Recent Trends in Classical Verse Translation

Recent Trends in Classical Verse Translation Steven J. Willett Shizuoka University of Art and Culture The vitality of verse translation depends on the vitality of the verse systems available to the translator. This obvious fact is easily forgotten in a postmodernist poetic culture that has largely discarded the extensive metrical resources of English, effectively leaving only free verse to the translator, and leaving that in such a deadened form it often lacks even the ghost of some regular meter lurking behind the arras.1 In drama and to a lesser extent lyric poetry we mostly find a protoplasmic verbiage , its dullness often dignified with the name “performance.” In narrative poetry, where the situation is slightly better, we occasionally meet strong iambic meters or well-regulated stress verse of the sort pioneered by C. Day Lewis and Richmond Lattimore, but more frequently must endure line after line of patternless stresses that expand and contract without reason in a sort of rhythmic bedlam often dignified with adjectives like “tough,” “muscular,” “taut,” “sinewy,” “clipped,” and “stac1 H. T. Kirby-Smith argues powerfully in The Origins of Free Verse (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996) 1–25 that free verse, if it is to succeed, “must depart in a distinctive and recognizable way from one or more conventions that have in the past governed the organization of the poetic line, or the stanza taken as a whole.” 222 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001) cato.” In the end, our rhythmical impoverishment appreciably saps but cannot, as we shall see, destroy the vitality of poetic translation. Against such an unpromising background, we are fortunate to have as many good translations as we have had the past few decades. The following survey will attempt to sift the good from the bad, draw attention to neglected work, and keep the vagaries of our contemporary verse practices clearly in focus while appraising verse translation. Its chronological ambit extends back roughly twenty years, but remains flexible enough to consider much earlier translations when current ones fall well below their quality. The presentation, however, avoids a strict diachronic approach in preference for a grouping by genre. GREEK LITERATURE 1. Homer, the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod Translating Homer is often thought to be a kind of heroic act, like scaling Mt. Everest without oxygen, and the product of the act a virtual touchstone for Classical translation. Homer is, in fact, quite easy to translate by comparison with drama or lyric poetry, and the modern history of Homeric translations demonstrates it. Since the eighteenth century, the Iliad and the Odyssey have been the most frequently translated texts in English. The never-ending stream of prose and verse renditions , many of the highest quality, attests not only to Homer’s dominant place in the Western canon but to the relative ease of Englishing him. Translators do not have to wrestle with the complex mix of meters, topicality, idiom, slang, reference, and myth they face in tragedy or comedy. Verse translators of Homer must, however, make two crucial decisions: the English meter they will use to represent the dactylic hexameter , and the treatment of formulaic language. Meter defines and constructs a long narrative poem. A long poem is, as the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova once said, virtually its meter.2 The formulaic language, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to define anything essential for our modern experience of narrative and is often, therefore, subject to cava2 Anatoly Nayman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, tr. Wendy Rosslyn (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1991) 17. WILLETT: RECENT TRENDS 223 lier treatment. Both decisions, along with selection of tonal register, will make or break Homeric translators. In the half-century since Lattimore published his groundbreaking translation of the Iliad in 1951, we have had ten major attempts to capture Homer in what passes for living verse. The Iliad has been translated by Fitzgerald (1974), Fagles (1990), Reck (1994) and Lombardo (1997); the Odyssey by Fitzgerald (1961), Lattimore (1965), Cook (1967), Mandelbaum (1990), Fagles (1996), and Lombardo (2000). I want to concentrate on the two pairs of translations by Fagles and Lombardo, which provide an almost perfect contrast in approach, reserving Cook, Mandelbaum and Reck for separate comment...