From Troy to Belfast: Translation and Comparative Literature
In the early 1590s, Christopher Marlowe’s Elegies translated Ovid’s non-rhyming quantitative Latin elegiac couplets into rhyming pentameter. This is one example:
In summer’s heat, and mid-time of the day,
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay …
Then came Corinna in a long loose gown
Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down,
Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed
Or Lais of a thousand wooers sped
I snatched her gown; being thin, the harm was small
Yet strived she to be covered there withall,
And striving thus as one that would be cast,
Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.
Stark naked as she stood before my eye,
Not one wen in her body could I spy.
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me!
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I,
How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh!
Who speaks here? Is it the Latin poet, suddenly made accessible to English readers? (We don’t know what readers Marlowe personally envisaged in a society where much poetry was meant for manuscript circulation; these were published after his sudden death.) Or is the sexual conqueror a resident of 1590s London? The situation must be altered, if only because the events described ni English belong to a milieu with different assumptions about class and gender relations; for example, the ‘conquest’ might be greater if the visitor is a free (and married?) woman rather than a slave, a distinction not quite available in Marlowe’s England. Then, with every rhyming couplet being a winner, the jauntiness sets up a distinctive voice and a pace that I don’t believe is possible in the Latin.
Like so many translations, the version tries to maintain the double perspective between the ‘here and now’ and the foreign past which is possibly more glamorous, an age closer to legendary beauties like Lais.
Decisions must be made about where between those time and places to pitch the new work. As a translator, I am at present facing the challenge of producing a version that will read as though written in English, yet is true to the different nature of life in Naples fifty years ago, But now I speak as a reader, mentioning some issues raised by translations, especially of poetry, that have implications for students of comparative literature.
Translations and adaptations – the distinction is harder to make for that era – from Ovid, among others, were a major influence in Elizabethan English writing. Marlowe’s versions of Amores were important in Donne’s finding his voice. Golding’s Metamorphoses is famously important for much in Shakespeare. Chapman’s Homer may be little read in the post-Penguin age, but Keats memorably testified to its importance. Catullus too inspired many; Ben Jonson, in adapting part of ‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia’, shifts frankly to an English landscape:
Kiss, and score up wealthy sums
On my lips, thus hardly sundered,
While you breathe. First give a hundred,
Then a thousand, then another
Hundred, then unto the other
add a Thousand. and so more
Til you equal with the store
All the grass that Romney yields,
Or the sands in Chelsey fields
Or the drops in silver Thames
Studying Catullus should raise further issues: a man turning into Latin the Greek poems of a woman, Sappho, was also adapting poems of homosexual love to heterosexual situations.
Ovid was a major influence for a modern Irish writer as well as in Elizabethan English. Ciaran Carson’s versions of Ovid abandon any pretence that they are totally set in a distant time and place, with their overt references to the situation in Belfast and surrounds. They also abandon the illusion of a literal proximity to the original. Yet, these versions convey some thing I have not found in others; the nervous rhythms counter the suggestion of most versions that Ovid’s is a relatively cosy retelling of stories originally more terrifying. Perhaps it takes living ni Belfast in the last twenty years to develop a particular sense of what it is to live in a world where gratuitous violence can suddenly descend, where the forces that overrule us can be unpredictably benign or malign, and the demons within us ferocious and implacable. In his version of Metamorphoses XIlI,576-619, Carson reduces 44 lines to a long-lined version of the sonnet form, ending:
And then the squab engendered other birds innumerable. They wheeled
In pyrotechnics round the pyre. The Stukas, on the third approach, split
In two like Prods and Taigs. Scrabbed and pecked at one another. Sootflecks. Whirl-
Wind. Celtic loops and spirals chawed each other, fell down dead and splayed.
And every year from then to this, the Remember Memnon birds come back to re-enact
Their civil war They revel in it, burning out each other. And that’s a fact.
What country are we in? The grimly playful movement between a Roman’s telling of the Trojan event and Carson’s version of events in modern Ireland also offers a serious statement. It’s as though he has found in the ancient story a distancing method that also comes to the heart of the agonies he knows.
Carson’s concern with movement between languages is clear in the collection, First Language, that publishes this and other adaptations from Ovid. The book’s first poem has a French title, La Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi and is written in Irish; the next, ‘Second Language’ is written in English, describing his acquisition of a working language, and all that goes with it, starting with infancy. His previous book, Belfast Confetti, takes its name from a colloquial expression and has a dedication in Irish.
Ireland is a case where comparative literature study could look at a complex relationship of languages: Joyce and Heaney, for example, have commented on the language coming naturally to many an Irish writer, heir of a country whose language was crushed by a colonizing power, who also knows that English is the language they really think and feel in, and the language that leads to the outside world, while Irish is for them a language learned later. Heaney learned it well enough to win a prize for Irish in his school days.
One writer for whom Irish comes more naturally, though its literary use is a conscious decision, is Nuala ní Dhomnaill. The bilingual text in which I first read her work, Pharaoh’s Daughter, has English translations by some very good poets. Once again, in what sense are those English versions poems? and whose? Does this put the reader in a better or worse position for appreciating her than those coming to Dante through the old Temple Classics edition where the Italian on one page was mirrored by a prose version with (apparently) no claim to literary calibre?
“Ceist na Teangan’, translated by Paul Muldoon as ‘The Language Issue’ looks at the very issue of writing in a tongue that might have few potential readers:
I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,
then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.
The analogy with the story of Moses (named in the original Irish) offers fascinating possibilities: that a daughter from the centre of the dominant empire might nurture the imperilled child that one day could return to his own subject people and lead them to freedom.
Seamus Heaney comments aptly on Lord Longford’s ‘prettied-up’ version of an Irish poem:
And if we meet, as we may do,
At church or on the plain,
You’ll pass me by as I will you
Nor turn your head again,
Heaney contrasts it with Thomas Kinsella’s starker version, in An Duanaire 1600-1900; Poems of the Dispossessed:
In the chapel, in the abbey,
the churchyard or the open air,
if we two should chance to meet,
don’t look, and I won’t look at you.
As Heaney notes, this version, as well as being truer to an Irish landscape, ‘keeps closer to a speaking voice than to a flouncing lyric one, is terser, less comfortable.’
Typically, the gentry collecting and translating the works of the’ folk’ tend to smooth or to censor. Bible translations offer much scope for seeing how assumptions of the scholars of one culture affect their versions of others. Post-Victorian versions of The Song of Songs (No seething bowels for the modern reader!), or of Paul on the dangers of fornication, itself a contested version of the Greek porneia (Why ‘immorality’ as a synonym? Are there no other immoralities?) back off fast from matters that gentle readers had best not think about. And then there’s the verb question: since Hebrew verbs lack tenses in our sense, translators must make continual decisions In the light of their own and their receiving group’s assumptions.
The very name. The Bible, is a reminder of how meaning alters as a name passes through languages. The Greek plural of Biblos, transformed into Latin, has become singular by the time it is taken up in the English Reformation and beyond; politically significant, a mighty book with which to smite, profoundly altered from the many works from which it was built. How do we deal with the divine name? Modern hymns, singing to ‘Yahweh’, assume a familiarity with the divinity so alien to the original speakers who used the euphemism, ‘Adonai’, or ‘Lord’, that a definitive version of the sacred name is hard to find in the ancient texts.
John Bossy recently described the King James Version, intended for public liturgy, as ‘churchy’, whereas ‘Tyndale’s translation was for devotional, which had always meant for silent, reading.” This affects the resulting versions. Tyndale didn’t divide his version into verses, so he provides a continuing narrative rather than one which pauses continually, fitter for public recitation, for quick reference, or for controversialists marshalling supporting quotations.
The issue of immediate oral delivery, with no allowance for footnotes or explanations of foreign concepts, is most important for translations for the stage. If we read or watch a medieval miracle play, whatever the version, we are also inevitably watching a cultural event, depending on a range of things integral, say, to the fifteenth century, but potentially museum pieces to us Tony Harrison’s version is an interesting attempt to handle these, but he has tackled even remoter drama, first performed as part of Athenian religious festivals more than 2000 years ago. In The Trackers of Oxyrrinchus, he translates fragments of Satyr plays within the framework of a ‘modern’ play. Several of the issues mentioned above are explored here; so too are questions about the Apollonian bullying (that can result in the flaying of upstart Marsyas) always present when the rich and powerful claim to own ‘culture’, and the self-destructive brutalising of the unruly at the other end of the social ladder, whether satyrs, fellahin, or unemployed football hooligans.
A translation can be a way of handling political censorship. I recall accounts of Shakespeare productions in Eastern Europe. Thomas Wyatt, at the court of Henry VIII, translates a chorus from Seneca’s play, Thyestes:
Stand whoso list upon the slipper top
of courts estates and let me here rejoyce
And use me quyet without lett or stoppe,
Unknown in courte, that hath such brackish joyes.
Wyatt transforms the relatively sedate movement of Seneca’s almost platitudinous lines about the perils of life in high places into a more graphic response of life, and death, in a Tudor court; but, if anybody should challenge the propriety of such comment, what could be more innocuous than a versified version of a learned Latin writer? Or what could be more an adornment to the English court keen to improve its own image as a centre of cultivated humanism than a translation from Petrarch? Most commentators agree that the poem starting ‘Who so list to hunt, I know where is an hind. . ” refers to Anne Boleyn, a dangerous topic. As well as providing some cover in perilous places, such versions (in this case a very free adaptation from Petrarch) also allow writers to find a structure of rhetoric, of imagery, for the situation, sometimes using the experience of an acknowledged ‘superior’ culture as basis. That notion of the ‘superior’ culture is so often an issue!
Finally, consider Chaucer’s use of Dante in Troilus & Criseyde, a poem also set in Troy with a tale coming to England, via Boccaccio, in a process of adaptation and translation. Troilus, having at last been to bed with Criseyde, sings a hymn to Venus:
Benygne Love, thow holy bond of thynges,
Whoso wol grace and lyst the nought honouren,
Lo, his desire wol fle withouten wynges.
For noldestow of bounte hem socouren
That serven best and most alwey labouren,
Yet were al lost, that dar I wel seyn certes.
But yf thi grace passed our desertes. (III, 1261-7)
These lines daringly adapt a hymn to Mary from the close of Paradiso, which itself offers innovative views on the relation between sacred and profane love Chaucer’s version, and his placing of the lines in the pagan lover’s mouth, are both homage and intellectual challenge, a fitting note on which to conclude.
Notes
• Ciaran Carson’s First Language (1993) and Nuala ní Dhomnail’s Pharaoh’s Daughter (1991) are published by Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland. After I gave this paper, Louis de Paor kindly sent me Nuala ni Dhomnaill’s ‘Why I write in Irish, The corpse that sits up and talks back’, New York Times Book Review, 8 January 1995, which also discusses her ‘Ceist na Teangan’
Seamus Heaney is quoted from The Government of the Tongue, London: Faper, 1988, p.34, and John Bossy from his review of David Daniell’s William Tyndale: A Biography, Yale, 194 in London Review of Books, 23 February 1995, p.24. Tony Harrison’s play versions are published by Faber
The above was first given as a paper at a Conference on Comparative Literature at La Trobe University, 26 May,1995 and published in Tirra Lirra. 28. Spring 1996. I have made a few minor corrections and revisions. (Chris Watson, June 2023)