Editor’s Note: This is the second of a four-part essay on reception of minoritized translators of Classical Epic Poetry by Imaan Ansari.
Who is allowed to make mistakes and deviate from a distilled model of translation? How does one straddle faithfulness to an ancient text and response to or from a modern audience? Where is the balance that a translator must actualize between the pull of the original author and their own, if any, creative license? Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “The Translator’s Task” has long been the canonical text against which answers to these questions are measured.[1]
For instance, “The Translator’s Task” has served as a theoretical blueprint for how a translator should approach balancing both the source and target languages of one’s translation. The difficulty of translation that Benjamin picks up on is balancing both of the languages that are involved in the process.[2] Simply put, leaning towards one language may result in being less faithful to the other. A translation is often thought of as a way of communicating or illuminating a conversation to someone in a second medium if they do not understand or cannot access the first. Benjamin argues that an appeal to the audience is not appropriate for the translator to keep in mind, as it may cloud the integrity of their translation.[3]
The translator’s role is to act as an intermediary between the writer and another reader. Translation in this picture becomes a process by which the translator can bridge a gap. Benjamin clarifies that the nuances of language make it impossible for a translation to line up perfectly with its original.[4] Although a translation may demonstrate a basic resemblance with the source text, the translator often takes creative license.
Benjamin exposes an inherent lack of accuracy that a translation presents even when deeply working to emulate the original. After all, the widely known English versions of “A Translator’s Task” are indeed translations, such as the one I am citing by scholar Steven Randall. Randall renders Benjamin’s words on the relationship between a source text and its translation as the following: “Translation is a form. In order to grasp it, we must go back to the original.”[5] Randall’s word choice is ironic, since through being grandfathered-in by the name of Walter Benjamin, Randall speaks with such authority on the topic of translation, but fails to acknowledge in this sentence that his scholarship on “A Translator’s Task” is translation.
According to Benjamin, the difficulty to be objective lies in the fact that a translator cannot merely parrot the source text but is tasked with choosing words that make it come alive in another language or medium. He writes, “It is clear that a translation, no matter how good, cannot have any significance for the original.”[6] However, this position is paradoxical, given that the translator must pinpoint the first writer’s intention in order to stay true to what both work to connote.
Benjamin believes translation to exist in the “afterlife (Überleben) of the source text,” meaning that there is a separation only in time between the source text and its imminent translations.[7] It is interesting that Benjamin acknowledges the existence of “untranslatability.”[8] Benjamin’s standpoint on translation conflates translation with art.[9] Art fits into the metaphor of untranslatability, as the original artist is often thought to hold the authority and license over their piece, granting them the ability to make and justify their artistic choices. Benjamin, and Randall—through translating “A Translator’s Task”—demonstrate that the translator is also an artist who cultivates their own form of art inspired by an original work.
Benjamin’s original work, titled in German, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, demonstrates that translators and their translations are compared with scrutiny to the source texts from which they take inspiration. The literature of the Classics that has been “accepted” into the canon is overwhelmingly written by European male writers. The phrase, “be faithful to the text,” then turns into a burden rather than a rule of thumb, especially for female and translators of color, who are underrepresented.
This “faithfulness” that Benjamin and many other translation theorists call upon is almost always attributed to Robert Fagles. His translations, namely of the Aeneid and the Odyssey, are viewed as classroom standards, although he does not preserve every aspect of what makes these ancient texts “epic”: for example, the meter in which each work was written. Of course, maintaining meter is a stylistic choice, but one with which he is not met with scrutiny for forgoing. On the other hand, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, translator of a new version of the Aeneid published in 2021, held herself to maintaining the dactylic hexameter through keeping every English line of her translation to six feet.[10] Her faithfulness to the text takes another dimension by bringing the meter back to life, in spoken English.
Image of Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer and her translation of the Aeneid.[11]
Yet, Fagles is the one whom society deems synonymous to translation.. The Los Angeles Times opens a 1991 article, commemorating Fagles’ translation of the Iliad, with the words, “Robert Fagles’ translation of the Iliad opens with rage–the word he’s certain is perfect, the English equivalent he believes Homer would have chosen to launch his epic poem.”[12] The title of this article, “Practicing the Art of Losing Nothing in Translation,” also implies that Fagles is an artist who transcends barriers between languages.
The Los Angeles Times supports a 20th century translator, Robert Fagles, as being on par with Homer. Even the identity of Homer is often debated, as part of the so-called Homeric question.[13] The possibility that the name may stand in for multiple people further plays into the reverence of Fagles and his “Homeric swagger,” a phrase posthumously attributed to him by the New York Times.[14] Such a claim has yet to be made about Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, demonstrating the ways in which male translators have been widely and more readily praised while female translations have been largely ignored.
Imaan Ansari is a high school junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her parents immigrated to the US from India, so her experiences as a woman of color and as a first-generation American influence her passion for investigating and amplifying the contributions of minority groups to the Classics. Imaan has taken Latin for six years. She is also fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and aspires to study Sanskrit. At school, Imaan serves on the Student Senate, fulfilling roles such as Chair of Finance, overseeing the student budget, and Speaker, communicating the Senate’s initiatives to students, faculty, and staff. Imaan is the Editor-in-Chief of Diversion, the Modern Language magazine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Symposium, the Classics publication. She is the President of Classics Club and also leads a free peer Latin tutoring service. Outside of Classics, Imaan enjoys playing golf, as captain of the Varsity team, and has been playing violin in various orchestras for over ten years
notes
[1] Benjamin, W., and Randall, S. (2012) “The Translator’s Task,” in The Translation Studies Reader, L. Venuti (ed.). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 69–75.
[2] Ibid., 75.
[3] Ibid., 76.
[4] Ibid., 77.
[5] Ibid., 76.
[6] Ibid., 76.
[7] Ibid., 71.
[8] See also Apter, E.S. (2006) “Nothing is Translatable,” in The Translation Zone: A new comparative literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 85–94.
[9] Nabugodi, M. (2014) Pure language 2.0: Walter Benjamin’s theory of language and Translation Technology, Feedback. Available at: https://openhumanitiespress.org/feedback/literature/pure-language-2-0-walter-benjamins-theory-of-language-and-translation-technology/ (Accessed: 13 August 2023).
[10] Demanski, L. (2021) “A New Aeneid translation channels Vergil’s ‘pure Latin,’” University of Chicago News. Available at: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/new-aeneid-translation-channels-vergils-pure-latin (Accessed: 13 August 2023).
[11] https://thevisualist.org/2021/02/shadi-bartsch-the-aeneid/
[12] Sandomir, R. (1991) “Practicing the Art of Losing Nothing in Translation,” Los Angeles Times, 6 January. Available at: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-01-06-vw-10476-story.html (Accessed: 13 August 2023).
[13] West, M. (2011) “The Homeric Question Today,” JSTOR. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23208780 (Accessed: 21 August 2023).
[14] McGrath, C. (2008) “Robert Fagles, Translator of the Classics, Dies at 74,” New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/books/29fagles.html (Accessed: 13 August 2023).
