Classics’ Relationship With Translation.

Johanna Hanink, an associate professor of Classics at Brown University, has a fascinating discussion of classicists and translation at Eidolon; it’s so full of good things I’m going to have a hard time extracting representative samples, so if you like the bits I quote, go read the whole thing:

Yet our pedagogical reliance on translation habituates us to thinking about language learning in strange ways. In a brief overview of the history of translation, Juliane House observes that “At the end of the eighteenth century the teaching of Latin had turned into a highly formalized ritual, the idea being to instil discipline into students’ minds.” Two and a half centuries later, not much seems to have changed. I remember sitting in high school Latin class with a copy of Mandelbaum’s Aeneid under my desk, feeling like a kid in the outfield praying the ball never flies her way. For me, the “ritual” of in-class translation became linked early on with fear of humiliation.

This kind of pedagogy also hinders the development of real comprehension, since, among other things, it encourages students to translate Greek and Latin into their native languages even when they read on their own. We know that’s not how you learn a language; it’s also a hard habit to break. […]

In 2015, I met a journalist named Konstantinos Poulis in Greece. Poulis is also a talented fiction writer who had published a well-received collection of short stories called Thermostat the previous year. When I read the first story, “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia,” I was so compelled by the narrative that I wanted more people to be able to read it too. Over the next couple of years, Poulis and I spoke often about finding an English-language translator for his work. When that proved difficult, I decided to try for myself.

As much as I had loved reading “Leonardo,” translating it was another story. This was the first time I had ever attempted a literary translation, a translation stripped of quotation marks. Before, when I had “translated” Greek and Latin passages as part of my scholarly work, I had mostly been concerned with showing readers how — and even simply that — I understood the texts. But with Poulis and Thermostat, something more was at stake. I wanted to do justice to my friend’s writing and help him to build his reputation in the Anglophone literary world. Euripides and Plato had never needed anything like that from me. […]

Soon after “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia” appeared in English, I met Rob Tempio, an executive editor at Princeton University Press, and he suggested to me that something from Thucydides could work well for the Press’s “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series. I was heartened to hear him agree that he, too, was puzzled by the exalted position that Thucydides’ Athenians enjoy in American political discourse. The prospect of retranslating and reintroducing Pericles’ funeral oration and the Melian Dialogue — and of gently subverting the “ancient wisdom for modern readers” concept —did seem like a productive and creative way of encouraging people to revisit their assumptions about the text.

She gets accepted to a workshop at Princeton in literary translation and wound up “on an unforgiving daily schedule of translating Thucydides after breakfast and Poulis after lunch”:

One new set of concepts particularly caught my attention: the distinction between “foreignization,” defined by House as a “procedure in translation where the translated text is translated in such a way as to maximally resemble its original,” and “domestication,” “where a text is adapted to the norms of a target culture.” Food is a category that offers good illustrations. One of the stories that I had circulated, “Untimely Love” (“Ἔρως ἀνεπίκαιρος”), is about a perpetually-foiled romance between characters named Nikos and Maria. Toward the beginning, Nikos comes home from a disappointing day at work and heats up leftover fasolakia, a Greek green bean dish. Later, the manager of a taverna complains about groups of teenagers who take up prime tables for hours but only ever order “a herring.” The members of the workshop urged me to think in both cases about whether I was aiming for a foreignizing translation, perhaps even with “footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers” (as Nabokov famously desired), or a domesticating one that would allow the reader to imagine that Nikos and Maria’s romance had unfolded just around the corner. I’m pretty sure that few American kids these days would spend an evening out picking over a herring.

Back home after the workshop, the pre-circulated drafts of our translations were sent back to us with extensive markup from the directors. Their comments were sharp and constructive. […] All of this helped me to see just how conditioned I had been by Classics to fear the imagined criticism that haunts so many of us: “her Greek really isn’t that good.” In this case, my eagerness to prove that I “understood” the language had only served to expose my shortcomings as a translator.

Now, though, I was armed with a new vocabulary that allowed me to think more confidently and explicitly about what I was trying to do. I decided that my target for “Untimely Love” would be near the midpoint between foreignization and domestication. Fasolakia became “lentils” (a food common enough in the U.S., but one that still seems a little “Greek”), and the herring “an appetizer.” After careful thought, I decided to remove the “foreignness” of the herring but to leave it up to the reader to imagine what exactly the kids had ordered (to my mind, mozzarella sticks). But I also chose to stick to calling the taverna a taverna, and not to “domesticate” so far as to abandon the specific atmosphere which that word evokes in favor of the more neutral “restaurant.”

She goes on to explain how that experience changed her approach to Thucydides:

Given that my purpose with Thucydides was to make the speeches more accessible, I resolved that with him I would apply a consciously domesticating approach. I loosened up unreadably tight sentences and made other adjustments. Cleon’s disdainful characterization of his fellow citizens as “theatai seated before sophists” (3.38) became “disciples gathered at the feet of gurus.” In Greek, a θεατής is more than just an “audience member,” but I was trying to avoid footnotes of any height. “Guru” seemed to be a way to capture Athenian suspicion of the sophists —their methods, promises, and often foreign origin — in American idiom. It’s something I could see Cleon saying in Congress today.

The whole thing is excellent, and I hope lots of classicists read and learn from it. Thanks, Bathrobe!