Latin is a language of transformation. The language itself, different from English, changes form in each iteration of tense and number and position. There is a sense of not knowing even when I do, the exact meaning with exact precision. There is the comfort of not knowing. Learning Latin has also facilitated a transformation of myself, my understanding of stories, the way that I see myself and other women as players in these stories, the way these stories reflect my lived experience. And now I am experiencing a separation, another change, another transformation. The unknowability is comforting, but it is also concerning as I begin a part of my life journey where I am not explicitly working with ancient languages as a part of my job.
I think my concern is how to keep up with a language when it’s not something that I am explicitly teaching. I am always thinking about it, always thinking about the ways that it got me to where I am. How, then, do I stay relevant with it? What needs to happen on a daily basis so that I do not forget what I spent so long learning and doing? My journey has always been one of a writer. Ancient stories and languages have always been a part of that journey. This is where translations come in, I think. A way to work with the language in this new iteration.
I’ve come to realize that knowing the language does not necessarily mean that I am completely getting rid of translations, or even that I avoid them, necessarily. Instead, knowing the language gives me a nuanced way to read the translation. Maybe because I have already read or studied or taught sections of the text in the original, I have a certain familiarity with the story as well as the language. This kind of relationship affords me a way of looking at the text and seeing what is there and what is not. I read the English, always questioning what the differences might be between it and the original. I turn back to the source text to see.
As I’ve read and written quite a bit about translation, I have learned that its purpose is rarely simply to render the words of one language into another. It is more than mere transfer. Even as the word itself comes from the Latin translatio, trans + latus, carried across. It’s not that it’s wrong to think about translation in this way, the carrying across, the transfer, but the question to ask is: what am I carrying across, or transferring? Not merely language, but also stories, cultures, belief systems, histories, messages. With a good translation, I see that the message of the ancient author is intact, or I see how it changes, conveyed in the thin English language, how the author challenges the message. I can see what transfers and what doesn’t. I can find out what needs to transfer and what might be better left as is.
Reading translations when I know the language puts me in a unique place, too, because it allows me to question and challenge the interpretations. I do not have to trust that the translators are doing the right thing and interpreting the stories correctly, I can challenge them, be critical of them in a way that returns directly to the source text. Now that I’ve been studying rhetoric for a while, I have learned what I wish I’d known all along: I see messages and audiences. I see the problem of the author: a contemporary author trying to render an ancient text relevant in the twenty-first century. I see power in language.
Alexandra Sladky 