In March 2020, alone with my wife and our two dogs, I reached for the familiar, the things that I loved and that brought me some feeling of comfort and normalcy, even the slightest joy. I turned, as I always seem to turn, to the Classics, to reading. I started with Daisy Dunn’s Catullus’ Bedspread, and then I read Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles aloud to my wife before bed. Then I started in on the actual epics: Homer’s Iliad, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and, most recently, Homer’s Odyssey. I’ve started Vergil’s Aeneid, and I have a new translation of Beowulf on my shelf. I have read many of the epics before; this was my third reading of The Metamorphoses all the way through. When possible, I’ve opted for translations by women. Recently, I have been thinking about translation, specifically translation of the Classics by women. I have been thinking about women and the Classics, women in the Classics, women on the outskirts and skating underneath the Classics, barely visible, or so it would seem. This issue of women in the Classics is one of representation (women as a part of the field, in important roles, also the presence of women in Classical texts), and it is also an issue of livelihood (women teaching, making money, publishing and selling books).
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is an American Classic, I would imagine (I have never studied American Literature formally, and so I don’t pretend to know the designations). Thinking about Little Women and the Greek and Roman Classics I am taken back to touring Louisa May Alcott’s home. I remember learning about how similar Alcott was to Jo: Alcott wanted to write her thrillers that were less wholesome than Little Women and more like suspenseful, thrilling love stories. Yet novels like Little Women were the ones that sold and made money to support her family. When I first saw Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, I thought that there was something different about this version of the story. Generally speaking, I felt a difference in the portrayal of Amy, she was not the same Amy that I had encountered in Alcott’s original book. I actually never liked Amy in the book. But this Amy – this Amy, I could like. I could not yet identify what, exactly, made this version of Amy different from the first, from the other versions in previous films, and I think now that it could be an issue of translation. It recently occurred to me that in the movie, Jo’s focus on making money with her writing and Amy’s focus on marriage as an economic proposition and marrying rich to support her family are true to Louisa May Alcott and her original Little Women, and yet they also ring true in the world today. Today, women are concerned about wage equality, the economics of marriage, and how they are to be in the world.
There are details within the text and factors outside of the text that come together to show how the world an author lives in affects the story she is trying to tell. The culture that receives the text has a certain way of looking at and thinking about a text from another time. The themes are there in the original, however, depending on the time and the culture, certain messages might be drawn out and more clearly exposed. Is this one of the rhetorical features of translation? On top of all of the features of rhetoric: the author who has written the text and is situated in a particular time and place and surrounded by a particular context, wanting to share a particular message, to share that message with a specific audience. On top of all this, there is also how the text is to be received. Reception by the particular audience.
The comparison, the similarities that I see between the recent translations of Greek and Roman epics and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women are perhaps on the surface only, or, I only see them because I have studied the Classics, and so I am primed to see this sort of thing. I believe that they are important, though. I wonder if making books into movies is a kind of translation. The idea that the same old story has to be made into a different kind of language, and also must stay true to the original, while also being able to speak to the current audience – otherwise, why make the movie at all? Why translate texts again and again, every ten or twenty years? It is an issue of making the old new again, or at least relevant and applicable. There may be nothing new under the sun, but there are certainly new ways to see things.
Alexandra Sladky 