Retained in translation

What comes across, and doesn’t, when we change languages.

Our tutoring consultant recently participated in a reading of the Classical Greek tragic play, Antigone.  It was in translation, of course; he is not a scholar of that language, and neither were the participating students.  In fact two of them were Chinese, and struggled at times with the English of the translation.  He’s not sure how much they benefited from, or even understood, the exercise.

The event came about because several of the tutors noticed that,while every student was exposed to Shakespeare in some form during secondary school, few met the ancient tragedies that lay at the beginning of Western drama.  To fix this lack,  Antigone was chosen as being at once accessible and challenging, and our tutor took upon himself to find the best translation for the purpose.  He eventually decided upon one of them and made several copies available for the play-reading.  But he was comparing translations up to the day of the event, and it struck him how much they varied.  While the general gist of each speech remained, much changed in detail, more than he expected.  For instance, the extended metaphor of the city-state of Thebes as a storm-wracked ship was prominent in one, but almost absent from another.  What the original Greek must have looked like is open to conjecture; all we can conclude is that Greek and English are quite different languages.

Even among the languages we’re familiar with, it’s not quite possible to translate exactly.  “A boy went to the school” becomes inexact in Russian, which lacks articles, and so is “Boy went to school.”  Even so apparently Scottish a sentence as, “Ian plays the bagpipes” cannot be literally turned into Gaelic, since in that language the only verbs that have a present tense are the two forms of “to be.”  The closest we can come is, “Ian is at the playing of the bagpipes,” with “playing” a verbal noun.

Beyond this is the matter of poetry.  Antigone was originally in verse, a genre that relies as much on the sound and rhythm of words for its effect as on their meaning.  One can try to suggest something of the effect in another language, but at best it’s only a suggestion.  English words are shorter, English poetry is based on stress and not length, English words sound different; so the attempt is doomed to ultimate failure.

Why, then, even try?  We could leave the beauties of Classical Greek to those scholars who have the time and inclination to appreciate the language, and take their word for it.  That’s what we do for much foreign literature, and indeed for those sciences in which we’re not versed ourselves.  Why torture a long-dead language into something we fool ourselves into thinking we understand?

Well, something still comes across.  The Greeks asked questions to which we are still seeking the answers.  Between family loyalty, political stability and religious piety, which is the most important?  What is justice, and how do we reconcile it with the imperative for revenge?  How much pride is too much in a great man or woman?  Beyond the flavor or color of the language we use, we think these are worth asking, even for Chinese students in an English interpretation of Classical Greek.