In the case of translating the ‘‘orality’’ of a source text, the most illustrious examples we have to hand concern the Homeric poems, which were conceived of as ‘‘oral poems’’ in a rigorous sense (i. e., products of composition-in-performance, or at least somehow derived from such a technique) only in the twentieth century, after the Parry-Lord investigations established the empirical reality of oral composition-in-performance for the scholarly world (for a brief overview, see Foley 1997 and Chapter 4, by Jensen and Chapter 29, by Due). Previous to this change in paradigm, the oral features of Homeric verse were dealt with variously by translators who did not have to take a stand on their inherently compositional/functional nature. As such, the vast majority of translations suppress repetitive oral features as inconcinnities of style without much soul-searching about the mutilation of the Homeric fabric. Exceptions to this explicitly reflect the scholarly shift in horizon, such as the translations of Richmond Lattimore, a classics professor well aware of the new views of the Homeric text (see his introduction to the Iliad: 1961: 39). But to this day, viable translations of Homer are made which ignore large amounts of the formulaic diction and epithets, such as Stanley Lombardo’s very American Iliad (1997) and Odyssey (2000). The assumption behind such translations is that oral features of style are ‘‘embellishments that were meant only to please the ear - stock epithets and recurring phrases where the meaning is of no account’’ (Rouse 1966: 7). At present, the most rigorous approach to rendering the formularity of Homeric verse in English translation is in the above-mentioned project at the Center for Hellenic Studies, which will attempt as far as possible to render identical phrasings identically in the translation - something which even Lattimore shied away from doing mechanically.
However, not even ‘‘orality’’ is a stable, unitary concept, and here again different assumptions can lead to very different target texts. The nineteenth century saw orality in terms of the European traditions of folk balladry, and some translators sought to render Homer in line with living folk song traditions; these traditions, however, represented more oral performance and propagation than oral composition (for this reason the ballad is sometimes referred to as an instance of‘‘aurality’’). The concept of a ‘‘ballad Homer’’ had been first raised seriously in F. A. Wolf’s textual criticism on the original Greek texts, but the idea had a profound impact on the nineteenth-century imagination. One of its extraordinary by-products was Thomas Macaulay’s rendering of the historian Livy’s first books into the Lays of Ancient Rome, with the belief that such was the original form of the Roman historical narratives (1842). Matthew Arnold in his essay ‘‘On translating Homer’’ combats at length the ballad-style translation of Homer, which was clearly a vogue he thought unworthy of the source: ‘‘To apply that manner and that rhythm to Homer’s incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty him’’ (1960: 132). But translators such as William Gladstone, Francis W. Newman, and William Maginn found in the English ballad and Spenserian stanzas both a meter and a diction they thought rendered Homer well as song in a register comparable to the source. Maginn found that there was no contradiction in believing in both a unitary Homeric corpus written by a single author and the oral propagation (and corruption) of his texts ‘‘sung in scraps’’ and later only recollected in Athens by Pisistratus (1850: 12-13). Thus his Homeric Ballads (1850) comprise twelve unconnected ‘‘songs’’ from the Iliad and Odyssey (with facing Greek text!) presented not as an image of their true form qua epic, but rather as he imagined one would encounter them in Greek performance.
The concept of oral culture implies more than just a style and has implications for how one conceives the entire cultural situation of the epic. Proponents of a ‘‘folkloric’’ Homer seen more as a vital part of a popular culture will render their Homer accordingly. This was at the heart of the debate between Francis Newman and Matthew Arnold, since Arnold chided Newman for failing to observe Homer’s nobility - a term with clear sociological as well as stylistic implications (1960: 127). Newman replied that Arnold, in insisting that Homeric quantitative hexameters be rendered in English accentual hexameters, failed to understand the implications of their one point of agreement:
‘‘Homer is popular,’’ is one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr. Arnold and I are agreed. ‘‘English hexameters are not popular,’’ is a truth so obvious, that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, “Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer.’’ Q. E.D. (Newman 1905: 124)
Newman relates his earlier eagerness to see ‘‘how unlearned women and children would accept my verses,’’ and his pleasure to hear ‘‘how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator,’’ all of which shows that his criterion for success was based on the assumption that Homer was widely accessible in style and must be so in English (1905: 124).
In more recent times, Georgios Psychoundakis has rendered both Homeric epics into Cretan 15-syllable couplets, the verse form of Cretan folk song (1995,1996). It is also the form of the Renaissance courtly epic Erotokritos, by Vitsentzos Kornaros ( ca. 1553-1613), which retained wide popularity in Greek culture through cheap editions and even oral propagation into the twentieth century. In this respect, the Cretan translator can advantageously span both the folkloric and epic categories with one popular form. Psychounda-kis was not a learned man, but a World War II Resistance veteran well versed in Cretan folklore and modern warfare. In his old age he turned popular ‘‘bard’’ and re-stitched Homer (working from previous modern Greek translations) in a very local idiom; but the translations were not performed by him, and were eventually published by the University of Crete Press, thus showing the assistance of the academy in the construction of a national ‘‘popular’’ culture in modern Europe. Nor is folk poetry the only option for a folksy Homer. In the 1930s, W. H. D. Rouse was convinced that Homer’s language was not an effete poetical construct, but was composed largely of words ‘‘taken directly from the common man’s lips, the vivid images which he uses naturally to describe what he sees’’ (1937: 285). Thus reacting against other English translations which he found ‘‘filled with affectations and attempts at poetic language which Homer himself is quite free from,’’ Rouse proclaimed ‘‘Homer speaks naturally, and we must do the same’’ (p. vii). His Story of Odysseus is thus couched in a storyteller’s prose: ‘‘This is the story of a man, one who was never at a loss,’’ it begins (p. 11). ‘‘At the time when I begin, all the others who had not been killed in war were at home,’’ he continues; ‘‘Well then, the seasons went rolling by... ’’ (p. 11). While both of these translations strive to make Homer vital and accessible to their target audiences, neither addresses vigorously the problem that the poems are composed in a hybrid Kunstsprache that presented a greater linguistic alterity to the average ancient Greek audience than the translators convey (something the English ‘‘ballad’’ Homers did address with their archaic diction). Psychoundakis and Rouse assumed that ‘‘Homer’’ was the common possession of‘‘his people,’’ and any translation ought to be the same for the target culture.
These last examples show us that even apparently radical divergences from the original’s form are still often rooted in assumptions about the source text and its culture. In other words, the ballad Homers and Rouse’s prose version make clear concessions to target-culture norms and forms, but do so under the conviction that they are better representing some essential aspect of the source. Therefore, a fair assessment of a translation can only be made when the full assumptions of the translator are disclosed, which is why the minigenre known as the “translator’s preface’’ is of inestimable value (though one must read such texts with due caution!).
World History
