Translating Boethius
Now that his new translation of Boethius'Consolation of Philosophy has been published, the Chair of the Classics Department offers some personal observations on the art and craft of translation. By Joel C. Relihan
Although I am a classicist, I am a little uncomfortable with the term. While I certainly teach the languages and literatures that this term typically refers to, I prefer to think of myself as a Latinist, a much more inclusive label.
My love of Latin is omnivorous and indiscriminate; the Latin language itself, more than any one of its particular manifestations, is what most interests me. This love knows no boundaries of time or genre, and in the course of a moderately long career I have been called on to translate any number of things; accordingly, I have been pleased to discover that Latin is truly one of the helping professions. As a graduate student, I earned my first academic dollar (which I regret I did not have framed) removing an obscene folk tale of the Pacific Northwest from the decent obscurity of the Latin to which a nineteenth-century field anthropologist had consigned it; my first professional publication was a translation of the Latin texts in a 14th-century collection of motets in Old French and Latin. I have revised a late medieval philosophical text (On Learned Ignorance, by Nicholas of Cusa), helped in the edition of a German humanist's neo-Latin translation of the Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes, guided a researcher through some 18th-century Irish population registers (in which I actually saw the name Ronaldus MacDonaldus), interpreted foreign medical diplomas, and frequently lived in Purgatory (translating St. Patrick's Descent into Purgatory for one medieval graduate student and helping my older brother with his dissertation, an edition of the Anglo-Norman and Latin editions of Robert Grosseteste's Pains of Purgatory).
I am glad to have colleagues who send me e-mails asking for advice in rendering some medieval passage or in interpreting some classical text; I am honestly happy to help, partly because such questions satisfy a sort of crossword puzzle solver's delight in a new problem, partly because they constantly increase my own exposure to the almost embarrassing abundance of Latin texts.
But this sort of translation work, when it takes one printed Latin text and turns it into one printed English text, is first and foremost practical. What does it say? takes precedence over How does it say it? I often want to give a translation and an explanation, a desire that seems to my colleagues to go above and beyond the call of duty. There are difficult mechanisms and realities of language and composition that are not really allowed to rear their heads in these sorts of projects: particularly, the fact that every text is based on other texts, that no text really stands alone, that the whole history of language and culture is in some way reflected in the creation of even the simplest utterance. While there is no need to maintain that every text in the original is inexhaustible, there is certainly no text that can be fully translated in all of its linguistic nuances and the full range of its cultural and literary associations, certainly not through the process--sometimes mechanical, sometimes inspired--that seeks to change one set of words into another. With translation must come interpretation.
But what texts deserve the painstaking effort, necessarily incomplete, of interpretation? This can sometimes be answered in cultural terms: texts already deemed important and influential. Yet there are personal and idiosyncratic answers as well: texts that the translator wants to make important. Translation is first and foremost an exercise in applied literary criticism, but it is also an inherently rhetorical enterprise, for translators are actively trying to convince a reader, through the medium of their own words in their own language, of the importance of the underlying text in its words and its language. Unless a translator believes that the original is in some sense trivial or contemptible (an uninfluential text, perhaps, or one written in clumsy or confusing language), and that the translation is honestly an improvement on the original, this is inevitably a quixotic quest, as the reader will only rarely be able to go back to the original to discover the depth of a text which can never be translated in its entirety. Translation may be betrayal, as the Italians say (traduttori traditori), but it is also a circular argument, a dog chasing its tail, and wise translators will take all of the help that they can get as they make their case for the texts to which they have devoted themselves.
There is a wealth of devices for enhancing the meaning of a translation, and they belong to a class of things that I think the French call paratext; all show that the translated words themselves do not constitute a free-standing text: the learned introduction with its interpretive essay and bibliography, the footnote, the endnote, the glossary, the map, the diagram, the illustration, the cover art, the jacket blurb. To the cynic, the proliferation of these devices in modern translations of the classics represents merely the pedant's refusal to let a text speak for itself. It is like reading a play by Shaw; at what point will the author be quiet and actually trust the reader to read? But texts don't speak for themselves, and the greatest harm that translators could do would stem from a presumption that translation is a simple process, some sort of transparent medium through which the light of the original may pass undiffused. The devices and resources of the original (from sounds, syllables, vocabulary, and rhythms to literary allusions, variations in style, and rhetorical structures) need to be carefully catalogued; the translator has to decide what can and cannot be carried over ("translated" in its literal sense), not just into another language, but into another world. Different texts make different demands; where can the translator's efforts be most profitably expended?
Literary Latin is in fact a very complicated test case for any theory of translation, because so much of the meaning of a word or a sentence is bound up in the context of the whole of Latin literature. The language is highly artificial, corresponding only rarely to anything that we presume they spoke on the street. It is consciously derivative, borrowing freely from the vocabulary, style, and syntax of earlier authors; it expects the reader to see these borrowings and to interpret in the awareness of this intertextual dependence. This is true of prose as well as verse; the added wrinkle in Latin verse is that the long history of Latin poetry is one of the difficult accommodations of the relatively intractable Latin language into the various meters and verse shapes of Greek poetry. A particular solution that Vergil may arrive at in making Latin epic sing in Greek hexameters will inevitably be borrowed by every subsequent practitioner of the genre. In other words, in a very literal sense, each Latin text summarizes the entire history of Latin literature and seeks to extend it. Yet this information is practically impossible to convey in translation; a footnote may mention that there are parallels to one passage in other works, but the dependence in vocabulary, the associations in earlier authors that Roman readers would hear ringing in their ears, is accessible only to the fluent Latinist, who knows to keep a detailed commentary handy. This is the first and most practical limitation: the translator is dealing with a single work at a time, and is not translating an entire classical library.
There is another problem: the very limited Latin literary vocabulary. Latin is hard not because of its grammar (which, despite what my students say, is fairly simple; certainly so as compared to Greek), but because its tiny vocabulary forces each word to have so many meanings and nuances. Yet each Latin text, recapitulating the history of Latin literature, refers to itself just as it refers to all that has gone before it. Latin literary aesthetics insist on the careful deployment of repeated words, and authors expect that the reader remembers where a particular word (or its root) was last seen and connects the two passages. Each word has meaning within the context of the particular work and its web of repetitions, just as it has meaning within the context of Latin literature and its web of associations. Every piece of even the most basic Latin prose needs to be read with the attention one would give a poem; for Latin, the old principles of what is still called New Criticism are absolutely essential. Any given literary work in fact provides its own best commentary, and here there is room for innovation in translation through the imitation of a practice common in Bibles: a translation can provide through an apparatus at the bottom of the page a list of parallel passages within the work, and endeavor to keep the translation of key vocabulary items consistent. In this way, a translation can help to create the sort of reader that the original author may well have expected.
So I learned from my long work with the Latin Boethius and his Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most influential works of Latin literature from the time of its composition in the early 6th century C.E. When it began its life, it was the last work of a philosopher condemned to death for involvement in a political conspiracy, cast as a dialogue between himself in prison and Philosophy herself, who has come to save him from despair and to claim him for her own. Twenty years ago, Consolation was a chapter in a dissertation in progress; ten years ago it was a chapter in a book that promised another book entirely devoted to Consolation as a sequel; this sequel will appear in a year, and my translation has intervened.
Consolation is a philosophical text written in a mixture of prose and verse; there are 39 poems contained within it, in an amazing array of meters. These poems are integral to the texture of the text (if you will pardon the expression), and the poems are interrelated by their meters: those in the same meter are usually on similar topics and cry out to be read in the light of each other, as a sort of ongoing plot; unique meters lend a special value to their topics by the simple fact of their uniqueness. In all the long history of the translation of Consolation into English, from King Alfred through Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth I to the present day (if I were given to humility, I would be humbled by the history into which I have inserted myself), there has never been a translation that preserves the original meters. My decision to attempt a metrical translation was not prompted by a desire for innovation but for preservation: the Boethius that I know takes his poetry seriously, and if I only tried my hand at impromptu poetry based on my own talents and training, I should bore the reader and misrepresent my author (you may look at other modern translations of the Consolation for some distressing examples).
I was able to preserve Boethius' range of styles by keeping the prose sections formal, as befits a very academic dialogue between the prisoner of the text and Philosophy his muse, while allowing the poetry a greater syntactic range; but I tried to preserve a consistency in the translation of root words across the poetry and the prose, thus to make it clear to the reader by ear and by eye (through the apparatus that marks the parallels) where these words, these phrases, these ideas have appeared before and will appear again. I am not ashamed to say that I made constant use of a thesaurus, as I looked for words of a certain metrical shape to fit the rhythms of the various poems, words that could also be accommodated into various prose contexts. For me, a thesaurus presents the history of the English language, divided into words and ideas; and I came to realize that what I was doing, in the footsteps of Chaucer, was drawing on the history of my own language and bringing it up to my own day, much as Boethius certainly did for his language in his day. For Boethius viewed himself as the last classical philosopher, as the last Roman patriot, as the last Roman poet. All of ancient history, literary, philosophical, political, and religious (and I conclude that this is a religious work, as based on my own rather minute investigations into the text, whose details I try to preserve through my metrical translations, my word choices, and my apparatus), is summed up in Consolation.
A translation that desires to do justice to the complexity of the original needs to be complex itself; its mixture of prose and verse is part of its proud ambition, to encapsulate all of art and experience within the covers of a book. I found that the work of translation involved me in a literary and philosophical exercise much along the lines of the Consolation itself; at any rate, the bond that I feel between myself and my author, created through the often painful process of translation, goes beyond the mere fact that, when I published it and heaved a sigh of relief, I was just as old as Boethius was when he wrote it and was executed.
