Lost in Translation?

Good translations are crucial since they make accessible what would otherwise require years of study. The problem, of course, lies in what is lost in the process turning one language into another.

One of the funniest scenes in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes in the woods outside Athens when Bottom the Weaver first begins to rehearse the play that he and his fellow workers intend to present at the wedding celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta. The mischievous Puck—no doubt commenting on the quality of Bottom’s performance—replaces the pretentious actor’s head with the head of a jackass. Bottom’s friend Peter Quince, coming upon him unexpectedly, cries, “Bless thee! Thou art translated!” and flees the scene in panic. “Translated” in Peter Quince’s sense means that he has been turned into something else, but it also means that he has been interpreted: in Puck’s “translation,” Bottom is a jackass.

Reliance on translation lies at the heart of what we teach at Wyoming Catholic College: translations of the Bible, the poems of Homer, the later Greek tragedians, historians, and philosophers, not to mention the Latin of Virgil, St. Augustine, and Boethius and the Italian of Dante. Good translations are crucial since they make accessible what would otherwise require years of study. The problem, of course, lies in what is lost in the process turning one language into another, because many nuances of sound and association drop away, all the subtleties that cannot really be supplied by imitations, footnotes, or explanations. Not until they get to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton do students read great works in their own language. At first, they might miss the comparative simplicity of the translated texts, which have already interpreted the foreign language and rendered it into easier modern English. Given time with the soul-deep resonance of their own language in the masterful expression of great minds, they come to treasure it, an experience that might lead them to undertake the hard work of mastering Greek, Latin, or Italian as well.

I was struck this week by what happens when translations fall away, not so much from the original, as from the earlier glories of English. Psalm 19 is a personal favorite and a kind of summation of education at Wyoming Catholic College, since begins by appealing to what we call “God’s First Book”—the evidence of the created world—and ends with Revelation itself. In the readings for Evening Prayer in Magnificat on Tuesday was the latter part of Psalm 19, and I read through it with a sense of deprivation in the translation (whichever one it is). Here is an example:

The fear of the Lord is holy,
abiding forever.
The decrees of the Lord are truth
and all of them just.

They are more to be desired than gold,
than the purest of gold,
and sweeter are they than honey,
than honey from the comb.

What I missed was the language of the Revised Standard Version in which I had first learned the Psalm and even memorized it at one point. Here are the same lines in the RSV:

The fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.

Read these aloud and you immediately feel the difference, I hope. Compare “the ordinances of the Lord are true,/and righteous altogether” with the largely monosyllabic rendering, “The decrees of the Lord are truth/and all of them just.” Even more telling is the difference between “sweeter are they than honey,/than honey from the comb” and the RSV rendering, “sweeter also than honey/and drippings of the honeycomb.” The newer version dutifully conveys the concept of honey, but the RSV lets the language focus, even in the very sound of the line, on the nature of honey, its golden slowness in dripping (coming as the image does immediately after “fine gold”). The real difference in effect comes from reading the lines continuously and experiencing the flow and gracefulness of the RSV and the lack of it in this new version. Not to be harsh, it feels like Sgt. Joe Friday from Dragnet had overseen the translation: Just the facts, ma’am.

In the overall work of translating a mighty biblical and classical tradition into the new context of 21st century America, what we should be after in translation is not simply denotative accuracy, but something almost sacramental, a way of making real again—making vividly present—the greatness of past accomplishment. That’s what we hope to do this March in Phoenix at our First Things Intellectual Retreat on Freedom. How do we translate the Athenian self-understanding of liberty in Pericles’ funeral oration into our current circumstances? How do we know that we comprehend St. Paul’s teaching on the “glorious liberty of the children of God” or Milton’s account of Eve’s free will in Paradise Lost?

Please join us in the work of translation.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

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The featured image is “Portrait of a scholar (Archimedes?)” (c. 1620) by Domenico Fetti, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It has been brightened for clarity.