I happened upon two stories today, both dealing with translating Greek and Latin poetry. Translations are currently bought mainly by students, which leads to a concern for 'accuracy.' I put accuracy in quote marks because, as the author of the
first piece argues:
Translators, publishers, and reviewers alike, in making claims for a translator’s accuracy or transparency, have led us to assume that we are “getting,” say, Homer. But we’re not. We’re getting (say) Richmond Lattimore or Robert Fitzgerald or Robert Fagles, Americans writing a book in English, and each writer very different from the others.
Since we are not getting the actual work, Talbot goes on to say, we might as well make a virtue of this by producing translation that are works of art in their own right. And that no longer seems to happen:
The new expectation that the job of a translator is to adhere to scholarly accuracy, to become invisible to his readers, has stunted the growth of one of our literature’s fruitful boughs.
This seemed, even to a professional classicist like me, a bit of a frivolous complaint. Until, that is, I read
this article on the production of the King James Bible (a 17th century translation of the Old and New Testaments undertaken by 50 anonymous clegy) and was reminded of the far-reaching effects of a translation that is beautiful and evocative in itself:
TThe text became the basis for some of the most lyrical English poetry ever written and the subject of endless Bible-as-literature classes on college campuses throughout the English-speaking world. ...
"There are lots of way to understand 'accuracy,"' said Jacqueline Osherow, an English professor who can read the original Hebrew text and teaches a Bible literature class at the University of Utah. "The Hebrew Bible is so poetic and beautiful. If you are rending it in a prosaic manner, you are losing out on a certain essential accuracy -- the poetic."
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