexameters - perhaps the first clear instance we have of how shifting target-culture norms alter the horizon of translation (see Livius refictus, Courtney 1993: 45-6). Cicero’s hexameter translations of Homer in the first century bce further show this standardization under the influence of Ennius’ successful propagation of the Greek metrical form (Blansdorf 1995: 161-6). We might take the passage from the Saturnian Odussia to the Livius refictus as a paradigm instance of the symbiosis of epic translation and epic emulation: as a target-culture notion of epic emerges and finds its own voice, this emergent form in turn shapes the translation of the very texts that spawned the native epic to begin with. Virgil’s Aeneid in many ways definitively fixed the epic voice of Latin literature for many centuries (see Chapter 42, by Kallendorf), so much so that by the time the Renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano came to translate Homer into Latin verse, the Virgilian voice resounded so loudly that Poliziano’s translations read at times more like a Virgilian cento or patchwork than a rendering of Homer (Poliziano 1976: 431-523). There is perhaps no greater way to gauge Homer’s creative influence than to see how the Homeric text itself becomes translated into the language of one of its greatest imitators.
Such symbiotic relationships recur throughout the history of epic translation, and give the appearance of a carnivalization of literary tradition; for one can genuinely speak of ‘‘Milton’s influence on Homer’’ in the translations of William Cowper (1731-1800) - highly criticized by Matthew Arnold - which twist Homeric poetry into the sinewy, Latinate blank verse of Paradise Lost. One can also speak quite seriously about ‘‘Dante’s influence on Virgil,’’ not only because the Divine Comedy stimulated a renewed interest in Virgil in the late Middle Ages (in fact, it was through reading Dante that Juan II of Navarre came to commission Enrique de Villena’s translation of the Aeneid, done at the same time as he translated the Divine Comedy), but also because some of the first Italian verse translations of the Aeneid are in terza rima, Dante’s trinitarian epic form (see Cambiatore 1532). One could equally speak of Ariosto’s influence on Virgil in the case of Lodovico Dolce (1508-68), who rendered the great Roman epic into ottava rima, the stanzaic form of Orlando Furioso (1568, see the study by Borsetto 1989). It would be a grave error to dismiss this kind of formal anachronism as naive projection or unreflective ‘‘domestication,’’ for this process crystallizes the imitative/emulative dynamic of epic tradition by refounding the target-language epic through finding it in the Urtext. This shows along a broader arc how the original text originates in a transitive sense, i. e., how it releases creative energies in the target culture that come home to roost in translation. Even in the case of Voss, who more than any modern European appeared to forge a seamless hexameter Homer, we find that his first translation came only after the hexameter masterpiece The Messiah by Friedrich Klopstock (1724-1803) had grounded German epic in a viable form. Once again, creative emulation preceded and influenced translation, such that we cannot sunder the target-culture dynamics of the epic genre from the horizon on the epic source text.
Perhaps every translator would like to believe he is the first to find the ‘‘true voice’’ of the original in his native tongue, or that he is the faithful vessel through which the ancient poet speaks as did the muses of antiquity. But it would be truer at this stage to assert that what the epic translator provides is an archival performance, one which not only mediates the archive of the ancient source text, but also reflects both upon the history of that text in his own culture and the history of the culture itself. As Rodney Merrill observes, to use an English phrase like ‘‘wine-dark sea’’ for oinopa ponton is to invoke a traditional English translation of a Homeric epithet, revealing the kinship between the bard’s traditional wordhoardand the translator’s native resources (2002: 71). But, although he or she writes from a given cultural perspective, the translator remains an individual making very particular and often very difficult choices in finding a new voice for old song. This personal trajectory is movingly iUustrated in the poet Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf (2000), through which he came to recover not only the Anglo-Saxon text, but the particular voice of the ‘‘big-voiced Scullions’’ that were his father’s rural Irish relatives. By claiming Beowulf as part of his ‘‘voice-right,’’ Heaney inserts it in the canon of his own poetic tradition; and by translating Beowulf in the voices of his Irish upbringing, he inscribes it within the arc of his experience. This is the truest dynamic of literary tradition, which must betray the text in order to bestow life upon it (Latin traditio encompasses, after all, both ‘‘handing down’’ and ‘‘betrayal’’); and this explains why translation will remain the perennial means of keeping ancient epic a vital part of modern culture.
World History
