Translating Sophokles

Sophokles: The Complete Plays. Translated by Carl R. Mueller and Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek. Preface by Hugh Denard. New Hampshire: Smith and Kraus, 2000.

At its heart, the problem of trans lation is a philosophical dilemma. No matter the approach, no matter the intentions of the translators, the translation will not and cannot ever be the same as the original. The original (assuming it is worthy of translation) is a work of art--the organic product of an organic process. If we go back to the Poetics, we see that the true work of dramatic art is something whole and complete, something that cannot be broken down into its component parts. It is as dissoluble as the primary colors. On the other hand, translation is a secondary activity--a reworking of the original, the purple we get from mixing red and blue. Yet, if we spend too much time bemoaning the apparent disappearance of red and blue in the color purple, we lose the potential for synthesis and progress. If we stop translating masterpieces simply because translation is a fundamentally impossible task, we lose the potential for creating new works of art like the one that Carl R. Mueller and Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek have produced in their new seven-play volume of translations, Sophokles: The Complete Plays.

Professors of theatre at UCLA, Mueller and Krajewska-Wieczorek combine a kind of expertise and talent that ultimately circumvents the intensely complicated issues surrounding translation that Walter Benjamin points to in his 1923 preface to his own translation of Baudelaire's poetry, "The Task of the Translator." Those uninitiated in the intricacies of Benjamin's argument may believe what seems to be the most common-sense approach to the task of translation: the job of the translator involves rendering the original text so that the translation resembles it as closely as possible. Logically, it would seem that the content or the overall significance plays a primary role in this kind of rendering. Yet, as Paul De Man tells us, Benjamin insists that the meaning of the original text is not the translator's problem. ¹ The poet concentrates on conveying a meaning, while the translator focuses on the relationship of one language to another. Illogical on a superficial level, the argument makes sense when one takes into account Benjamin's orientation toward the notion of meaning in this context. For him, the meaning that the translator ignores concerns a word's analogous relationship to a concept in the world. Along the same lines, the translator deals with the relationship of words to words, without consideration for the original referent. ² And on Benjamin goes, spiraling into an intensely interesting consideration of the translator's work and delving into classical notions of mimesis. Yet, from a director's perspective--from the perspective of someone concerned with the works of Sophokles as pieces of theatre meant to be performed--such intellectual flights of definitional brilliance are impractical. In the theatre, we need translations that serve the needs of a production, and looking back over a century or so of critical responses to Sophokles in performance, it is amazing how often the critics point to the translation as the primary downfall of a given run.

A sampling of critical responses to Antigonê can be quite illuminating. For instance, in 1891, a New York Times reviewer notes that Dean Plumtre's translation is "poetic in form," and "preserve[s] a fair degree of literalness," but is "somewhat lacking in the quality of smoothness." ³ Eighty years later, in a 1971 review of a production of the Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald translation, Clive Barnes declares,

Although doubtless it aspires to poetry, it is unfortunately prose of the very kind that makes the adjective prosaic the word it is today. The adapters scatter clichés and commonplaces around like corn to hens, and sometimes this dull language is broken by chillingly modern phrases that a writer would hesitate over in a television soap opera . . . [The translation] is so far...