Classics professor produces new 'American' translation of Latin classic
November 12, 2007
Joel C. Relihan, professor of classics, has produced a new translation of Apuleius's Latin classic, The Golden Ass (Or, A Book of Changes). The project, which took more than a year, immersed him daily in a work of literature he has long admired.
''The Golden Ass was one of the few texts that I reread for fun in graduate school,'' Relihan says. ''It is a well-known book in Classical circles, the only intact piece of prose fiction to survive from Roman antiquity, and a book of almost incalculable influence in the Renaissance, so I was a little surprised to discover that many people have not heard of it. At any rate, they look at me funny when they see the title and wonder whether I am all of a sudden some sort of soft-core pornographer.''
Of course, Relihan is nothing of the kind. Although he describes the storyline as ''at times disturbingly obscene,'' he also calls it ''bizarre, grotesque, horribly violent and ultimately sincerely religious.'' The whole of it is much more than, and much more interesting than, its most famous component piece, the lengthy tale of Cupid and Psyche, which was the ancestor of such modern fairy tales as Beauty and the Beast.
These tales from the second century A.D. are narrated by Lucius, a young man who is transformed into an ass (as in donkey) and embarks on a number of adventures that are rife with peril and pleasure. As a literary form the book is considered a ''romance,'' not in the Harlequin fiction sense, but in the sense of ''a popular genre that is in essence a survivor's tale of descent into a nightmare world of loss and eventual recovery of identity,'' as Relihan writes in the book's introduction, citing the literary critic Northrop Frye.
The plot, however, is at times secondary to the ornate style, which Relihan says is ''marked by striking combinations of archaic vocabulary and made-up words, by elaborate rhetorical structures, by fancy rhythm and jingling rhyme.'' To translate this high-flown Latin into modern American English was no small feat.
''The challenge was to create a style that operated on roughly the same wavelength as Apuleius's own,'' Relihan says, ''that would strike a modern reader, particularly the modern American college student, as agreeably and comprehensibly weird, but not impenetrably obtuse.... I did not try to mimic Apuleius's stylistic and rhetorical effects in any sort of one-to-one mapping. Apuleius has rhythms, rhymes, and verbal play, and so do I, but what element appears when is determined by the limitations and possibilities of English and of my own resourcefulness.''
Alliteration is another striking element of Apuleius's writing and of Relihan's translation, which is full of such delightful phrases as ''pusillanimous procrastination,'' ''bedecked and bedizened'' and ''this slow-footed, molasses-in-January ass of all asses.'' Relihan is not afraid of anachronism, here or elsewhere: while the Romans had January, they did not have molasses.
All of these elements and flourishes make the book highly readable-and listenable. The publisher's web site (http://www.hackettpublishing.com) features excerpts from the translation read aloud by Relihan. Soon it will also offer an expanded version of the book's already detailed index, which Relihan created as a tool for scholars.
Relihan realizes that translation is an ''imperfect process'' and that ''the original will always contain far more than any translation can express.'' Still, he maintains that there is great value in translating classic works into English. Modern translations, he notes, make the works more accessible, fresh and up-to-date for the contemporary American reader.
''I wish that I could have accomplished my Platonic ideal of the perfect translation,'' Relihan says, ''which would have been a combination of the erudition of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the linguistic wit of S.J. Perelman, the foremost American comic prose stylist of the twentieth century (if I may be allowed my own eccentric opinion), but I think I succeeded well enough.''