An additional note: it is OK, and in fact good, if your readers are occasionally startled by a marked/ visible choice of wording. It's a positive thing if people who can't read the original feel empowered to say they "disagree" with your translation. It means they noticed they were reading a translation, made by a living human being, and they feel engaged in what that process might mean. It means that more people in our narrowly provincial presentist Anglophone culture are at least beginning to think about the vast complexities of linguistic and social difference, about translation, about the gaps between antiquity and modernity. Ideally, even the most extreme simplifications of media and online coverage can bring more readers to reading ancient literature, even in translation, and that's a wonderful thing. The occasional surprising or supposedly controversial choice, the occasional silly online "debate", might even inspire a handful more readers to learn ancient languages for themselves, which is a very positive outcome. If people sign up to take Ancient Greek just to prove me wrong, I will be delighted to welcome them to class.
Hi Dr. Wilson! Today I finished your translation of the Iliad. I intend to read the Odyssey in 2025. During my read, I was occasionally startled by a very modern-sounding phrase; in the final book, for example, Priam urges Achilles by saying, "Come on."
My experience with these phrases was that they prompted me to look in the notes to see if you had added any additional context about why you chose that phrasing. I was never disappointed to be pulled deeper into the text.
As an undergrad, I took the same class twice for credit: (German/English) stylistics, with the marvelous Herr Professor Dr Schulz-Behrend. This was precisely our task. Translations of short passages had to be written in the style of the original, with the proper tone, whether arch or wry or amused.
It was quite challenging, but it was one of the few classes that truly met my expectations of what a university experience should be: a wise and learned professor not only imparting knowledge, but guiding us, with a limited number of people seated around an old wooden table in a dusty corner of the university.
Now that I routinely work across several languages, that course and the discipline in translation that it imparted often come to mind. As a result, I have great respect for the translator’s work, and for making the choices that can utterly transform the experience of the neophyte reader. And to remind myself of the limits of translation, I occasionally dabble in translating Rilke’s works (for my own consumption), never to be fully satisfied.
A brilliant exposition of the translators art. It has helped to clarify my own hopelessly confused thoughts on the matter. Although I regularly translate texts about philosophy not literature, and not always ancient languages the principles you expound are equally applicable. Thank you.
I have a comment focused primarily on translating prose, as it's much harder to do within the constraints of verse.
A good translation should be faithful to the original. Where it can't be faithful, it should try to indicate how the translator understands the text. This means translating like things alike, active for active, passive for passive, replacing verbs with another verb, and keeping distinctions between ongoing and completed action. If you do break a rule then be consistent in that rule breaking, as in if you replace one noun in a complex sentence with a verb then do the same with the next noun, or try a different strategy to achieve the most accuracy.
Faithfulness can also mean replacing colorful, archaic, or foreign language with equivalents or using or retaining rhetorical figures, but too much of that takes you away from more literal faithfulness. And the casual reader of Cicero's letters whose interests are political or philosophical is not going to appreciate the scholarly art of translating all the Greek phrases as French.
Being too faithful to the Greek produces unreadable garbage, but not caring about faithfulness at all produces English sentences that are disconnected from the text and give the reader no idea how and why the translator made the choices that they did.
One could critique this translation style and say that it is old-fashioned and designed to help instructors grade students, and that mature scholars should move away from it. I could agree with that. But forcing yourself to translate in a way that indicates how you understand the Greek means that you can more easily be proven wrong and thereby learn from your mistakes. I would also add that the planet is not exactly drowning in undergraduates, or even graduates, that can translate difficult passages with understanding, so many would benefit from this tool.
None of this should take away from your other excellent translation advice.
An excellent analysis, thank you. There may be another category of translation to consider, or at least there is for me: a relatively literal translation for the reader of the original language who needs a prompt for some words or meaning - preferably in a bilingual edition. Some poetic translations, acknowledging their other merits, are not faithful to line or vocabulary and may not be very helpful here. I'm thinking at the moment of Dante. The Italian -French edition of the French poet Jacqueline Risset I think is great in this respect, as it captures the line and vocabulary but still reads as poetry. I also have a fondness for the very old Jebb Greek-English edition of Sophocles. Latin seems more difficult in this respect, because of words orders. Probably my Latin is not good enough to interpret word order as part of the message!
This is a lovely post, not only about translation, but also creative labor in general, and the specific job of creating something which is partially one's own work, and also a public work which is inherently not entirely one's own.
An additional note: it is OK, and in fact good, if your readers are occasionally startled by a marked/ visible choice of wording. It's a positive thing if people who can't read the original feel empowered to say they "disagree" with your translation. It means they noticed they were reading a translation, made by a living human being, and they feel engaged in what that process might mean. It means that more people in our narrowly provincial presentist Anglophone culture are at least beginning to think about the vast complexities of linguistic and social difference, about translation, about the gaps between antiquity and modernity. Ideally, even the most extreme simplifications of media and online coverage can bring more readers to reading ancient literature, even in translation, and that's a wonderful thing. The occasional surprising or supposedly controversial choice, the occasional silly online "debate", might even inspire a handful more readers to learn ancient languages for themselves, which is a very positive outcome. If people sign up to take Ancient Greek just to prove me wrong, I will be delighted to welcome them to class.
Hi Dr. Wilson! Today I finished your translation of the Iliad. I intend to read the Odyssey in 2025. During my read, I was occasionally startled by a very modern-sounding phrase; in the final book, for example, Priam urges Achilles by saying, "Come on."
My experience with these phrases was that they prompted me to look in the notes to see if you had added any additional context about why you chose that phrasing. I was never disappointed to be pulled deeper into the text.
As an undergrad, I took the same class twice for credit: (German/English) stylistics, with the marvelous Herr Professor Dr Schulz-Behrend. This was precisely our task. Translations of short passages had to be written in the style of the original, with the proper tone, whether arch or wry or amused.
It was quite challenging, but it was one of the few classes that truly met my expectations of what a university experience should be: a wise and learned professor not only imparting knowledge, but guiding us, with a limited number of people seated around an old wooden table in a dusty corner of the university.
Now that I routinely work across several languages, that course and the discipline in translation that it imparted often come to mind. As a result, I have great respect for the translator’s work, and for making the choices that can utterly transform the experience of the neophyte reader. And to remind myself of the limits of translation, I occasionally dabble in translating Rilke’s works (for my own consumption), never to be fully satisfied.
A brilliant exposition of the translators art. It has helped to clarify my own hopelessly confused thoughts on the matter. Although I regularly translate texts about philosophy not literature, and not always ancient languages the principles you expound are equally applicable. Thank you.
Dr. Wilson,
Please keep posting! I am fascinated by your notebooks and how you wrestle to decide the particular wording of a translation.
Thank you!
This has given me a much better understanding of the process and purposes of translation, and I so admire your scholarship.
I have a comment focused primarily on translating prose, as it's much harder to do within the constraints of verse.
A good translation should be faithful to the original. Where it can't be faithful, it should try to indicate how the translator understands the text. This means translating like things alike, active for active, passive for passive, replacing verbs with another verb, and keeping distinctions between ongoing and completed action. If you do break a rule then be consistent in that rule breaking, as in if you replace one noun in a complex sentence with a verb then do the same with the next noun, or try a different strategy to achieve the most accuracy.
Faithfulness can also mean replacing colorful, archaic, or foreign language with equivalents or using or retaining rhetorical figures, but too much of that takes you away from more literal faithfulness. And the casual reader of Cicero's letters whose interests are political or philosophical is not going to appreciate the scholarly art of translating all the Greek phrases as French.
Being too faithful to the Greek produces unreadable garbage, but not caring about faithfulness at all produces English sentences that are disconnected from the text and give the reader no idea how and why the translator made the choices that they did.
One could critique this translation style and say that it is old-fashioned and designed to help instructors grade students, and that mature scholars should move away from it. I could agree with that. But forcing yourself to translate in a way that indicates how you understand the Greek means that you can more easily be proven wrong and thereby learn from your mistakes. I would also add that the planet is not exactly drowning in undergraduates, or even graduates, that can translate difficult passages with understanding, so many would benefit from this tool.
None of this should take away from your other excellent translation advice.
An excellent analysis, thank you. There may be another category of translation to consider, or at least there is for me: a relatively literal translation for the reader of the original language who needs a prompt for some words or meaning - preferably in a bilingual edition. Some poetic translations, acknowledging their other merits, are not faithful to line or vocabulary and may not be very helpful here. I'm thinking at the moment of Dante. The Italian -French edition of the French poet Jacqueline Risset I think is great in this respect, as it captures the line and vocabulary but still reads as poetry. I also have a fondness for the very old Jebb Greek-English edition of Sophocles. Latin seems more difficult in this respect, because of words orders. Probably my Latin is not good enough to interpret word order as part of the message!
Professor, I have read both your Iliad and Odyssey translations. They are well-marked.
Also, off subject, please recommend a good translation of the Song of Roland.
Thank you
Thank you so much for writing this. A perfect way to start the new year..
This is a lovely post, not only about translation, but also creative labor in general, and the specific job of creating something which is partially one's own work, and also a public work which is inherently not entirely one's own.