Roman Theories of Translation: Surpassing the Source by Siobhán McElduff (review)

This monograph aims to understand how the Romans conceptualized their translation of Greek literature. McElduff tackles a tremendous volume of material from a vast historical period, working with both poetry and prose in her search for a Roman theory of translation. Her basic assumption, as set forth in the introduction, is that the source text (ST) for Latin translators was not an entity to be faithfully adapted, but rather one to be competed against and, ideally, dominated in the cultural negotiation between Rome and conquered Greece.

Chapter 1 contains an overview of nonliterary translation. This introduction to topics such as bilingualism and official interpretes will be useful to beginners, though it offers little that is new. The book then proceeds roughly diachronically, beginning with Livius Andronicus’ and Ennius’ introduction of epic to Rome in chapter 2. Chapter 3 explores Roman comedy, arguing that the genre’s appropriation of Greek literature via translation is a strategy of containment used “to present a stereotype of Greekness that would fix the colonial subject as a category within Rome” (78). McElduff surveys, inter alia, Plautus’ didascalic references (66–72) and the Terentian prologues (85–94) in her effort to shed light on the contentious debate surrounding Latin adaptation of Greek New Comedy. In chapter 4, which is devoted to Cicero, McElduff observes an association between translation and elite Roman identity, asserting that the orator’s writing on the subject is deeply implicated in his political and social maneuverings. She also argues that Cicero saw translation as a civic endeavor aimed at making Rome culturally self-sufficient, though, the author suggests, the risk of losing his own voice in the process brought about the ultimate collapse of the orator’s project.

Chapter 5 covers the late Republican and early Augustan age, examining the works of Parthenius of Nicaea, Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, and Germanicus Caesar, in whom McElduff sees “ . . . a complicated nexus where translation had multiple functions” (156), among them philosophical, social, and literary. She concludes, however, that they find common ground in their use of Greek texts without regard for their original integrity. Chapter 6 closes the book by briefly considering the writing of the two Senecas, Polybius, Quintilian, Pliny the Younger, and Aulus Gellius. Here, McElduff emphasizes literary translation as an intellectual activity that served to delineate the boundaries of elite status, especially through its connection to rhetorical training. Once again, she sees free use of the ST as a persistent element of Roman translation. Following are a summarizing conclusion (187) and an appendix of Latin words for “translation” (189–96).

Several of McElduff’s ideas are illuminating, such as her observations on Plautus’ use of vortere as connected to physical transformation (72–73), on the orator qua translator of men, opinion, and literature (97–100), and on Horace’s effective use of the lyric I (138–39). Nevertheless, this book is, in many ways, deficient in method and argumentation. The author’s premise that “ . . . from Livius [Andronicus] onwards, Roman literary translators all translate in the same way” (43) is flawed, based as it is upon only a very small sample of Latin translations actually comparable to their Greek originals. In reality, this question (particularly as it relates to Republican translation) is obscured by a gaping lack of evidence. But McElduff’s choice not to study this literary phenomenon through close comparison of Greek originals to their Latin adaptations (4) weakens the import of this hypothesis, even when it might be borne out. Her statement, for instance, that the Ilias Latina’s “free attitude toward its ST shows that it stood within the main track of Roman translation” (170) goes unsubstantiated by textual evidence. When she does compare Greek models and their Latin translations, the Greek text is given only in English—a methodologically rather questionable procedure. For instance, when examining the adaptation of Augustus’ Res Gestae into Greek, McElduff argues that the superscriptions of...