Witnessing Societal Change through Translated Versions of The Lord of the Rings

1. On Translating Tolkien and the Reception in Greece

Many of the best English-language authors, "from William Faulkner to J.R.R. Tolkien, understood their art in terms of world creation and developed rich environments which could, indeed, support a variety of different characters" (Jenkins). Tolkien presents Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings, our world in a fantastic époque inhabited by human beings and fantastic creatures, with their social hierarchy, rules, languages, and culture. Shaping Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings across cultures must be a real challenge for translators, as the way the environment is referred to "invites participation, in many subtle ways" (Agøy 49), and the characters relate to the distant past through dream-memory (Flieger 99–112). Another decision facing translators is how they can portray the intense visual quality of the medieval dream vision (Amendt-Raduege) in target texts. In the Greek context, the work has been translated twice (in 1985 and 2001), by the same publisher (Kedros) and the same translator (Ms. Eugenia Hatzithanasi-Kollia). This situation may eliminate variation triggered by factors like translator habitus or institutional convention, and focuses on how societal change and narrative hierarchies alone may have impacted the target versions. The goal is highly significant in that it draws attention to and is likely to produce evidence for "a theory of language in society or, more precisely, of changing language in a changing society" (Blommaert 2, emphasis added), which focuses on cultural, social, political and historical aspects of a larger social system. The two versions seem to show eloquent signs of how the target societal environment has changed.

The first Greek translation of The Lord of the Rings appeared relatively late, after Dutch (1956), Swedish (1959), Polish (1961), Danish (1968), and German (1969) translations. Translation theorists have been keen on contrasting these first translations with subsequent versions in the respective languages, to examine the use of various discourse phenomena (style, proper name rendition, intertextual references) in portraying Middle-earth. Rainer Nagel contrasts two German versions to suggest that the new version of The Lord of the Rings (2000) "very often overshoots its target of modernising the text, of 'assimilating' it" ("New One" 48). Danny Orbach examines two Hebrew translations to suggest that the first (1977) is much richer "using Biblical and Talmudic idioms and giving the book a high air" (59) although it "does not take into account the diversity of stylistic levels in the original text" (61). The Jewish tradition, Orbach suggests, does not have a mythology like the European nations, so the available sources were the Bible and the Babylonian legends, which the new version eradicates. The question arises as to what differences the two Greek translated versions of The Lord of the Rings display in their attempt to adjust the medieval gloss of Middle-earth to present-day reality.

The study teases out types of variation which portray diverging aspects of reality in the two versions. It shows that the two Greek versions of The Lord of the Rings portray the world of Middle-earth in a manner relative to the socio-political morphology of the period immediately prior to publication. There is a range of themes which the two translation versions seem to register in a diverging manner. The present study draws attention to the signs of a changing society manifested discursively in the two translated versions. It suggests that mediatized communication affected the portrayal of reality in the second target version.

The reception of The Lord of the Rings in Greece, although warm, has been rather slow. Rita Ghesquiere unraveled the canonization process of (children's) translated literature and distinguished between dynamic/slow systems: "dynamic systems translate almost immediately, while slow systems wait until other translations confirm the success of the original book" (26). In Greece the publishing industry displayed features of a rather slow type of system. Around 1985, thirty years after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Kedros publishing house commissioned the translation hesitantly (interview with the publisher...