As I’ve been thinking about beginning my dissertation, I’ve been reflecting on my relationship with translating Latin and even doing a little bit of translating.
Johanna Hannink distinguishes the difference between acts of (literary) translation and the kind of translation that we do in Latin (or Greek) classes: “Translation is a flexible, creative exercise, whereas ‘translation’ – what most of us do in class – is one in cryptography, ‘a tool that stands in for comprehension’” (“The Twists and Turns of Translation”). I see one problem in Latin education as equating translating to reading, that we need to translate in order to read, to understand, to comprehend. Perhaps one of the issues is the way that we value (literal) translation in the classroom as the one exercise that results in comprehension of the text – only after we put the Latin text into English can we understand it. It is a difficult habit to break, even now, as I strive to read more Latin.
I’ve read parts of Susan Bassnett’s book Reflections on Translation. She writes, “Sometimes, though, a translator translates something because through the process of translating he or she finds a clue to their own identity,” (Bassnett, 7). Latin is not a language in which many writers use the first person, it is not easy to find ego in the classic texts of antiquity. The places where I actually felt I embodied Latin text and could find my identity in it was through translation, albeit in classroom (literal) translation. Translation was a way to interpret. Also it was a way to see the silent parts of the story, to see Daphne, Europa, Dido, Io, Iphis, Arachne, Diana, etc. These moments of translating stories into English, even in the context of the classroom allowed me to see how another voice could fit into the story, another voice like mine.
This December, after the semester ended, I started a small project: translating the first book of Quintilian’s Declamationes Maiores. I took the passages from the Latin Library and divided them across seventeen days, one passage per day. I wanted to see, to try for myself, what the work of translating a rhetorical text felt like. I think that I believed it would feel different, but it felt the same that it always has. A reminder of what small and tedious work it is for me to “read” Latin, that I still equate translating with the idea of understanding and reading Latin. I like the work of translation, even the tedium of literal translations. The work is quiet, intimate, and interpretive. And I’ve only just cracked the surface, there is much work to be done, particularly with wading through all of the conditional sentences, a grammatical construction that I somehow never had to teach and never encountered much in my teaching. The exercise in translation is a reminder that I owe much of my recent successes in Latin to having to teach it – this is where my real understanding of the language comes from.
I wonder what it would mean for women to translate the rhetorical texts. Like women have done with the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Metamorphoses, among others. The poems have stories of women, and however silent the women may be in the original texts, I can see them, and I can imagine what they might (want to) say. I can see how other men have translated those women in the past and how they aren’t quite right. The thing about the rhetorical texts is that there are no women or women’s voices really at all. (Are the declamations an exception?) The word rhetoric today is so equated with politics and political speeches. Could retranslating the rhetorical texts and speeches of Cicero and Quintilian give any insight into our current political climate and our current problems with political rhetoric? Julie Zauzmer drew connections between Cicero and Trump back in 2016. In the same way that the epic poems cast light on humanity even in our own time (echoing Ovid’s first lines of his Metamorphoses as translated by Allen Mandelbaum: “…may the song I sing be seamless as its way weaves from the world’s beginning to our day” (3)), could retranslating the rhetorical texts cast light on our own political climate?
Sources:
Bassnett, Susan. Reflections on Translation. Multilingual Matters. 2011.
Hannink, Johanna. “The Twists and Turns of Translation.” Eidolon. 4 Feb. 2019. https://eidolon.pub/the-twists-and-turns-of-translation-33f1272dffa8. Accessed 31 Dec. 2021.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Harcourt, Inc. 1993.
Alexandra Sladky 