1. “Tell me about a complicated man…”
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The other day, a good friend sent me an article about a new translation of The Odyssey. The hook of the story was that this version was by the first female to translate Homer into English, Professor Emily Wilson.
My friend followed the link with an open-ended question:
“What do you think about this?”
The article also highlighted how the work deviated from previous translations. Before I was even done reading the article, my knee-jerk response, which I thought but didn’t say, was “I don’t really like it.”
For years, I had assumed the point of a translation was to serve the original text. The only Odyssey I knew was “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns…” To hear it any differently sounded like a bastardization.
“Tell me about a complicated man,” sounded too different to me, and thus wrong.
I didn’t have a problem with the translator’s gender – it was the characterization that “Wilson chose to use plain, relatively contemporary language,” which my subconscious read as a “modern translation,” a term I always found abrasive, akin to playing down to the audience, or an attempt to make something great more appealing to the modern masses, like Leonardo DiCaprio doing Shakespeare in an Acapulco shirt. For some reason I was reminded of Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, which to me was an example of a modern translation that I never really went for, one that deviated too far from the original.
But the hint of Dante made me stop and think more about it. The question went a lot deeper than gender. And I had been down this rabbit hole before...
2. The Dante Problem
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| Dante, and Dante, and Dante... |
The opening lines, the ones that resonated so heavily with me, read:
Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.
When I started at college, I was a Communications Major, but after tanking the first year, I realized that I wanted to be a writer. And by Senior Year, I decided I wanted to write my own novel, using the framework of Dante’s Inferno (for a 20 year-old, it seemed like an original idea). Since I was away at school when this revelation happened, I picked up another copy of Dante.
Imagine my surprise when the words I had memorized were different.
I didn't even know it at the time, but my age-old translation had been by Mark Musa. This new one was by Seamus Heaney:
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
Where the straight path had been lost sight of.
Heaney added a layer of complexity to Dante’s words: “I had wandered” is much more active than merely “losing sight” – Heaney had taken the act of becoming lost out of the narrator’s control. Waking up in that situation is much more startling than merely finding oneself. Awake naturally suggests the narrator was once asleep, as opposed to the jarring nature of suddenly finding, of spontaneously being – what came before that finding is more ambiguous.
This revelation led to an obsession to buy every version of Dante I stumbled upon.
First I found Laurence Binyon, printed by Viking Press in 1947:
Midway the journey of this life I was ‘ware
That I had strayed into a dark forest,
And the right path appeared not anywhere.
This version removed our possession from our own life: This life is not ours; it merely IS. The straight path does not necessarily denote the correct path, perhaps merely an easier one. Binyon removes this ambiguity.
Then there was H.R. Huse, in 1954:
In the middle of the journey of our life,
I came to my senses in a dark forest,
For I had lost the straight path.
To come to one’s senses feels more like a middle ground – it’s not quite asleep vs. awake, or a finding when lost, but a coming into focus. It is also interesting to note that Huse’s translation specifies “although intended as prose, is printed in the typographical form of the original verse.”
The Carlyle-Wicksteed translation from 1932 Random House Modern Library:
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
The self-presence of coming to one’s self, while at the same time keeping “our life,” is a crafty way of creating an individual-but-universal experience. It also adds another layer, because, while it might be assumed, “straight” does not necessarily mean “correct,” but in this translation, the wandering feels correct because it contains the essence of the self. The Carlyle-Wicksteed translation also abandoned the tercets of Dante’s poetry.
S. Fowler Wright, dated 1928:
One night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight path afar.
Through the great dark was no releasing way;
Above the dark was no relieving star.
The pessimism of halfway also meaning half-past in a more lyrical translation. It also vaguely defines just how long (“afar”) one has to wander to become lost.
A second Modern Library Translation, this time by Longfellow, completed in 1847 (my version was further edited by Mathew Pearl in 2006):
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
The elegant and slightly bloated language of the time makes it feel dated, but still relevant. Placing the adjective before the noun, “A Forest Dark,” gives it a certain, almost Shakespearian charm to it.
And this is the opening tercet - just the first three lines - of an epic poem that stretches 14,200 lines. These are all of the translations that still occupy real estate on my bookshelf, after several moves, and a gradual culling of my collection (the Pinksy translation mentioned at the beginning was lost somewhere along the way).
I’m sure you begin to see the problem. Which is good, because at the time, I didn’t. To me, translators were mechanics, not writers, not artists. They were academics serving a function. And the more versions I dug up, the more frustrated I got. None of them seemed to get it right.
What was Dante trying to say?
Eventually I went to the source. 700 years ago, Dante originally wrote:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
If you really must know, Selva directly translates to “Wood,” and Oscura to “Dark.”
Dark Wood.
That’s it.
Dante’s Divine Comedy is a well-known work in a popular romance language with probably hundreds of translations, so it all seemed like a pithy problem, pointless bickering over whether “Selva Oscura” meant “dark wood,” “dark forest,” “great dark,” (somewhere along that path I read it as “a tangled wood” too).
3. Well Hello, Clarice…
Like so many burgeoning male authors, I went through a phase where I adored the words of Charles Bukowski (that’s a whole other essay, and yes, I would defend it). At some point, I came across John Fante, and the blurb by Bukowski on the cover of “Ask the Dust,” which stated simply, “Fante was my God.” The similarities between Fante and Bukowski were legion – overly romantic roman-a-clef novels about impoverished authors in Los Angeles, struggling with poverty and brilliance, hanging their coats on the meager, single published work that taunted them about doing more, being better.
As I read more of Fante, I realized that the line from Bukowski back to Fante went back even further. The originator of the genre was Knut Hamsun – a 19th Century Norwegian author. If Bukowski ripped of Fante, then Fante definitely pilfered from Hamsun. As soon as I realized this, I tracked down and bought the first copy of "Hunger" I could find – the Robert Bly translation of 1967, and after reading that translation, I was left unimpressed by Hamsun’s work.
Almost a decade later, after visiting Oslo twice within a year, I decided to revisit Hamsun. I was particularly taken by the Penguin Classic version (in the intervening years, Penguin had updated the series’ design from pasty yellow to a sleek black binding), because its cover featured a woodcut by Edvard Munch. To my surprise, the Penguin version was a different translation than the FSG Classic on my shelf – Sverre Lyngstad instead of Robert Bly.
Right from the start I noticed a problem, one much different, much more disconcerting than Dante's.
Lyngstad refers to Bly’s translation “extremely faulty and inaccurate,” before adding, “It contains a myriad of errors and misreadings, confuses the geography of Kristiania (Oslo), the novel’s setting… Bly converts Hamsun’s idiosyncratic blend of present and past tense narration to a uniform past tense… Bly also seems unmindful of Hamsun’s biblical allusions, with their mocking, rebellious tone and irreverent parody…”
I had never heard of this before - The translation itself was wrong? How wrong was it? How would i know which was the preferred version?
As with Dante, I was curious to see just how different the text was, so I stared by reading the two editions side-by-side, and quickly delved into madness - annotated notes in one about the translation of the other; a complicated system of + and – to denote which translation said it better.
After a night of laborious note-taking, I was 8 pages into the book. But more importantly, I was not enjoying the work itself. It also just highlighted the futility of it all, because all it really did was signify which translation I liked better, not which was more faithful or more accurately translated.
Ultimately it boiled down to the same problem as Dante – I didn’t speak the writer’s language, so I had to rely on someone else, and it highlighted the deeper issues of translation. Had Bly’s alterations ruined Knut Hamsun for me? I had never missed the message of a book based on the translation before – Selva Oscura being a tangled wood and not a dark wood never spoiled Dante for me, so why did Bly flattening “Palace Hill,” a specific location in Kristiania, into the more generic “the bottom of the hill,” resonate more?
I couldn’t say, and while "Hunger" didn’t knock me over the way I had hoped it would ten years ago, I did find it a more enjoyable read the second time around. Maybe it was my maturation as a human and a writer, or maybe the translation had something to do with it. The tense confusion goes a long way to helping the reader empathize with the narrator by creating a subtle, almost imperceptible level of confusion and thus anxiety in his story (to be honest, I might not have even noticed it had the translator not pointed it out).
This problem became more apparent as I delved into more experimental works.
When I discovered Clarice Lispector, the translator noted a similar problem in translating her very unique and idiosyncratic form of Brazilian into English.
In the introduction to a new translation of Lispector’s Agua Viva, editor Benjamin Moser writes, “Clarice Lispector’s weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produces sentences – often fragments of sentences – that veer toward abstraction without ever quite reaching it. Her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning – never to discard it completely.”
Lispector’s off-beat language made it clear that translation was always going to come up short. It highlighted for me the fact that if you were not intimate with the language, the best a translator could do was give you their interpretation of what the author intended (although, quite paradoxically, Moser also points out that the better you know Lispector's native language, the harder she is to understand).
In the introduction to Jorge Louis Borges’ “Dreamtigers,” Professor Miguel Enguidanos refers to the life of Borges as “a truly private life of calm self-possession and ‘recogimiento.’”
There is a lengthy footnote to explain:
There is no choice here but to use the untranslatable Spanish word, for to live in “recogimeinto” is not simply to live in solitude; nor is it merely to live locked within oneself. A life of “recogimiento” is the life of the solitary many who accepts and lives in perfect harmony with his solitude, nurturing himself on what the soul has within it, an unfathomable and, for many, unsuspected treasure …
This was a devastating blow to me. Here, the translator felt he had no choice but to give up. Here was a word that had found the English Language insufficient – incapable of handling another language. Here was a word, so unique to the language, a word so beautiful and perfect the way it was, that the translator wouldn’t even attempt to translate it – one so complex that it took a paragraph of English to try to encapsulate what it meant.
For me, it was like finding out god didn’t exist; that I had been using the wrong shade of paint the whole time; this was the first time I saw my language as fallible. It was the only language I had, and it wasn’t good enough.
From there I found a myriad of examples. Moser too highlighted the difficulty of choosing one word for a phrase that had multiple meanings, and the shortcomings that led to the book keeping its native title:
“…the book was called Agua Viva. This is the only one of Clarice’s titles that offers no ready translation. Literally “living water,” the words can mean a spring or a fountain, a meaning often suggested inside the book, but to a Brazilian the words will first of all refer to a jellyfish.”
Neither translation was what Lispector was aiming for. “I preferred Agua Viva, a thing that bubbles. At the source,” she wrote.
In the introduction to her translation of Fernando Pessoa’s "The Book of Disquiet," Margaret Jill Costa notes, “The Book of Disquiet has been translated into many languages, and each of those translated editions is different, with often different texts in different order… In a way though, its very incompleteness is enticing, encouraging the reader to make his or her own book out of those fragments.”
Translating Pessoa presented the same difficulties that Moser had in translating Lispector. “I was reminded of just how difficult it is for the translator to find meaning in those ‘meaningless’ sentences which can often be oblique or emblematic – and, at the same time, reproduce that same languid fluidity in English, that seductive voice.”
The pitfalls of shifting words between languages, through the filter of a translator, helped me to see the difficulty in taking an apple and making it an orange (or at least, making it look like an orange). It helped humanize the process for me, to see just how much effort went into translating. It was so much more complicated than “Dark Wood,” versus “Forest Dark.”
4. To be, or not to be… Mad vs. Mad
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| New Hamlet |
This past summer, I saw one of my favorite actors, Oscar Isaac, play the lead in a new production of Hamlet. I didn’t quite know what to expect. I’d seen several iterations of the play over the years, and at first, Isaac’s black hoodie felt like a far cry from the fluffy Victorian costumes in the last production I had seen.
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| Old Hamlet... |
When I walked out of the play for the first time, with a friend who is a much bigger Shakespeare aficionado than me, we were in agreement that it was the best depiction of Hamlet either of us had ever seen.
The Mad Prince can have two meanings: Mad = Insane, or Mad = Angry. Actors, at least in all of the versions I have seen, tend play Hamlet in one of those two ways – as pathologically insane, or as hell-bent on avenging his murdered father (and using insanity as a cover). It’s usually laid out for you – “He’s Insane,” or “He’s Angry.” What Isaac did was craft a more nuanced character: a fragile prince who at is core is indecisive, who can’t decide between the competing lobes of his brain – he vacillates between anger and sadness and an inability to cope, and it is that manic push-pull that drives him gradually over the edge. “To be, or not to be,” is not a question he asks himself, it’s a symptom. Isaac was the first to accurately convey both Hamlets in a single performance.
And it wasn’t until I started this essay that I saw this as the biggest piece in the puzzle of translation.
When a reader reads a book, the character becomes their own – they form opinions, decide loyalties, imagine what the character looks like, whether they like or dislike them, etc. Stage plays almost seem like a form of putting that thought process on display for others. Isaac read Hamlet as flawed, not in a one-dimensional way, but flawed in too many ways to count. The way he read Hamlet translated to the stage, for the masses to soak in, for viewers like me to absorb. How Isaac saw Hamlet is different than how I saw Isaac play Hamlet.
I’m not well-versed in theater, so maybe “acting as translation” is just an age-old trope, but for me it was a revelation that tied everything together. But it was also another anxious step – my appreciation for Isaac’s translation came only because I had seen different variations of the same text – his portrayal was different than Mel Gibson’s or Kenneth Branagh’s, or than nameless actor I saw in a castle in Denmark.It was almost as if the more transalations, and the more varied, the better the characters could be understood.
At its most basic, plays are words that need to be translated by other people, other artists, in order for them to be properly experienced. Reading Hamlet say “I loved Ophelia” is not the same as Oscar Isaac seeing a body and utterly breaking down, taking it in his arms as he is hit with a wave of realization that Ophelia was dead, someone he loved, someone he pretended to hate in order to push away so that she might find salvation, and ultimately someone driven to madness of her own as a result of his actions.
In the same way that reading “Selva Oscura” is not the same as Seamus Heaney saying, “yes, it is a ‘Dark Wood,’ but it’s also ‘Our’ life,” Isaac took a simple phrase, a simple sentiment, and made it a revelation.
5. Look to the Gods
The problem with Dante was that there seemed the possibility for a universal answer (at least, a universal language), I just didn’t speak it. If I could speak Italian well enough, I wouldn't need a translator. The problem with Hamlet was that there was a universal language (at least for English speakers like me), but not a universal answer. I needed more translators to understand what was being said.
With the gods, it was far worse - it wasn’t that there was a single answer that I simply didn’t have access to, it was that there was no single answer, in this language or the next.
When I started traveling, I fell in love with Ireland, and in particular I fell in love with the old Celtic beliefs. Their gods were fallible characters, ones who weren’t to be found far away in a Heaven or Valhalla – they were tied to the loam of their domains. They were accessible to humanity – if you believed, and if you knew where to look, you could commune with them.
But the more I came to enjoy their stories, the more the problem came into focus.
The Celts had no Dante, no Homer, and no written language. And since everything was passed down orally, the more the Celtic tribes spread across the continent, the more their gods began to differ. Trying to learn about Celtic gods became its own rabbit hole – there is no Bible to study, no singular text; the best books try to distill the essence of the gods, some of whom had a different name in every town and every tribe in which they were recognized, each with subtle variations, many of which had been lost in time.
To make matters worse, Celtic gods suffered the same fate as the Old Nordic Gods - when they finally were recorded for posterity, not only was it a singular incarnation of a god with multiple names/stories, but they were written down by Greek or Roman writers. In other words, the only version of these gods that exist is text in a foreign language. There is no source, no selva oscura, merely the translation.
Consider also the Prose Edda, the oldest and most well-known treatises on the old Gods of Scandinavia. It flaws are obvious - it was written by a Catholic priest – a monotheistic religion that decries other gods as sacrilege. As such, it carries a noticeable bias about the gods it is saving from the ravages of time. On top of this, it has no single-source translation from which to study – the oldest surviving versions, of which there are at least six, each contain variations that set them apart from each other.
Which leaves it as an incomplete variation of an incomplete variation: a series of gods and legends that were flattened from countless iterations into one, which was recorded by someone who didn’t believe in any of them (and whose religion said it was heresy), and translated to a different language, now considered ancient, then broken into six different variations of its own, only to be translated again into English.
The anxiety this caused, for someone still seeking an ultimate translation, is too headache-inducing to write out.
The gods were lost.
It was a special kind of Hell, but there was something beautiful in that idea.
6. The Missing Gods
Growing up Roman Catholic, things were very structured – this is the one God, perfect and infallible; you worship, based off of this one Bible, and you worship him on this one day.
The older I got, the more I strayed from that ideology. At some point in my teens I tried to explain to my parents that I got much more out of Church when it was not mandatory – worshiping when I wanted was much more effective than worshiping when I was told. This idea didn’t seem to fit with their ideology. I was told it was wrong.
When I visited Newgrange, a Neolithic passage tomb in the countryside of County Meath, the first thing the tour guide pointed out was the elaborately carved stone outside the entrance. He gave several theories about what it was, and what it represented: some suggested it was a map of the surrounding river valley; some thought it was a depiction of neolothic gods; some an ancient calendar; maybe a type of astrological chart. The guide even mentioned, “One child on a tour said ‘maybe it’s just art; for art’s sake.’”
The point was, no one really knew what any of it meant. Like the Celts, the Neolithic Irish had no written traditions for their gods. While the Prose Edda at least preserved a patchwork of legends through a filtered and broken translation, beyond what could be inferred by a few crude stone carvings, the gods worshiped by the people of Newgrange had been lost.
There was something deeply tragic about that.
But also something magically liberating, something to be learned from the old gods.
When I first started reading translations, I assumed they, like my one true God, were infallible – this single translation was the definitive voice of the author I was reading. I was oblivious to the filter of the translator through which it had passed.
But translations exist in the same sphere as the gods of old – they’re all very similar, it’s just a matter of finding the one you desire to worship.
Newgrange still seemed to contain the energy of a holy place, but it was also a tabula rasa – its meaning had been wiped clean, opening the way for someone like me to fill it with whatever significance I decided. And I did (that too is a whole other essay).
Having no answer at all meant you could make up whatever answer you wanted.
7. The Nature of Homer
Still, the more I contemplated the nature of translation, the more anxiety I felt, as both a reader and a writer.
As a reader, the idea of a translation not being perfect is frightening. I felt I wanted that definitive voice – I want to read the author. And I can’t. I don’t want to say that Robert Bly spoiled Knut Hamsun for me, but the experience was very different than reading a “more faithful” Fernando Pessoa for the first time.
As a writer, the anxiety is two-fold. For one, it frightens me that another person could have that kind of sway over a finished work of art; the idea that the work doesn’t really belong to the author. Part of it is envy too – that the scope of a writer’s audience could extend to people beyond their own borders, that they needed to be translated for more people to experience their work.
At the end of the day, I was concerned with the words of Homer, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in history. A god in his own right. And yet, like the old gods of the Neolithic Irish, or the tribal Celts, or the ancient Norse, he was a phantom, a specter. Here, one of the pantheon of writing gods, writing in a language that doesn’t exist anymore – a dead language that only learned scholars can read.
That is the most distressing idea of all. Here I am, worried about my vision being corrupted by other writers, while thinking about one of the greatest, whose voice in not available to anyone.
But even that is a very myopic view of the problem.
Whether or not Homer was one person or many has been debated over the years. But what is widely accepted is that the Iliad and The Odyssey were Homer collecting stories that had been previously passed down orally. Which puts Homer in the same category as Snorri Sturluson, the priest who recorded the Prose Edda for posterity.
Homer was a translator himself!
8. Conclusions
It’s daunting, and it’s scary, that selva oscura. The first translation of Hamsun I didn’t like, but the second one was better. Maybe the next person to translate it will craft an even better vision. I’d seen four or five versions of Hamlet. But it wasn’t until that last one that I found one I connected with. I’d never met the Neolithic gods, but I worshipped on their hallowed ground. I’ve never read Homers actual words, but I adore his voice.
All of this philosophy about translation completely circumvented what I thought my friend was aiming for – a question about what my thoughts on gender and translation are. I am waxing philosophical about Homer not having a proper voice, while avoiding the question of marginalized voices in canonical literature.
For such topics, I always think of Neil Degrasse Tyson. Asked if maybe there was a genetic reason why there weren’t more female scientists, Tyson responded:
"I've never been female, but I've been black all my life and so let me perhaps offer some insight from that perspective. I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expressions of these ambitions. All I can say that is the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist was, hands-down, the path of most resistance through the forces of society. ... Now here I am, I think, one of the most visible scientists in the land. And I look behind me and I say, 'Where are the others who might have been this?' And they're not there. And I wonder: Where is the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive that others did not simply because of the forces of society that prevent it at every turn?"
In the end (and I guess this is the long-winded point I was trying to get to), it was a long and involved process for me to realize the value of translation as more than mere utility – they are an art form in and of themselves. Which is why I was dancing around the question so much – I’d never framed it as a gender-based question because, for a long time, I didn’t value the work.
But once I understood that, the answer for me was easy – the more voices, and the more diverse, the better. Every English translation of Homer, as with every translation Dante that I have ever seen, has been written by a man. And every translation of Dante was different. I will never read or speak Italian fluently enough to be able to judge for myself, so I have to deal with my own shortcomings, and stop projecting them onto the work of translators.
Carrie Brownstein, guitarist for the band Sleater Kinney, famously said, “I didn’t want to be a girl with a guitar… ‘Girl’ felt like an identifier that viewers, especially male ones, saw as a territory upon which an electric guitarist was a tourist.”
Her gender plays a part in her art, but it does not define it. The same goes for translation: time and place and ultimately gender might color the translation, but it’s a delicate distinction to make: to show it to be different because it is translated by unique person with a distinct voice, not translated by a woman. Wilson’s translation is different because she is Emily Wilson, and not Fagles or Lattimore or Fitzgerald or Homer himself or whichever bard Homer first listened to. Emily Wilson being a 20th Century woman is no different than Longfellow being a 19th Century man.
Maybe her gender will color the text like Snorri Sturluson’s religion colored the gods of the Prose Edda. Maybe not. Perhaps her voice will not resonate with me the way Fagle’s did. Perhaps her words will go on to become the standard version taught in schools all over the country. If Wilson casts Penelope in a different light than other translators, I will look forward to that eye-opening perspective the way that Oscar Isaac gave me a fresh perspective on Hamlet. The deeper its meaning, the more rich the history. Dante wrote “Selva Oscura” – DARK WOOD. He didn’t write it as tangled or forest or ours or yours or mine, he just wrote it.
Either way, I will read her translation and love it or hate it or feel indifferent to it, but it won’t be because she’s a woman, it will be based on what I think of her art. I am glad a woman translated The Odyssey. Along with the silenced voices of the gods lie the silenced voices of women, and I for one am glad those the voices are becoming more diverse, and I welcome Wilson’s voice to the pantheon of artists who have tackled such a monumental task.
Ultimately, the more voices that are out there, and the more diverse those voices are, whether it’s a man translating a romance language, or a priest writing about polytheism, or Homer writing down oral traditions in a now dead language, or a woman translating that dead language, it helps ensure that the story, in whatever fashion, survives.
Coda: “What do you think about this?”
After I was about 2,000 words down this rabbit hole, I wrote my friend to say that I had not forgotten about the question; it was just going to take me a few days to craft a proper response. The response I got made me laugh:
“Oh, did I ask you a question? I just wondered if you were interested in reading it with me!”
And here I was, seeking a universal understanding in language…
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