If you have ever read a book both in the original language as well as in translation, whether an ancient text or otherwise, you can probably immediately identify a whole list of reasons to read a text in the original. I don’t need to convince you! My hope, however, is to break down the process of translation in a way that even if you haven’t had such an experience yourself, you see the value of literature in its original language.
So, what exactly happens when we translate a text, moving it from one language into another? To understand the difficulty of translation, it is helpful to think of a language in terms of layers of meaning. Every single word in any language comes with multiple layers of meaning. These layers come from the cultural context of the word, the interaction of the word with other words in the language, the placement of the word in the specific context of the text, chapter, paragraph, and sentence in which it is found, etc. When we see a word in our native language, our brain automatically processes all of this information and in a matter of moments, gives us a single definition of the word that integrates all of the many levels of meaning. However, when you start to move between languages, there is no way to retain all of the levels of meaning for every single word. You can translate the literal meaning of a word, but you cannot maintain the cultural context of the word. You can maintain the grammatical function that a word is serving in a sentence, but you cannot necessarily keep its same position in the sentence. Every time you translate a word, you make choices about which layers of meaning you believe are more important and which ones you can lose, a decision that at its best takes the depth of a text from 3D to 2D and at its worst changes its meaning entirely. Each decision removes layers of meaning at the discretion of the translator. You can imagine how when making this decision about every single word, the shape of the text as a whole can change pretty dramatically in the matter of a few sentences and massive amounts of meaning can be lost.
Thus far we have only talked about what meaning can be lost in translation, but it is also well worth considering what is added when a text is translated from one language to another. One of my favorite pieces of classical scholarship addresses this very question. I won’t bore you with the details of the paper, but the basic premise of the article compared translations of a passage of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War composed during various populist revolutions, including the American and French Revolutions.¹ The examined passage was the famous description of democracy given by Pericles in his funeral oration for the slain Athenians. This passage is notoriously vague and difficult to work within the Greek, so Alexandra Lianeri wanted to ask how classicists in different cultural contexts from the original with known political leanings adapted the Greek in their translations. She found (as might be expected) that translators read what they wanted to into the Greek. If they were in favor of the American revolution, for example, they chose the translation of the passage that put democracy in the most favorable light. If they were opposed, they took a different angle and posed democracy in as poor a light as possible. The nuance and complexity of the original language are entirely lost, replaced instead with a definitive statement by the translator. All the scholars were looking at the same Greek, but due to the vagueness of the original language, all came up with dramatically different translations that was much a commentary on their own times and opinions as it was a faithful representation of the Greek.
I don’t say all of this to give you a massive amount of distrust in translated works. It is certainly well-advised to consider the possible biases of translators and recognize that some nuances are lost across translations, but I would argue that reading Vergil in translation is far better than not reading Vergil at all. On top of that, I can’t pretend that reading an ancient text in its original language makes it possible to understand the text exactly as its original audience did. The passage of time itself is a translator of these works of literature, and not one particularly sensitive to preserving context and meaning. However, while we may not be able to ever entirely recover the full richness of ancient texts, reading them in their original language certainly gives us the best chance. To see the text in the original language allows us to strip away as many lenses as we can, aided by a translator or time itself, and see the language as it was intended to be seen, to hear the voice of the author, and come as close to experiencing the richness it offers as we could possibly hope for.
---------------------------
1. The article, “On Historical Time and Method: Thucydides’ Contemporary History in Nineteenth-Century Britain” by Alexandra Lianeri can be found in A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides edited by Christine Lee and Neville Morley.
No comments:
Post a Comment