When I started my dissertation, I thought that the project was important because the first translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by a woman was on the verge of publication, and what seemed like a sudden influx (relatively speaking) of translations by women, including Emily Wilson, Shadi Bartsch, Caroline Alexander, and Sarah Ruden, have been published since the early 2000s. It also seemed like the project provided a way that I could bridge a gap between the work being done in English and work done around Latin and Greek – it served almost as a justification for my own pursuit of two, seemingly different, fields of study.
After leaving the teaching of Latin, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t lose the language, because a language is something that can be lost, can slip through your fingers as swiftly as sand, when it falls into disuse. I’d experienced this before in between college and graduate school, and relearning Latin was excruciating. The question has been how I could keep it up if I wasn’t teaching it, interacting with it everyday, because it wasn’t until I started teaching it that I really got any good at it. Learning Latin has always been necessary for me: in order to study the origins of so many stories that I love, I must know the original language. There are quite a few different uses of “loss” around language – something is lost in translation; abilities to speak or understand languages can be lost when we don’t use or hear them – when my grandmother went to get hearing aids recently, I learned that the sound of certain letters can be lost if we don’t hear those sounds (or use them). There’s also the feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue but being unable to think of it, and so it feels like something is lost, that language is ungraspable in that moment. As I’ve started to practice translation more regularly, this is the feeling that I most relate to, the feeling of having a word on the tip of my tongue and always choosing a word that is less appropriate for the situation.
To help establish my ethos as someone who studies translation and translations of the classics, I felt that it would be important to translate Latin texts myself. Because I have studied translations by women, I felt that the next logical step would be to call for the translations by women of women’s Latin and Greek. In support of new commentaries published of women’s Latin by Pixelia Publishing, I chose one of the two texts they had available, Isotta Nogarola’s Defense of Eve. Despite having never really translated Latin written by a woman in the twenty years that I’ve studied this language, there was not as much different in reading Nogarola’s Latin as I thought there might be. In the case of Isotta Nogarola, I’ve read that the author’s brother “rewrote the text extensively” to fit into the genre of the Ciceronean dialogue, a popular format for philosophical writings, as noted in the “Introduction” to the edition by Boyle, et al (18). There is the overwhelming sense that this text reflects the conventions of this genre of writing by men.
Does there have to be something like a lightning strike or lightbulb moment? Or, is it just that the work needs to be done, regardless of whether there is something fantastic and eye-opening about it? I wanted it to feel like I was translating women’s Latin, and for there to be something remarkably different about it. But it was the same. Important and necessary work is often tedious, but it must be done. I approached translating Nogarola’s Latin the same way I approached Cicero – I read each sentence in full, I made markings to help with grammatical constructions and to break down clauses, I occasionally wrote words and their meanings in the margins. I did not read the entire text through all the way before starting, which means I was working sentence by sentence. I looked for connections between sentences after I translated. The result, when I was done, was a sense that I had simply engaged with this text to understand what it said, to find or comprehend the meaning, but my translation was not poetic.
Translation is labor, difficult and tedious. All at once, it feels like I am only just beginning it and have been doing it for years and years. It is different to be thinking about how to set down the words in English that also share the message of the original. There’s more to it than transferring ideas from Latin to English. And yet the idea of trying to make it literary, rather than literal is overwhelming. How does one make a translation that is beautiful?
Alexandra Sladky 