(Re–)Translating Ancient Greek and Latin
Translating from Ancient Greek or Latin presents fundamentally different challenges compared to translating between modern languages. The modern translator of ancient languages is invariably not a native speaker of the language they are translating from, and there is no community of speakers to which one can turn for help in interpreting especially difficult texts. Unlike with French, English or any other modern language, when it comes to Latin and Greek, the dismayed translator has no one who can say definitively and authoritatively what a particular phrase or expression means in the original language, and whether the translation “feels” right. While generations of grammar books, dictionaries, and other tools certainly exist to help provide some clarity, the translator is ultimately on their own. Inevitably, each translation becomes at least in part an exercise in researching the development of lexical and grammatical usage across the language’s history. This often involves comparative analysis with other Latin or Greek texts which exhibit similar features. To illustrate the difficulties translators of Ancient Greek and Latin face, consider an ambiguous expression in Theophrastus’ Metaphysics, where the translator must both notice the expression and know how best to interpret it in order to give a fair rendition of the author’s philosophical argument.
When posing the question as to whether things which exist only in the mind are connected or not to things existing in nature, Theophrastus suggests that even if they are not, they may still be “somehow both contributing to [bring about] all of existence” (Gutas’s translation, 2010). The trap which the translator must negotiate here is the translation of the participle συνεργοῦντα (lit. “working together”), alongside the prepositional phrase εἰς τὴν πᾶσαν οὐσίαν (lit. “to all existence”). The preposition εἰς generally means “into” thought it overlaps to some degree with the preposition πρός meaning “to” or “towards.” In either case, one cannot translate συνεργοῦντα εἰς τὴν πᾶσαν οὐσίαν as “working together (in)to all existence” as this is, at best, unidiomatic in English; moreover, one finds examples across Greek literature of the period of forms of συνεργέω (the verb from which is derived συνεργοῦντα) used both with εἰς and with πρός. This compels the careful reader and translator of Theophrastus to make a translatorial decision as to whether there is a discernable difference in meaning between συνεργοῦντα εἰς and a hypothetical συνεργοῦντα πρός when translating this difficult passage (van Raalte 1993, 92). To arrive at a convincing answer, the translator must refer to every extant usage of συνεργέω with each preposition, or, if this is not feasible, to those extant usages most pertinent to the present context, based either on temporal or contextual similarities (i.e., from other texts written by Theophrastus or by his mentor and colleague Aristotle). One conducts this stage of the research most easily through a search of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), a research centre and database containing digitized and searchable editions of the vast majority of Greek literature from the archaic period up to the year 1453. A proximity search through TLG reveals that there are 706 examples of συνεργέω with either εἰς or πρός occurring within 5 words of the verb in Greek literature. Naturally not all of these will be particularly pertinent, but a systematic analysis of this corpus will facilitate the translator’s task. In this case, one finds that while συνεργέω + πρός indicates working towards a goal, while συνεργέω + εἰς emphasizes the actual effect or completion of the goal (see van Raalte 1993 and Gutas 2010 ad loc.). When translating therefore, one must not only avoid the overly literal “working together (in)to all existence” but must also indicate in some way that the “goal,” i.e., “all existence,” has been achieved by the two things which are “working together.” Due to the difficulties in conveying naturally the difference between “working towards a goal (which has not yet been and might not end up being accomplished)” versus “working towards a goal (which has been accomplished)” without adding more to the translation than is present in the original Greek, scholarly translators generally must rely on adding paratextual explanations through bracketed phrases, commentaries, footnotes, and appendices to disambiguate such cases.
The Challenges of Translating a Finite Corpus
Dead languages are unique in offering translators a fixed, relatively small corpus of texts that appeals to readers with diverse interests. Lovers of martial epic will certainly never get bored with Homer and Vergil, while students of philosophy will continue to puzzle over Plato and Aristotle just as they have for over two millennia. Nonetheless, the corpus of classical Latin and Greek is not increasing in size (other than through the occasional papyrus discovery). A translator of German or Russian, on the other hand, will never run out of work due to the sheer number of new texts published annually; a translator of Latin and Ancient Greek has a painfully limited number of classical authors available, and many of these exist only in fragments. For instance, while a scholar of Augustan poetry is very fortunate to have essentially all of Vergil’s and Ovid’s writings intact and available, it is a great hindrance to research on Latin prose of the period that we have lost nearly all of Marcus Terentius Varro’s writings.
Varro, a famed polymath of the final decades of the Roman Republic and contemporary of Cicero, famously wrote over 64 individual works ranging in subject from histories of Rome to philosophical treatises, to say nothing of his satirical poetry. Nevertheless, all that remains of this scholarly accomplishment is one complete text, De Re Rustica (On Farming), a didactic manual for the would-be farmer, and less than half of another, De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language), a rich source for understanding the Roman sense of what we might call linguistics. All the same, Varro still comes out quite well compared to many other famous Roman writers. We know of many famous poets from the late Republic and early Principate whose entire oeuvre is lost, robbing modern translators and scholars of insights into the linguistic, philosophical, and literary preoccupations of some of the most famous writers of the period. How different would modern Latin philology be if we had access to Varius Rufus’ epicurean poem De Morte, or Cornelius Gallus’ elegies? As it is, we must be content with a few meagre fragments from both, with little hope for more forthcoming. These are just a few examples of the quandary the modern Latinist is faced with, and the same state of affairs holds true for Hellenists; one must, of course, be grateful for the texts which have survived to our own day, but it cannot be ignored that one often finds oneself returning constantly to the same restricted corpus of authors who are unusually well preserved, to the detriment of all others. Excepting the discovery of new and substantial manuscripts or papyri (which does occasionally happen), the translator seldom has the privilege of encountering and translating a previously unknown author. Moreover, these inevitable limits have given rise to a phenomenon where the most popular ancient texts are translated and retranslated practically ad nauseam. In English alone one finds dozens of popular translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in the modern era. There are, of course, ancient texts which are rarely translated; one might think for instance of the aforementioned De Re Rustica, or even Boethius’ De Arithmetica, both fascinating texts, but a little dry and idiosyncratic for most tastes. When one thinks of the famous epics and love poems, or the salacious biographies of the emperors, or Caesar’s detailed accounts of his military campaigns, it seems deceptively obvious that there is a surplus of translations already available to the curious reader.
This surplus becomes particularly evident for a work as famous as Homer’s Odyssey, but one finds that the long list of English translators reveals a cohort of people of very similar education, career, and perhaps worldview, accumulated over centuries of translation. It is not surprising then that Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation made a splash upon publication, seeing as it was, despite the huge number of total translations, the first English translation of the Odyssey by a woman. This case in particular has been revealing of the role which a translator, particularly a translator of ancient texts, plays in transmitting the original text, a role which goes beyond the practical linguistic skills required to navigate databases like the TLG or the myriad philological commentaries which hang above so many of our surviving classical texts. Wilson refuses in her translation to follow some of the patterns apparent in previous translations which often are more revelatory of the context of the translator’s world and time than of Homer’s. To take just one example, in translating the word κυνῶπις, an epithet derived from “dog” and “face”, which Helen uses of herself (Od. 4.145), Wilson avoids the typical ethically and sexually motivated formulations such as Fagles’s (1996) “shameless whore” and Mitchell’s (2013) “bitch,” choosing to instead integrate the idea of the dog into the larger context of the passage, writing, “They made my face the cause that hounded them.” This choice is made not only with the aim of domesticizing the passage for a modern audience, but also on solid philological grounds; as Wilson argues (2019, 286-8), the word κυνῶπις is never used in extant Greek of mortal women other than Helen, otherwise used only to describe the Olympian goddesses Aphrodite, Hera, and the Furies. Moreover, even when the word “dog” is used as an insult in a general sense, Wilson argues that it is not with the misogynistic connotation of the English “bitch,” but in the sense that a person is uncivilized, inhuman, or violently aggressive. This type of research is carried out in much the same way as we saw in our analysis of Theophrastus above, through the comparative reading of all texts which show the same word or very similar words in the extant corpus, allowing the translator to rebuild the connotations and implications which the word may have had for a person of that period, rather than those which a speaker of English or of some other modern language might reflexively arrive at.
In a sense, the great weakness which a translator of Ancient Greek and Latin must face is also a great strength. There are no native speakers of these languages left, and the corpus of surviving text is extremely small and often fragmentary, factors which make it difficult for the translator to ever be completely sure that they understand the exact shade of meaning which each word and sentence imparts. On the other hand, the small size of this corpus (relative to modern languages) often allows the industrious translator to verify the usage of any particular word through comparison with all or nearly all the extant occurrences of the same word across the entire classical history of the language. The ancient philologist as translator’s task really is to negotiate the difficulties which a fragmentary corpus presents through the precision which our modern databases, linguistic knowledge and commentaries afford. But even when this is done well, one must always remember that a literary translation is a new text reflective of its translator almost as much as its original author. As we have seen through comparing Wilson’s Odyssey with a few of her predecessors’, even after more than two millennia, there is no such thing as a definitive and final translation of Homer—each translator brings their own knowledge, research, and literary and cultural sensibilities to the task.
Don McCarthy is a PhD candidate in the Classics Department at the University of Toronto. He writes primarily on Latin poetry of the Augustan age, with further research interests in Translation Theory as applied to Latin and Greek philology.
Bibliography
Fagles, Robert (trans.). The Odyssey. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Gutas, Dimitri (ed.). Theophrastus On First Principles (known as his Metaphysics). Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Mitchell, Stephen (trans.). The Odyssey. New York: Atria Books, 2013.
van Raalte, Marleine (ed.). Theophrastus: Metaphysics. Leiden: Brill, 1993.
Wilson, Emily (trans). The Odyssey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018.
———. “Translating Homer as a Woman.” In Homer’s Daughters: Women’s Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, edited by Fiona Cox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
