The Poetics of Translation 9780300160789

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The Poetics of Translation

/ too am untranslatable. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Willis Barnstone

The Poetics of

Translation

History, Theory, Practice

Yak University Press New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College. Copyright €> 1993 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barnstone, Willis, 1927The poetics of translation : history, theory, practice / Willis Barnstone. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-05189-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-300-06300-4 U Translating and interpreting. 2. Bible—Versions—History. I. Title. P306.B287 1993 418V02—dc20 92-31515 GP A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

To David Michael Hertz for tuning the word and to Lowry Nelson, Jr., for rectifying mine

As S. Augustine saiih; A man had rather be with his dogge then with a stranger (whose tongue is strange unto him). Miles Smith, preface to the King James Version To a thousand cavils one answer is sufficient; the purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside. Samuel Johnson, Life of Pope [Greco-Roman writers] interest us, they matter to us, Í repeat, as errors, not as masterpieces. We have scarcely anything to learn from them because of what they said, thought, and sang, but simply because they were, because they existed, because, poor men like ourselves, they swam desperately as we do in the perennial shipwreck of life. José Ortega y Gasset, "Misery and Splendor of Translation" Think of the Chinese translating the Sanskrit texts, or the Jews translating in Alexandria the Hebrew Testament and the Romans translating the Greeks. The history of the different civilizations is the history of their translations. Each civilization, each soul, is different, unique. Translation is our way to face this otherness of the universe and history. Octavio Paz in conversation with Edwin Honig Translation saves you from your contemporaries. Kenneth Rexroth, "The Poet as Translator"

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Part 1 • Introduction and General Issues 1 Introduction The other Babel 2 Problems and Parables Meanings of a sign, or Parable of the Greek moving van Translation as part of a general theory of literature Fifteen quick looks at the philosophy of literalism Literalism Fidelity and translatability Misalliance of theory and practice How through false translation into and from the Bible Jesus ceased io be a Jew Thirteen quick looks at sacred originals Translation as the double art Originality, translation, and tradition Translation as the writer's apprenticeship Eighteen quick looks at the translator's dictionaries, or A guide to guides of truth and error The translator as a freely creative person or an erroneous slob Translation as an instrument of literary and political reform The author and translator: God and his servant Translation as dream, or Parable of the dreaming scrivener God, the eternal translator

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Part 2 • History: The Bible as Paradigm of Translation 3. Prehistory of the Bible and Its Invisible Translations Down from Babel with the sundered word of God

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Contents Was Babel a Sumerian ziggurat at Ur? Starting with Abraham of Ur 4. History of the Bible and Its Flagrant Translations The naming of the "little books" of the Bible, or What a shame we call those books the Old and New Testaments The Hebrew Bible The creation of the Septuagint The creation of the New Testament by invisible and secret translations Hermeneia, or How the Christian Fathers prepared authorized versions of the Bible The Bible in Europe after Jerome A vagabond Bible, picking up clothes and dropping rags here and there, wanders into England The book of the world devised by forty and seven scholars appointed by King James I of England

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Part 3 • Theory 5. Before the Twentieth Century The good old days when theory wasn't theory 6. Signs of Our Time: A Semiotic Slant Translation theory An exaltation of theorists Walter Benjamin and his translator-angel carrying a hermetic third language into the metaworld Benjamins parable The translator's task

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Part 4 • Practice An ABC of Translating Poetry

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Notes Bibliography Credits Index

273 279 292 293

Acknowledgments

A poet or scholar writes in solitude with the voices of other books near by. The words of Aristeas, Horace, Augustine, Jerome, Dryden, Herder jakobson, and Steiner have been with me all these years. But I do not have a long list of friends and colleagues who gave me information and hints or tore the manuscript apart and mended it. That might have been good. This book was put together in solitude with those other written voices in my ear. Yet there have been friends whose very presence and goodwill have been crucial. Once in Buenos Aires—it was 1975 during the Guerra Sucia (the Dirty War)— Jorge Luis Borges, with whom I was working on the translation of his sonnets, conveyed through Carlos Frías that I had not found a good rhyme to go with "Walt Whitman," the last two words of a poem. I protested, and then Frías said diplomatically but firmly: "Borges says to try harder." Those words have sustained me for many years and have made things easier. Matei Calinescu, by his own example, has set me to work. James Halporn prepared me for the sins of the Latin class Latin test when I took his course at Columbia University in translating Cicero's De senecíute. My colleague David Hertz, to whom (along with Lowry Nelson) I dedicate this book, has shared hot chocolate breaks in the cement tower in which I have spent much of my adult life, night after night. The janitors have offered friendly reality after midnight in this otherwise deserted monster building. When I escape with a laptop computer to the Cycladic island of Serifos, my sons and daughter are there and they are the best and most candid critics. In Oakland, California, I finished this volume in the house of Sarah Handler, who praised me generously for every page. I thank my editors at Yale University Press: Ellen Graham, for making me finish this, and Susan Laity, perfect editor, whose good hand and spirit determined the book's final contours. Three friends have gone over the manuscript, and they are exceptions who make up my stout list of three. Lowry Nelson, Jr., meticulously gave the text his time and generously shared the plenitude of his polyglot knowledge and wisdom, Sharon Sieber read the versions, made creative suggestions, and did not let me

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Acknowledgments take any shoddy trips into facility or recognizable error, and Matei Calinescu read the proofs (as 1 have read his), in our pact to support and save each other. I also wish to thank James S. Ackerman, professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, for his austere and helpful reading of "How through False Translation into and from the Bible Jesus Ceased To Be a Jew." With the exception of epigraphs, all translations are my own unless otherwise noted. All unidentified quotations from the Bible are from the Revised Standard Version.

PART

I

Introduction and General Issues

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1 IIntroduction

Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land ofShinar and settled there.... Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Genesis 11:1-9

The Other Babel With the fall of Babel, God dispersed the word, gave us tongues and the solitude of difference, and also the impossible but pleasurable duty to repair our separation. After the destruction the deity implicitly challenged us to look up again and rebuild the tower of another Babel. The act of translation is the other Babel, that impossible tower. From its high observation circle, the eye glances back an instant, uncertain, through time's distorting glass and then glares ahead, in a new distorting mirror, to see the ever-changing places where new Babels will temporarily be reconstructed.

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Introduction and General Issues Some think the oral or graphic words of the past can really be heard, seen, and transported intact, word by word, note by note, brick by tírick to a new site and erected again in stunning duplication. They call this process translatio, or "moving," "transportation," or "translation." Some think of translatio as realistic—photography or even photocopying. Let them think so. The scientists who cut up matter, even the most invisible world stuff, can actually have precise information from their experiments transferred into other languages in which nothing essential is added or lost. Externally, the reports carried over may look and sound different, but that is only appearance. The sense, the meaning, is transferred intact. And such translatio, which if properly done is risk-free, is an innocent, tedious, and exacting task, with no decorative frills. But the work of the singer, the poet, the Bible-maker, and scribe is different, and the carriers of the word stumble at every step on the road to revelation. Their way is as crooked as a butterfly's ruler. Losing their way, they must add and alter routes. And to cart their words out of the past, they invent vehicles in which nothing fits exactly. They gamble with their talent, and in the end are condemned to surprise and the art and infidelity of re-creation. With the deconstruction of Babel, God gave us not only tongues and their anxiety but a knowledge of mutability. After Babel nothing can be seen as fixed, for the eye has discovered that with each passing second every living thing transforms and is translated anew. Even those things inert, dead, are not fixed but are distorting, translating. The eye itself contributes to that process of recreation. After Babel we witness the inconstant yet eternal building of the other Babel. THE POETICS OF TRANSLATION

In choosing its title, I sought to make clear this book's scope and intentions—to brighten the focus on translation as art. I wish to distinguish literary translation, including the ancient art of imitation, from routine information transfer, such as the interlingual rewording of scientific or business documents. Poetry is central, being the ultimate challenge at the complex heart of the art of literary translation. More so than prose, poetry, because of its prosody, is polysemous, with many layers of meaning—aesthetic, phonic, and expressive—to transpose between tongues. The book's subtitle refers to its ancillary concerns. To give a notion of the history of translation I have used as the central paradigm the history of the translation of the Bible, the most translated book in the world and a work containing the main genres of writing. With regard to theory, after a discussion of general issues and theory from a linguistic and then a semiotic slant, I look closely at Walter Benjamin's "Task of the Translator," which is a little world made cunningly of theory, literary translation, and language. Benjamin's radical, Kabbalistic spirit finds in translation the

Introduction way to reconstitute pure universal language, yet he dismisses with disdain the transfer of subject matter and proposes an utterly word-for-word literality that, he acknowledges, threatens comprehensibility. At first glance his means seem to negate the very notion of translatability, but, as we shall see, although his strategy will not guide us to an empirical rendering of Sappho into German or English, it lets us enter, at least vicariously and sympathetically, the intense fantasy realm of his third, paradisial language, the reine Sprache. Whether we share his messianic purpose of ultimate residence in that pre-Fall linguistic terrain, in mapping our way Benjamin takes us through the enigmas centered within the art and theory of translation. The last section of this book, practice, is a personal ABC of translation, a guide for the poet translator. It is eclectic, almost libertarian in presentation, offering diverse approaches under whatever name the translation process may assume. The ABC singles out no approach for special benediction, but does ask that each method be named and acknowledged. Once acknowledged, the whole method, fact, and matter of translation may be forgotten so that the poem before us can be read as an original act. The poem deserves to be seen as a naked creature, and, as Pierre Grange observed, "It is sinful and sad to mark the face of a poem, beautiful in translation, with scabs of authentic history" (Dream Time 77). In this ABC, fidelity reflects a debt not only to a paraphrasable literal meaning but to its aesthetic quality. It should be said, however, thai fidelity is a lofty word, like virtue or truth or good, claimed by diverse and opposing approaches to translation. In my discussion of the Bay Psalm Book, I suggest that firm principle and actual practice often separate soon after having made vows of mutual devotion; in the instance of Benjamin, the dichotomy between principle and practice actually inspired him toward his ideal of pure language. The divorce between principle and practice, moreover, even in academic studies, seems to offend nobody. The subject of this book is literary translation. 1 have wished to emphasize the poet translator's virtual autonomy, art, and originality. In speaking of originality and poetry translation, Octavio Paz deftly universalizes the art, asserting the primacy of translation in every speech act. "Originality in a given translation is," Paz contends with a wink, "untrue in that no text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation" (Traducción 9). After engaging in this early example of deconstructive observation in which he puts into doubt the originality, primacy, and stability of any text and thereby, like Derrida, questions the hierarchical relation in the opposition of original and translation, Paz extends the paradoxical argument, taking us full circle in order to claim the opposite, that "all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such constitutes a text" (9). Looking, then, for a key word to carry the notion of both art and method, I went back to a title I had used for an earlier book, The Poetics of Ecstasy, which

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Introduction and General Issues gave me The Poetics of Translation. The word poetics suggests formal aspects of art, problems that will be systematically treated, such as prosody (including meter, rhyme, and stanzaic structure), translatability, fidelity and methodology ("word-for-word" literal versus "sense-for-sense" literary renderings), equivalence and difference (phonic and syntactic), diction (archaizing versus contemporizing), and syntax (original versus naturalized). Poetics also suggests taxonomy, the classification and naming of types of translations, such as John Dryden's metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation or Novalis' grammatical modified, and mythical And, primarily perhaps, the word points to theory and methodology, which have been dealt with variously from biblical, Greek, and Roman times to the twentieth century. More recently, the emphasis has been on linguistic and structuralist approaches, on early Russian Formalism and semiotics, and on the rapid accumulation of deconstruction dicta by Jacques Derrida and his American counterparts. TRANSLATION THEORY AND LITERARY THEORY

The histories of translation theory and its practice constantly intersect. Before the twentieth century, theory has a pragmatic focus and is actually a history of prevailing or recommended practice, while in our century theory qua theory prevails, with relatively little relevance to its literary use. Theory and practice today, in every respect, operate in isolation from one another in books on translation and in translations themselves. Insofar as translation is seen as merely a restricted literary activity—transferring aesthetically framed information between languages—it has generated diverse, learned, and sometimes rhapsodic studies. In the Alexandrian (second century B.C.) Letter of Aristeas, we have the first real investigation of the translation process, an extraordinary, legendary work concerning the translation of the Septuagint Bible, allegedly achieved in seventy-two days by seventy-two (or seventy) scholars who under divine guidance arrived independently at perfect and identical versions. This account, which also provides the context for an intellectual history of Alexandrian Jews and Greeks, fixes translation between praxis and miracle. Although we do not possess an Aristotle to establish a single, prevailing poetics, we do have important writings by Horace, Quintilian, Jerome, Du Bellay, Tytler, Dryden, Pope, Goethe, Herder, Arnold, Croce, Benjamin, Ortega, Wittgenstein, Jakobson, Derrida, Steiner, and Eco. The late Czech linguist Jifi Levy—whose book Czech Theories of Translation (1957), which emphasizes linguistics and theory, is perhaps the most ambitious and comprehensive work on translation in the modern period—has dourly lumped the work of all earlier studies of literary translation as empirical observations or essayistic aphorisms. Levy is correct that earlier studies of the art of linguistic transformation contain empirical observations and essayistic aphorisms, but his either / or strictures suggest a prescriptive rigidity that ignores the

Introduction proto-semiotic discrimination of Augustine, the insights of Johann Gottfried von Herder, the meditations of Benjamin, and even the structuralist clarifications of Roman Jakobson (who was for a time a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle), to name a few seminal writers who have written eloquently about translation. What is an art is often suspect and patronized, however, especially when translation is seen as merely correct information transfer. It is bad thinking, though common, to flail or ignore those who concern themselves with the literary word in translation theory. In reality, the theoretical problems of literary translation are far more complex, sophisticated, and ultimately meaningful—at least for the arts—than linguistic analyses of models relating to information transfer. Yet the major documents, old and recent, whether the focus is literary or language science, will weather restrictive comments. Levy's terrible comment on all earlier studies, frequently quoted by other detractors, is foolish But the question is not whether those writers who have written about translation are major, minor, wise, or even foolish, nor is it about a division between scientific linguists and literary figures. Such divisive labeling is odious. The key question is whether the activity of translation itself is to be seen as separate from or intrinsic to general theories of literature and language. It is my view that when translation is considered a transforming principle, a fundamental and vital ingredient in perception, writing, reading, and rereading, then its study, by necessity, takes its place as an essential element in any general theory of literature, ranging from Aristotle to recent reading theory and semiotics. Translation theory and literary theory come together in the act common to them both: reading. Reading is an act of interpretation, which is itself an act of translation (an intralingual translation from graphic sign to mind). Harold Bloom asserts that "'interpretation' once meant 'translation,' and still does" (Map of Misreading 85). Bloom, George Steiner, and Fredric Jameson all remind us that reading and translation are intermingled activities. In The Prison-House of Language, Jameson describes the means of developing a new literary system as one of translating the diction of the old one to the new terminology (132). In short, and with innumerable applications, reading is a form of translation, and, conversely, translation is obviously a form of intense reading. Given these intimacies, it impoverishes us not to think of translation theory as essential in literary theory, and of both notions as necessary to a general field theory of literature. Hence reading is translation and translation is reading. This aphorism can be applied specifically, with all its qualifications and quirks. Translation tends to be a certain kind of reading, an ''intensive reading" of the original text, which as a result becomes an "interpretive reading," or, as John Hollander has pointed out, a reading that functions as an "interpretive translation" ("Versions, Interpretations" 214-16). Similarly, writing is translation and translation is writing. The very essence of the activity of writing is that at every millisecond of the writing process the

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Introduction and General Issues writer is simultaneously interpreting, transforming, encoding, and translating data into meaningful letters and words, and at every millisecond of the translation process the translator is the writer, performing the same activities. Jackson Matthews comments on Paul Valéry's coupling of writing and translation: "At moments Valéry seemed to think of translation as the model of all writing: 'Writing anything at all, as soon as the act of writing requires a certain amount of thought and is not a mechanical and unbroken inscribing of spontaneous inner speech, is a work of translation exactly comparable to that of transmuting a text from one language into another"' (in Valéry, "Translations" 75). At the same time the translator, according to Valéry, who of course saw his writer as a formalist seeking meanings to match the poet's already discovered harmonious words, is the ideal writer. Valéry's view is only one specific fleshing out of the notion of translator-as-writer, narrowly in keeping with his own formalist, language-biased ideals of poetry, but his views give a special advantage to the translator, the "inventor of forms": "It would seem then that Valéry considered the translator as an original artist working (like a Chinese miniaturist) within severer limits and for this reason composing in a purer medium than an original poet" (Matthews in Valéry, "Translations" 74). Valéry's lifelong experience of writing and translation equates these two activities, which is not only right in theory but is, in all wider understanding of translation, the practical experience for any writer and translator, playwright and director, choreographer and dancer. The original titles are interchangeable, writer and translator. In the deeper or lighter sense of their resonance, they are one. Because translation then comprises the transforming principle at the heart of all literary activity, any diffidence with regard to it is out of place for either its formal study or its creations. Yet, as we shall see, such diffidence, in the form of shame or concealment of shame, is perfectly ordinary. THE SCARLET BRAND OF T FOR "TRANSLATION"

In literary translation the source author and the translator commonly set up a dialogical relationship, instigated for chronological reasons by the translator, and then parent and child struggle for primacy. In his essay on Franz Kafka and his precursors, Jorge Luis Borges points out that a later author may alter the text of the precursor as decisively as he or she is influenced by the precursor. So too the translator not only receives from the precursor but recognizes and resurrects the author and actively determines our understanding, reception, and evaluation of the source in a re-creation that ultimately vies with the "original" for authority and even originality. The agon between source and receptor authors is inherent in struggles concerning the eternally unstable canons and traditions of general literature. Because a literary translation is a work of literature, its existence and formation can be studied only within a theory of literature—whether it be from Athens, Paris, or New Haven. In this light, the question of originality which has

Introduction always obsessed the literary mind concerns source author and translator authors alike. Insofar as a new work of literature in a tradition needs to prove its originality rather than its base dependence on precursors, so an outstanding literary translation, suffering under the stigma of dependence on a source precursor, mitigates the shame of translation by concealing the sources and thereby taking on the respectability of original authorship. So the New Testament, most of which is translated from lost sources, is presented as original gospel, not translation; so the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible is popularly perceived to be God's words, delivered by the Creator in English and sacredly original; so Noah and his flood purport to be unique rather than a late reincarnation of two millennia of Mesopotamian flood stories; so Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus stands alone, without reference to Chaucer's genius in revising versions from Boccaccio and from French epic love poetry, so Richard Crashaw's close translation of Saint Teresa's famous "Vivo sin vivir en mí" (itself an intralingual glosa of a traditional anonymous poem) goes unrecognized as a translation of a translation in all editions of Crashaw's writings; so even W. B. Yeats's "When You Are Old" (a close version of Pierre de Ronsard's most famous sonnet), is exonerated from the shame of translation by means of a misleading footnote in David Daiches* section of M. H. Abrams' Norton Anthology of English Literature: "A poem suggested by a sonnet of the 16th-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard; it begins 'Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle' ('When you are old, sitting at evening by candle light') but ends very differently from Yeats's poem" (1345). The words "but ends very differently from Yeats's poem" (a disputable assertion) mean to suggest that by its original ending, belonging to Yeats alone, the poem is more than a mere translation, and therefore worthy of our attention. In the first part of our century Ezra Pound was "the great mover," "the grant translateur," to use the title held by Chaucer for his original writings. And Pound's original corpus is essentially linked to or derived from translation and textual memories of translation. The reception of his work reflects all the neuroses of translationitis. The critical community has always been troubled and ambivalent about his rendition in Cathay of poems by Li Bai (Li Po). Cathay is either derided for its howlers by American and British Chinese scholars who discern literary translation as an accurate crib for deciphering original texts in Chinese or grudgingly praised by literary admirers who nevertheless remain uncomfortable about receiving a beautiful translation as an equal among equals and prefer to see it through Pound's own confusing guises that transform it into a semi-mythical work by a Japanese named Rihaku. If accepted as Pound's own rather close literary rendering, Cathay cannot, as translation, be considered to have the same authority and value as Pound's original work. So Cathay, despite its good name, still inhabits its own literary no man's land. The shame of translation is real, and, alas, universal, even though superficial and absurd, more real and more traumatic than Harold Bloom's related "anxiety of influence" (a similar dialogical battle between authors in a tradition).

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Introduction and General Issues To counter the scarlet brand of T for Translation which the translator must wear prominently displayed, much secular literary translation before our century, and specifically after the late Middle Ages, has taken the form of what Dryden calls imitation, or near imitation, a very free version in which the source text is subservient to the near-autonomous translation. Hence we have Edward Fitzgerald's Rubâiyât, a total re-creation, almost invention, of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam; George Chapman's ecstatic version of Homer (which enraptured John Keats); and Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey, which defined not Homer's Greek heroes but the prosodie speech and comportment of eighteenth-century English gentlemen. Of Pope's Iliad, L G. Kelly says, "This is Homer in a powdered wig declaiming in a baroque theatre" (True Interpreter 59). These are examples of earlier translations, under transparent cloaks, which almost pass as originals. Although the letter T for Translation, or the incriminating Theft by an adulterer of a virgin text, remains decipherable on the book jacket and on the poems themselves, by one means or another its glowing shame is muted and absorbed into the achievement or great name of the translator who has the fame and cover of being, in his own right, an original author. There are those who come to the aid of translation, who see it not only as a translingual activity but place it clearly and dominantly in the transformational act of thinking, reading, writing, and interpreting. Yes, translation in its larger sense may conquer the world of mind, writing, and existence itself, for ever since God translated himself into being, we imitate that furious activity until we die. We translate ourselves from bed to our feet, from sleep to awakening, from darkness to sunlight, from one level of dream and consciousness to another and back. But less grandiosly there remains the problem of ordinary literary translation. We must not only define original literature and translation and everything in between but, once the beast of a translation is sighted, trapped, and named, determine what value to give it. What place in literature is there for literary translation? Is a literary translation literature? G. N. Devy, in a recent study of translation theory, confronts one aspect of this question with direct lucidity: "A literary translation has a double existence as a work of literature, and as a work of translation. Those who do not know the original language tend to look at it as literature, those who do know the original look at it as a secondary product of translation" ("Translation Theory" 58). Translation does all the expressive, imaginative things of ordinary literature. But, as Devy states, "While creative literature has received ample attention by critics and philosophers, literary translation has no privilege of having a well developed philosophy of beauty in translation" (65). What do we do with an orphan of dubious parentage? And is translation, as J. Hillis Miller stated in Bologna in 1988 (quoted in Devy 65), a "wandering existence in perpetual exile"? After George Steiner's After Babel, the most eloquent recent apologia for the translator as artist appears in Susan Bassnett-McGuire's jewel of a book on trans-

Introduction lation, a uniformly insightful study disguised in the Methuen New Accents format as an "introduction/* presented under the plain title Translation Studies. Bassnett-McGuire discusses Renaissance translators who were, in that period of discovery, imbued with a spirit of original creation. To the translators of the day such as Thomas Wyatt, the earl of Surrey, and Chapman, she relates the Platonic notion of divine inspiration of poetry: 'The Platonic doctrine of the divine inspiration of poetry clearly had repercussions for the translator, in that it was deemed possible for the 'spirit* or 'tone* of the original to be recreated in another cultural context. The translator, therefore, is seeking to bring about a 'transmigration* of the original text, which he approaches on both a technical and metaphysical level, as a skilled equal with duties and responsibilities both to the original author and the audience*' (55). In Renaissance England and France, in a period swelling with discovery and innovation, the translator was a radical artist and intellectual, bringing in and ordering the past, altering national traditions of writing and thought. The translator as beggar at the church door, the scribe or servant, does not describe a man who could lose his head for a phrase and intoxicated the generations of Wyatt, Dryden, Pope, Shelley, and Pound. So the translator has had many postures, from Puritan shame to revolutionary exuberance. His or her work appears today under many lights: shadowy service of a mean sort; chiaroscuro disguise to pass for real; and, rarely, the bright arrogance of an Edward Fitzgerald, who wrote in a letter to E. B. Cowell, "It is an amusement to me to take what liberties I like with these Persians, who . . . are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little Art to shape them" (Fitzgerald to His Friends 103). What is missing, what has always been missing, is a fair and rational approach to the reading of translation. The double authorship has inevitably confused reader and critics, who must come to terms with the enigma of originality that has afflicted all reasonable criteria of judgment. JUDGING TRANSLATION AS LITERATURE

There is translation and translation. Jakobson speaks of ordinary translation as "interlingual transposition." Yet since synonymy and full equivalence are impossible, "poetic art is therefore technically untranslatable" (BassnettMcGuire, Translation Studies 15)—but only in an absolute sense. If we seek nearfull equivalence, the best we can hope for is "creative transposition," with an emphasis on "creative" if the translation is literary. But how do we judge the translation? Are we to limit ourselves to the linguistic possibility of achieving equivalence, and shape our judgment to the degree that this equivalence, ordinary or creative, literal or free, is accomplished? Or do we consider and judge the translated text on its own, as an autonomous aesthetic object?

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Introduction and General Issues I think we can and should do both: measure and describe the degree of achieved equivalence (naming the method will usually do—metaphrase, translation, imitation), and then move on to the more important matter of evaluating the translation as we would any discrete semantic and aesthetic unit. But how do we accomplish the latter? There are many obstacles in the way of literary reception of translation. There is a tradition working to deflate the notion of true achievement in literary translation, meanly according it secondary and shadowy status. At one extreme, translation may be a scholarly crib or interlinear gloss to return us to the original. Conversely, old and modern Edward Fitzgeralds look imperiously on a source text as a specimen of inferior culture, a pretext not a text, in need of improvement to enter the dignity of the English language. Many readers of the Rubaiyat and versions of the Christian Bible, for example, value the receptor text, not the source, and indeed consider the existence of the source text an irritant and doubtful at best. Since we do make judgments, let us, for our purposes, posit an outstanding translation (that is, a poem in translation that independent of its genesis seems in its new version to be an excellent poem) and then, by meditating on this outstanding translation, move on to the overriding question of determining its literary value. Good translation is good literature. It is not diminished because of its race. It is branded and cursed, inevitably so, but it should not be. Remember that the best have been branded and cursed, from Eve to Hester Prynne to Pablo Picasso, although Picasso did not have to wait long until his translations of Paul Cézanne and others were esteemed and were again translated by Roy Lichtenstein. In Eve (transformed into mortal Eve), Picasso, and Lichtenstein, the act of translation is an act of rare originality, which is never unprecedented, without a source text. A translation is what we perceive when we do not read the script as primordial genesis—as the very first created original. Even this criterion, in keeping with those (particularly Paz) who contend that all texts are translations of text, is generous to originality, for let the original text which has no genesis stand up and be accounted for. When we have that translation, if it is beautiful and profound and its language magnificent, why must we see it not for itself in the present but invidiously in history and intertextuality? Why must it be, like Borges' Argentine coin the zahir, only a symbol of a past and a future with virtually no value in the present? Why must a translation's unknown, unseen past occlude its real presence in our eyes? Usually, the translation is seen in this way because of a perception, external to the text in front of us, that the translated poem has reference and is subservient to a master subtext, which may be inaccessible to the reader because of its indecipherable foreignness. Perhaps it is good for us to see all literature in the humble and humane frame of history, yet to demean the poem before us because the word translation has

Introduction been attached to it is to permit history and information extrinsic to the poem to undo us as readers. To allow an obtrusive intertextuality—the fact of its translation—to subvert the reading experience is to surrender to frivolous ignorance and to obey a feudal principle of originality; it cheapens the reality of the literary object in our possession. In doing so, we substitute a dream of the unknown subtext (of what is indecipherable or inaccessible, yet acclaimed real) for the actual page before our eyes and end up unjustly deprived. At least the most pious readers of the Bible do not suffer from such deprivation, for they have banished the original source text and accept the translation as the unique reality. So how can we cope with translation? Should we take the way of denial and conceal the fact of translation? It will not work for most of us. Our revelation, our mastery, as readers comes when we can accept the translation as the word of its nowness, or, as Wallace Stevens says in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," "the cry of its occasions." In the end the poem in translation is more candid and courageous than its unstigmatized parent, for it presents itself with the label of its dependence. We are foolish readers to deprive ourselves of what is ours to love, rejecting the translation for the vanished memory of an earlier infatuation. When Ezra Pound begins his epic Cantos with a translation from book 2 of Homer's Odyssey, we read both authors in a union of harmony, and grace comes to us as reading interpreters from not caring who is speaking those wondrous words with their ancient sonority. If we do insist on possessing the name of the author in order to redeem the work before us, it is "Homer and Pound." That's the name of the team. The translation is a collaboration, the work of two artists, or a double art. To produce a translation the normal triad of author-text-receiver is doubled. So technically, we may discover that we are reading the writing of an author who is readertranslator of another author's writing. But given such a heavy load of awareness, it is best, except in a moment of analysis, to read on with no reservation, erasing the brand of T from our consciousness and accepting the authorial firm of Homer and Pound in order to give ourselves fully to the pleasure of the text. Reading is a mystical union. A secular one, usually. It follows the simple rules of Saint John of the Cross's negative way, way of illumination, and way of union. That union should be the product of each good reading experience but, by the intrusion of external signs warning of the ills of translation, the reader is captive in the night of aridity, unable to move into affirmative light. Then when we have come to terms with the scarlet T its destructive meanings will pass. As Hester's odious A eventually came to mean not "Adultery" but "Able" and finally "Angel" scrawled across the sky, so we will insist that translation's T signify Technc, "art." And then, with the stigma of translation removed, it will not be bad also to remember the past and be comfortable with the author of the translation—even when the sounds of the source language are still in our ears. That we have heard

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Introduction and General Issues the rough, sonorous Italian melody of Dante's dark forest need not be a threat to its foreign translation. Best, however, is to see and hear only the text before us. For in reading well and fully, in doing justice to the work before us, we encounter the past and present together, redeem the source author through the present, and dignify the reading experience and all its participants. Then a poem in translation becomes a poem.

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Problems and Parables

Whoever hears translates words that sound in his ears into his intellect, that is, practically speaking, into the language of his mouth. Franz Rosenzweig, Translating Literature

Poetry is waiting not only for a translation but for another sensibility. Poetry is waiting for the translation of a reader. Octavio Paz, Traducción

We are digging the pit of Babel. Franz Kafka, "The Pit of Babel"

Meanings of a Sign, or Parable of the Greek Moving Van After rounding the stormy Peloponnisos, when your ship docks at the Greek port of Piraeus you will see a frenetic waterfront speckled with little vans, some pulled by smoky motorcycles, others by small truck motors, but each bearing a similar logo boldly scrawled on the side panels: jXETotopa. The sign means TRANSPORTATION.

That Modern Greek word on the van, metáfora, is equivalent to Latin transiatio, from the past participle of transferre, and both words, metáfora and translatio, have the root meaning of "carrying across," their way of saying "transportation." Yet translatio also means "translation," and gave us our English word. Although the common word for translation in Ancient Greek is metaphrasis, metáfora signifies not only carrying across but, in ancient rhetoric, transference of a word to another sense.} This latter definition is a round-about way of reaching another observation about i¿eTac|>opá, our original logo on the truck panels. The sign also means TRANSLATION.

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Introduction and General Issues Finally, the most obvious meaning of metáfora is its cognate meaning of "metaphor." So we quickly reach the third related meaning of the logo. The sign means METAPHOR. To sum up, metáfora means "transportation," "translation," and "metaphor"; and, to refine the polysemy, insofar as metáfora signifies carrying across, and translation is the activity of carrying meaning from one language across to another, in its root meaning the word metáfora is itself a metaphor for translation. And what is the essence of metaphor but A = B? Or in the jargon of translation practice, A is the equivalent of B. This formula of equivalence, A = B, generating an intralingual metaphor from a foreign source, is also what translation is about: A = B means that metaphor is translation. Within the notion of metaphor is translation. But equally true, within the notion of translation is metaphor. Therefore, if we use the formula for metaphor, A = B, to express the general activity of translation as stated in "metaphor is translation," we can restate the equation, reversing it to read B = A, and come up with the startling notion that translation is metaphor, or, expressed in a fuller axiom, translation is the activity of creating metaphor. To see metaphor as translation and translation as metaphor will be a most useful tool for discussing the fundamental question of translatability and untranslatability. To see translation's method and intention as metaphor, as opposed to duplication, counters the purist argument for untranslatability, which normally goes: Perfect replication in translation is desirable, but perfect replication is impossible. Hence translation itself is impossible.

Perfect replication is of course possible only when there is no change, when there is simply repetition, when A = A. With any rewording, however, there can be no full synonymy. And translation, within or between languages, requires a change in language: the meaning is "transported" from one word or one set of words to another nonidentical word or set of words. In this translatio there cannot be identity but difference. Were there to be verbal identity with the original, there would be no translatio or movement or translation. And between languages we have not only the phonological and connotative differences of intralingual rewording but differences between language systems. In his essay "Impossibilities of Translation," the linguist Werner Winter states plainly: "The system of form and meaning in language A may be similar to that in language B, but is never identical with it" (69). And, as we shall see, Borges proves that even when there is verbal identity, there will still be a difference. So the aim of translators to produce identical twins must always fail.

Problems and Parables In Borges' masterful satire on reading, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote," Pierre Menard copies out two chapters from Cervantes' Don Quijote word for word as they appear in Spanish and publishes the text—apparently the same text—under his own name, claiming the superiority of his version over the Cervantine original Vulgar plagiarism has no place in the puzzle of Menard's creation. Moreover, Borges reveals that Menard's intralingual literal transcription of a text of the Qui/oie cannot even be considered a mere mechanical copy of the barbarous original by Miguel de Cervantes since the new version, though verbally identical, is not only different, but is, in fact, deeper and more complex. Borges* narrator states: "Menard's fragmentary Quijote is more subtle than Cervantes'. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his 'reality' the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega" (42). The narrator tells us, moreover, that although Cervantes' text and Menard's have the same words on the page, "the second is almost infinitely richer" (42). Indeed, he suggests that for a civilized Frenchman at the beginning of the twentieth century it would be impossible, despite thousands of hours and countless identical drafts, to produce a work identical for a twentieth-century reader. Borges' intuition of the role of the reader in creating texts within a specific context establishes the basis for what is later called reader-response theory. Borges implicitly confirms the obvious yet scarcely felt fact that a text without a reader is dead ink on a page, is nothing, is not alive until each individual reader translates that perception of black on white, of shaped darkness on paper, into meaning and emotion. And each individual reader will accomplish this differently, as Pierre Menard expected his readers to do. Speaking of this story, Emir Rodriguez Monegal writes, "We can see the foundation of a new poetics, based not on the actual writing of a work but on its reading" (Borges 330). Borges writes in "Clouds (1)," one of his last poems: "The Odyssey is a cloud / changing like the sea. Something different / each time we open it" (Los conjurados). And Gérard Genette, commenting on this Borgesean insight of difference, declares, "The time of a book is not the limited time of its writing, but the limitless time of reading and memory" ("Littérature selon Borges" 132). So, in reading conventional translations or even in reading identical texts, whether by the same author or fantastic "translations" by the mad Menard, there can never be identical responses. In practice, Menard proves that when once one brings the activity of reading to the page, the texts lose stability and change. In fact, even A = A can never be true. In translation, since the A on the left side of the equation (the first reading) is always different from the A on the right (the second reading), in the end, even in a copy, the most scrupulous of all translations, where the intention is replication, once we introduce the reader to the formula, we end up with A = B. Indeed, we do not even have to make a copy. Reading the same text twice proves that A = B, for with each reading a second,

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Introduction and General Issues altered text is born. Translation then, as all transcription and reading of texts, creates a difference. Or, returning to our earlier postulate on the meanings of metáfora, translation is the activity of creating metaphor, which is to say, of creating differences, whose formula persists as A = B. Once it is seen that translation cannot be A = A, the mimetic assumptions of literalists fail, of those who would demand the impossible, or throw out the whole activity of translation on the grounds of inexactitude and difference. Were truly literalist assumptions to prevail, translation would indeed be impossible, because in translation A = A is impossible. And only under those impossible preconditions of literality would we then have to agree with those who assert that poetry cannot be translated—nor can prose nor any sign system. The great doubters of verse translation such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Benedetto Croce, José Ortega y Gasset, and Robert Frost would be vindicated. But poetry is translated, sometimes felicitously, and whether well or poorly done it can be accomplished provided there is a declaration of difference, provided that A = B. Given such premises and helped by the axiom "translation is metaphor," the act of translation can be judged not on its attainment of identity but on the quality of its difference in seeking identity and equivalence. Success or failure in translation will be judged by the quality of the newly created metaphor, which is always the final product of translation. Often the useful term equivalence is used to cover the difference between source language and target language or between source text and target text, but equivalence in no way signifies replication. There is no equivalence without difference. In poetic metaphor it is the difference, the tension between near-equal parts of a translation, that makes the poetry, since translation is the activity of creating related difference. To return to the parable of the Greek moving van and the shifts in nuance and usage of the verbal sign metáfora, we observe how carrying across a word within the same language or to another language entails a complexity of everchanging sense found in new signs with their own lexical codes. The original significance of metáfora in Greek persists, however, as either a primary factor or a secondary insinuation in its Latin and English versions or equivalents. More, these same observations on matters of intralingual primary and secondary meanings and interlingual change and equivalence, which all derive from that painted sign on the vans, aptly serve as an analogue—or extended metaphor—for the main questions of translation itself. Those perky vans appear and disappear, indifferent to our vision of them. But even their appearance evokes activities of the mind which require words. We read a written logo and interpret it. To find meaning in this logo or in any linguistic sign requires its "translation into some further linguistic sign," as Jakobson stated, a formulation first articulated by C. S. Peirce, whom Jakobson

Problems and Parables

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praises as "the deepest inquirer into the essence of signs" ("Linguistic Aspects" 233). So one sign breeds another, there is unending process of rewording, retelling, translation, transmutation, and wherever we turn, where meaning is sought, where mental activity takes place, we are living inescapably in the eternal condition of translation. Which is to say, we are forever making a metaphor with its related differences. We are reading and translating ourselves and the world. In a word, to come to Greece and find that even the moving vans run around under the sun and smog of greater Athens with advertisements for transportation, for metaphor, and ultimately with signs for TRANSLATION should convince us that every motor truck hauling goods from one place to another, every perceived metamorphosis of a word or phrase within or between languages, every decipherment and interpretation of that logo on the panel, every act of reading, writing, and interpretation of a text, every role by each actor in the cast, every adaptation of a script by a director of opera, film, theater, ballet, pantomime, indeed every perception of movement and change, in the street or on our tongues, on the page or in our ears, leads us directly to the art and activity of translation.

Translating from one language into another is a mathematical task, and the translation of a lyrical poem, for example, into a foreign language is quite analogous to a mathematical problem. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology All poetry is translation. Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression The human mind can do nothing but translate; all its activity consists of just that. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Translating Literature Every reading is a translation. Octavio Paz, Traducción

Translation as Part of a General Theory of Literature During the days of inflationary rhetoric in the battles between analytical philosophy and everything else (especially traditional metaphysics), the positivist Rudolph Carnap once declared with cold disdain that all philosophy outside

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Introduction and General Issues of logic and mathematics is nonsense. Given the pleasant impossibilities of translation and even of objective, unvarying reading, the positivistic paradigm might also hold that all translation outside of algebraic equations is nonsense. But time and fashion have given us relative peace and tolerance in philosophy, and in translation we have already coped with the exclusionary argument for banning translation altogether, formulated in the objective but irrelevant equation A = A. We may have established in some definitive way that literary translation, like all activities of writing, is not a predictable, objective, and repeatable exercise but a venture into variations, not a science with data whose validity is proved by repeatability but an art of differences. Moreover, it should be clear that the translator, as a receiver and creator of art, is free to set and upset the parameters of translatability. These observations I offer, knowing full well, however, that literalist strictures on translatability will not go away, that translators of the Bible will not tomorrow receive the epiphany that they are dealing with literature as well as theology, and that critics of translation, longing for objectifiable system, will not cease to ask for absolute transcription in the same breath that they demand artistic maturity. Yet it is well now to go beyond these perennial stages of contention in order to glance at some deeper implications of literary translation. Let us explore translation as an activity underlying all perception, reading, and writing, a process infusing the mind's most banal response to ordinary sense data, and an instinctive device directing the mind's most self-conscious moments of artistic creation. WRITING AND READING AS TRANSLATION; TRANSLATION AS INTERPRETATION

Translation is a much broader venture than the ordinary transference of meaning from one language to another. To write is to translate thought into coded graphic marks on a page. To read is to translate those marks back into a mental text. To translate (in the ordinary senses) is to transform them into lexical equivalents in the same or another language. So every transformation of thought into writing, of writing into reading, and of one written text into another written text is an act of translation. Of course these activities happen not separately but simultaneously. Only in language can we speak of them—and therefore conceive of them—as separately recognized acts. In practice the mind does not tolerate the dragging time of analytical language. So in effect the initial act of reading involves simultaneous transformations of those encoded letters on the page into a mental text that lies immediately on the screen of understanding but is also stored in memory, where it remains available for later access, and it is recalled by further transformations. These steps of building and accessing a mental text are the process that Herder calls a secret Gedankenübersetzung (thought-translation). Each step comprehends transformation and overlapping interpretation, all under the broader notion of translation. Therefore, to read is not only to translate but also to interpret.

Problems and Parables Just as the act of reading involves interpretive translation, so the act of formal translation involves an interpretive reading of the source text. Indeed, translation is a hermeneutical process, or, in modern terminology, an old-fashioned exercise in New Critical close reading, performed in order to come up with the most complete understanding of the source text for the purpose of determining the target text. (I should add, however, that once that understanding of the source text takes place and the target text is prepared, the New Critical autonomy of the original reading disappears, since now we have a new text dependent historically and intertextually on the old one; indeed, translation is for Hans-Robert Jauss, insofar as it represents the interrelation between source text and target text, the ideal paradigm for his reader-reception theory.) In a word, to translate is to read and to interpret. Hans-Georg Gadamer asserts this notion dogmatically: "Every translator is an interpreter" (Truth and Method 349). If we separate the mental activity of reading and translation, albeit artificially, into its discrete moments, we make interesting discoveries. The translator works intra- or interlingually to transform one text into another text, and after the initial reading to discover source meanings, the search for equivalent target meanings begins. Then the act of translation occurs, not by lingering on the page but in the mind, through interpretive readings and rereadings and the subsequent transformation of initial thought into new thought. Finally, the new thought becomes so dominant that it assumes its own authority, and then the translator transcribes this new creation onto paper as a translation of the thought into script. What is crucial is the movement of initial thought (a reading of source text) to the new thought (the mental translation). As to the observation that translation occurs not on the page but in the mind, there is again an analogy with current reading theory, specifically with the work of Stanley Fish, who asserts: "The place where sense is made or not made is in the reader's mind rather than the printed page or the space between covers of a book" (Is There a Text? 36). He finds a "spectacularly successful" example in the way Christian exegetes, with the proper interpretive strategies, were able to create in their minds exactly the new texts they wished to find in their translations of Ovid (170). These apparently new notions, of meaning production in the mind and of reading as imaginative translation, were of course enunciated nearly two centuries earlier in Herder 's "secret thought-translations." The justifying principle and theory behind Christian exegesis and interpretation of Scripture, from allegory in Origen, Aristotelianism in Augustine, and general scholasticism in Aquinas, is authorial intention. Such interpretation is based on what purports to be knowledge of God and his scribes' holy intentions but in reality is a cover for its opposite principle: reader participation, or reader as author. Hermeneutical exegesis was allied before the fact with deconstructionist criticism and the reader's intervention in and invention of the text. The exegete formulates "pagan" and biblical words anew through Christianizing, in-

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Introduction and General Issues terpretive readings and translation in such a way that the reader speaks for the author and thereby becomes the author. Critical talk about the death of the author is misguided. Rather, we may speak fairly of the author's replacement by a new author, the reader, who takes over the job of the source author and becomes inventor and director of the text. Through a process of revisionary free translation, the reader makes the author's text his or her own, just as in "translation proper" (to use Jakobson's useful designation), through a process of free imitation the translator makes the source text her or his own—and in effect becomes its author. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, however, there remains in both reading and translation proper an artistic partnership. Sometimes, with a perceptive and imaginative reader, a double art of creation reigns, in which author and reader become co-authors. There is a clear analogue in the changing of author into reader-author with the changing of source text into target text. Indeed, the act of reading and the act of translation are analogues of each other. This process of changing source text into target text is not only a signal act in general literary theory; reading theory in specific comprises the favorite analogical model—whether by Fish, Bloom, Jauss, or Wolfgang Iser—to describe the diverse strategies for revealing what happens when one reads. To take one example, Iser inevitably accounts for the reader's need to fill in vast gaps in an indeterminate text by resorting to the translation process. For him it is the key to what reading is all about. His implied reader sets about to fill in empty spaces during the reading experience by translating those voids into an individual world experience. In The Act of Reading Iser writes: "The concept of the implied reader thus describes a translation process, whereby textual structures translate themselves through ideational acts into the reader's existing stock of experience" (67). In plainer words, Iser is observing that a reader responds to a text by taking it into the mind and translating it into meaning and experience. In sum, these principles of translation from author to translator to reader reveal a series of dependent acts of translation: the author translates the thought by writing a text; the translator reads and interprets the author's text, and then, as the second author, formally translates that interpretation by writing a second text (the translation proper); and the reader translates the second text into her or his own creation. Translation theory is part of general literary theory, and in recent decades, with so much emphasis on reader reception, reader creation of the text, and reader reading and misreading of precursors, we have a climate especially sympathetic to translation's preoccupation with the relation among authors, texts, and the degree to which the translator-author and new text in each instance lie close to or go creatively far from prior author and source. The specific tension between fathers and sons, early and later texts, suggests the model of translation itself: the carrying over of the text in a way that may be blatantly imitative,

Problems and Parables disguised, misguided, misread, reread, re-created, or intentionally mistranslated. The obvious bard of influence, of the dark unfriendly ties between earlier authors and their anxiety-plagued heirs, is Harold Bloom. In his study of Bloom's theory of influence, belatedness, and misreading, Michael Gillespie shows how Bloom's declarations are perfectly displayed in the translation model. Gillespie analyzes Bloom as the quintessential speaker, at least by analogy, for a theory of translation: For Bloom, then, meaning results from an intertextual dialectic; it is a relational event; and translations may be considered to constitute one of the relational fields that participate in the dialectical interplay of meaning. It may be said further that if no poem is wholly original, if every poem is to be read as its poet's reading of a precursor poem or of the tradition of poetry in general, then every text is, in a sense, a "translation.". . . The translation model can provide a clearer illustration of the dialectics of writing than the paradigm of original creation itself ("Translation" 95)

With regard to these questions of influence and imitation in the act of poetic composition and its analogue in formal translation, I propose later on that the influence of translation in the work of poet translators occurs not so much because of their encounter with an extraordinary source text but through their own transformation of that source text into their own invented language. Instigated by the act of translation—or mistranslation, if Bloom's dark defensive truths be true—the poet translator self-reflexively discovers the language of his or her own inventions and borrows or steals it. To find translation everywhere in the universe and in the mind is comforting but problematic. The notion becomes so generalized that it risks falling into mere conceptual wordplay (the danger of all theory). Yet in translation there is an underlying transforming principle: each instant of speech, writing, reading, and translation involves a multitude of transformations and transportations, a multitude of receptions, shapings, and carryings over. The general word for all these activities is translation. Paz speaks for the universality of translation by taking us back to the infant child asking a parent the meaning of a word. He writes, "Aprender a hablar es aprender a traducir" (To learn to speak is to learn to translate) (Traducción 7). In literature the question is how to translate. And how to do it well is of course the rub, which leads us to the traditional and overwhelming enigma of faithful and free translation. With equal ardor and intelligence, there are those who argue, and indeed demand, utter fidelity in translation, while others, the majority, propose that one should no more ask for a slavish reproduction of the original text into its interlingual incarnation than expect that the practice of writing and reading will be a transference of the world into a perfect and unimaginative mimesis. Finally, there are those who offer a curse on both houses, saying that

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Introduction and General Issues good translation itself is impossible anyway. This refutation is metaphorized in the argument that translation is like looking at the wrong side of the tapestry. Despite the achievements of Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (a version of Boccaccio's Filostrato), Shakespeare in his elaborate retellings of Plutarch and the Gestes Romanorum, and the translators of the Bible in their interpretive transformations, the stubborn enemies of translation are absolutely—but only absolutely—and irrelevantly right. PARABLE OF READERS AND TRANSLATORS ON A DATE

In reader-reception and reader-response theories, reader and text interact, each contributing meaning to that vital encounter. The leading proponents of reader theories propose translation as a model to describe the activity when the reader has a rendezvous with a page of print. As in any sexual encounter, there are at least two active participants, each contributing something to the engagement of mind and body. If the reader is totally passive and assumes that the text alone will offer all pleasurable information, with little regard to history, circumstance, and earlier texts, expecting nothing from him- or herself other than analytical attention to the apparent surface information of the textual core, then we are in the company of a proper academic New Critic. The New Critic disdains personal and emotional involvement with the page as a posture for premodern sentimental critics and readers. In fact any affective contribution to the printed page is a posture to be dismissed as irrelevantly subjective and impressionistic. If the reader actively seeks contact with the textual body (which may or may not be available in the room), however, then he or she contributes to the body's existence through imaginative and intimate contact, and may even be accused of self-centeredly exploiting the graphic core as a mere sexual object. The text is enjoyed, but only according to a contract whereby the reader-critic, on his or her own terms, brings life to an inert body. It is the Gnostic version of creation as told in On the Origin of the World, wherein Eve raises a lifeless and spiritless Adam made entirely of mud (see Barnstone, Other Bible 70). Eve, the instructor, discovers the molded body lying on the earth, pities it, bends down and breathes pneuma (breath or soul) into her co-likeness who has been cast down, and with the utterance of her word into his still lips Eve translates Adam into flesh, bringing life and light to the grateful being, who can now speak. At either extreme of these reading theories, of the passive New Critic or the creatively Gnostic Eve, the translation paradigm holds up. The accumulation of mental information derived from the encounter of reader and text depends on a translation of print words into mind words, regardless of who takes the initiative and who is dominant. There is an obvious analogue to these reader-text encounters that has to do with a specific translation issue: the movement of reader back to the source text

Problems and Parables through the scrupulous attention of the translator or, conversely, the movement of the text ahead to the new reader through its naturalization in the hands of an actively engaged translator. To continue the equation, in the first instance the translation method is likely to be classified as literal and comfort a passive New Critic, who respects the full integrity of an original and stable text. In the second instance, the translation method is typed as free, and Eve, the active translator, transforms the source text through her attention and intervention, and delivers it refreshingly before the reader's eager gaze. Or, to change the active persona from a female Eve to a promiscuous Donjuán, the expressive translation suggests the work of a free-minded, perhaps licentious infidel, fiercely engaged in playing with and converting the source figure into his own creation. The rough formula for these two adventures is: A restrained, passive New Critical reader to an autonomous text is analogous to a literalist translator encountering a stable document who respectfully seeks to report the exact words of the verbal construct, while a responsive theory-of-reading reader to an unfulfilled text is analogous to a creative Eve translator (or a translator-rogue Don Juan) encountering a receptive and mercurial source body who both agree to go out on a mutually transformative date REGISTER, STRUCTURE, AND AUTHORSHIP

Now that we have questioned whether the very activity of translation is reputable, or indeed possible, and have concluded that it can be respectably stuffy or notoriously lively, that it is not possible in an absolute sense yet is bountifully possible as an art form, we may discuss its principles in three fundamental areas of translation theory and practice: register, structure, and authorship. Again, to keep these overlapping categories clear and in order, I have outlined them thus: 1. Register, or translation level a) literalism b) middle ground c) license 2. Structure, or degree of source text in translation a) retaining structure of source text in target text b) naturalizing structure of source text in target text c) abandonment of original structure and creation of new one 3. Authorship, or dominant voice a) retaining voice of source language author in target language b) yielding voice of source language author to translator's voice in target language

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Introduction and General Issues Before discussing this specific outline of translation principles and problems, let us consider briefly the historical context. The two large categories of translation are literal information transfer and literary transposition. These two precincts of translation—commercial, diplomatic, and scientific information as opposed to literature, religion, and philosophy—have been treated in ancient and modern studies. The distinction between the practical and the aesthetic was made in ancient times by Quintilian in Institutes oratoria (Principles of Oratory, before A.D. 95). Friedrich Schleiermacher established the distinction for the modern age in Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (On the Different Methods of Translation, 1813). In this seminal volume, Schleiermacher, speaking of Übersetzen or Übertragen, separates the Dolmetschern (interpreter) from the one who engages in creative Übersetzen or Übertragen (translating). Following Dryden's observations on metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation (discussed below), I have found it useful to distinguish three classes of translation: (la) the practical information transfer of the Dolmetschern, which Schleiermacher calls strict literalism or a word-by-word interlinear crib; (Ib) the middle ground of translation, which Steiner refers to as "faithful but autonomous restatement" (After Babel 253); and (le) free re-creation or imitation, which is the general practice of Medieval, Renaissance, and some modern translators. To elaborate these questions in outline detail, we have: 1. Register a) literalism 1. Aquila de Pontos' and Benjamin's word by word 2. Dryden's metaphrase 3. Novalis' grammatical 4. Schleiermacher's informative (similar to Goethe's prose versions of Homer or Luther's Bible) 5. narrow fidelity to the letter of source 6. usually nonliterary, as in information transfer of commerce, science, diplomacy, but sometimes literary, as in Nabokov's lexical transfer of syntax and dictionary definitions and Benjamin's interlinear gloss b) middle ground 1. Horace's and Cicero's sense by sense 2. Dryden's paraphrase 3. Novalis' modified 4. broad fidelity to the sense and spirit of source 5. responsibility to original author 6. literary, as in Robert Fitzgerald's Homer and Virgil, but may also pertain to history, philosophy, or any humanistic text

Problems and Parables c) license 1. Dryden's imitation 2. Novalis' mythical 3. free creation 4. infidelity to source 5. infidelity to source author and favoring translator as constitutive author 6. the medieval tradition of interpretive transformation of classical texts by means of Christian allegorization, as in Ovide moralisé 7. uniquely literary, as in Robert Lowell's Imitations or Christopher Logue's metaphrase of the Iliad Although this division of registers is usually tripartite, it is sometimes bipartite. When bipartite, part Ib, the middle ground, is often eliminated and division made between la, literalism, and le, license, although the division may be between la, literalism, and Ib, middle ground, or Ib, middle ground, and le, license. The second central issue, an offshoot of questions of fidelity to source, concerns the degree to which the syntactic and tonal world of the source text is reproduced in the target text. There are three positions in this matter of how to transpose: 2. Structure a) retaining structure of source text in target text 1. translation in service of the source poem, which remains primary 2. mimetic form, as in James S. Holmes's theory of mimetic transfer, or Richmond Lattimore's Homer, in which Greek hexameters are imitated in English 3. Schleiermacher's demand for a modification of translator's native lexicon and structure in order to convey the feeling of the source text 4. barbarization of translator's native idiom in target text by extreme imposition of source text word-for-word substitutes, syntax, grammar, and form, as in Aquila de Pontos1 Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible b) naturalizing structure of source text in target text 1. translation in the service of the new poem, which becomes primary, relegating the source text or poem to a secondary realm 2. analogous form, as in Holmes's theory of analogous transfer, as in Fitzgerald's turn to English blank verse to replace Homer's Greek hexameters 3. Alexander Fraser Ty tier's and Dryden's vehement call for a naturalization of the source text into translator's native idiom c) abandonment of original structure and creation of new one 1. organic form, as in Holmes's theory of organic transfer, in which

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Introduction and General Issues Pound's free, invented form (derived from Anglo-Saxon and Latin) replaces Homers Greek hexameters, or Christopher Logue creates a new form for the Iliad Naturally, the notion of structural retention (2a) and barbarization, (2a:4) is more at home with the register of literalism (la), while the notion of naturalization (2b) conforms to both middle ground (Ib) and license (le). But these two new registers, retention (2a) and naturalization (2b) frequently do not fall neatly in place. So we have the contradiction in Schleiermacher's speaking for genuine literary translation, for the middle ground, while calling for the abandonment of the translator's own speech and requiring fidelity to original structure; and, conversely, we have Dryden speaking for the same middle ground, while asking that the literary product bear the full flavor and syntatic imprint of his contemporary English speech. We have the chaste, close, responsible version, in which the original author is always visible and the source culture is often allowed to retain an imposing flavor in the target language, and, in opposition, a free transference, in which the translator is most visible, where the work seems to be native and at home in the target language, not a naturalized immigrant, but, as the Spanish mystic Fray Luis de León posited, "as if born and natural in the language" (Poesías 15). Dryden fully concurred, declaring his Virgil a contemporary Englishman: "1 have endeavored to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age" ("Dedication of the Aeneis," Essays 72). And Matthew Arnold, while mockingly giving both sides of the argument, would also have the translation appear to be the work "from an English hand." He elaborates: "[It] is said that the translation ought to be such 'that the reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work' " (Translating Homer 2). So on the foreign body we have native English attire. There is no attempt at immaculate duplication or enlightened forgery. A new work, a new structure, moreover an apparently original structure, albeit under joint authorship, is born. The third central issue, an offshoot of responsibility to author and translator, concerns the degree to which the manner of the original author comes through or is replaced by the style and character of the translator. Again there are two positions in this matter of 3. Authorship a) retaining voice of source language author in target language 1. translation in the service of the author, who remains primary 2. voice of the original author remains as intact as possible 3. voice of the translator is suppressed (in deference to author) b) yielding voice of source language author to translator's voice in target language 1. translation in the service of the translator, who becomes primary

Problems and Parables 2. voice of the translator is dominant 3. voice of the original author is overcome by the voice of the translator As in the issue of the authority of the original structure and language, we may suppose that the translator who fully respects the original authorial voice in the source text would take a position with the literalists, or at best with those on the middle ground. The translator who takes up the baton and plays his or her own composition, however, must be with the licentious imitators in b3. But it is not necessarily so. As in our discussion of reproduction of source structure, there are conflicting points of view, with the result that a translator may very well fully disregard source structure in favor of native, yet just as fully suppress his or her own voice. In the vast, illuminating, and confusing critical literature on translation, particularly literary translation, the lack of definition of central problems and categories is disconcerting. The most coherent discussions are linguistic and semiotic, although in these disciplines literary and aesthetic questions are more often than not ignored or of secondary concern. By contrast, literary commentary, which confronts the aesthetic and distinguishes between information transfer and aesthetic transfer, nonetheless suffers from discursion. It often lingers at extremes—on much-repeated gem words of Cicero or Horace or star-cluster lines of Paz, scintillating in verbal paradox. Paz, the most profound and sensitive of literary commentators, has perhaps given us our most enduring epiphanies on translation as well as much disparate and unsystematic brilliance. I have tried to chart—reductively, yet perhaps clearly—basic principles and problems of translation, suggesting a few variations in this connecting maze. Precisely because of the interconnections of these principles and problems, because, as in all literary theory, science and art merge, there will always be controversy renewing the art, confusion leaving it in darkened labyrinths, and illumination resolving its enigmas dogmatically. Absolutes may be proclaimed, but those absolutes will soon be translated into other absolutes. And although some people will try to impose a single way, there can never be one conquering normative approach to translation. In this study the translation paradigms will strongly depend on two early sources: translation of the Bible, with its frequent goal of literalism and absolute fidelity, asserted but rarely practiced; and classical translation, with its freeminded Roman poets and rhetoricians who chose to re-create, to paraphrase Greek letters into their Latin tongue. The Roman method was to dominate the practice, if not the pretensions, of secular translation from the Middle Ages, when antiquity strongly re-entered the West, until the early twentieth century. With these notions in mind, in the next pages I treat the anti-Roman practice of literalism. Despite the scorn so easily applied to pedantic or scholarly trans-

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Introduction and General Issues lation of literature, where infelicity hides behind the cloak of good scholarship, literalism has remained a powerful, frequent premise of all translation. I first offer a few aphoristic glances at its unstable philosophy.

The meaning of fidelity, which is assured by literalness, is that the great longing for the complementarity of languages should make itself felt in the work. Real translation is transparent, it does not hide the original, it does not steal its light, but allows the pure language, as if reinforced through its own medium, to fall on the original work with greater fullness. This lies above all in the power of literalness in the translation of syntax, and even this points to the word, not the sentence, as the translator's original element Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" Every literary document that purports to be a translation from an original in some other language makes a kind of contract to be correct, but it is traditional to regard any such contract, if filled to the letter, with a bit of contempt and suspicion. John Hollander, "Versions, Interpretations, and Performances" The dictionary is based on the hypothesis—obviously an unproven one—that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms. Jorge Luis Borges, "Translation" Literalism is a feature of boorish translators (interpretes indiserti). Cicero, De oratore The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase. Vladimir Nabokov, "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English"

Fifteen Quick Looks at the Philosophy of Literalism Literalism attracts great stylists like Vladimir Nabokov and Walter Benjamin while it paradoxically feeds the disdain of Horace, Cicero, and Quintilian. Literalism in Benjamin's mystical proposal recovers the pure language of truth in which the final secrets that all thinking strives to reach are kept, silent and at peace. To recover that pure language is the immense power given only to translation. Translation is not metaphor but synecdoche and metonymy, and yet the

Problems and Parables

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ideal way of obtaining métonymie adjacency is the Aramaic Targum, or interlinear gloss of Scriptures. The philosophy of literalism demands perfection, claims fidelity and virtue, and dresses itself in the authority of dictionaries. It likes definitive meanings and eschews complexity. Its operational credo is "word for word." It transfers information perfectly and offers the monolingual reader truth. Literalism aspires to operate like a machine, an interlingual photocopier of meaning, giving automatic, predictable, and repeatable versions. Because it aspires to the truth of science, it abhors variation and difference. It also abhors art as an indignity unworthy of serious scholarship. It would like to transfer its domination of science, commerce, and theology to literature. Literalism abuses literature pompously and disdains other philosophies of translation. It howls against howlers. Yet in transferring literary data it leaves more behind than it carries over. Its method is to match corresponding interlingual signifiers automatically, with little regard for the aesthetic correspondence of the signified. It proudly has a bad ear and eye for those verbal signs. Obsessed with translating the sign of the sign, the shadow of a sign rather than the full polysemy of the sign, it falters symbolically into mistranslation, which it calls accurate and literal. Literalism censors literature, excising art from the target text. Its philosophy of disregard for polysemy, and especially the aesthetic, is itself an anti-aesthetic aesthetic. Literalism cannot decide what it wants to be literal. Is it the sign it wants duplicated, or is it the meaning of the sign? Is it after word-for-word, particlefor-particle, letter-for-letter literality? Does it seek sound-for-sound, form-forform, syntax-for-syntax correspondence? It feeds on illusion based on impossibility. Literalism is a faith whose reference is vague. It is better at denotative than connotative meaning yet obtains perfect accuracy in neither. It flounders in the credo that literality is possible. Literalism can be a cover for lack of genius, is what Samuel Johnson says more eloquently and abusively in the the idler: "The writers of the foregoing age had at least learning equal to their genius; and, being often more able to explain the sentiments or illustrate the allusions of the ancients, than to exhibit their graces and transfuse their spirit, were, perhaps, willing sometimes to conceal their want of poetry by profusion of literature, and, therefore, translated literally, that their fidelity might shelter their insipidity and harshness" (No. 69, 1759). Literalism diminishes the literary. It has poor eyesight. In practice the philosophy of literalism corrupts literary texts. Octavio Paz contends that servile translation (traducción servil) is not even translation but "a depository made of a string of words to help us read the text in its original language. Something closer to a dictionary than a translation—which is always a literary act" (Traducción 10).

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Introduction and General Issues • Literalisms servant-translator should be pitied because, as George Chapman says in the preface to his complete Iliad of 1611, the pedantic translator must suffer a double loss: necessarily unable to capture the native "full soule" of the original in a new language, he also sacrifices the grace of his "naturall dialect" by his rude attempt. • Translation begins with rapture, according to Chapman's theory of great interpretation, and it is impossible to enter into an artistic mystery without rapture. The way to Homer's "deepe and treasurous hart" is "With Poesie to open Poesie." • Literalism is founded in a suprahistorical kinship of languages, says Benjamin in his theory of literalism. Translation reconciles the complementarity of languages that each single tongue strives for and intends: all the simple elements, words, and sentences. • An interlinear word gloss brings us to the border of a third language. In his introduction to the translation of Charles Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens, Benjamin says that through strict linguistic literalism we will find that plenitude of complementary intentions in the third language of translation. In espousing radical literalism (Wörtlichkeit) he finds that "if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade" ("Task of the Translator" 79). • Horace thought literalists were slaves, Cicero called them fools. Quintilian said to the translator, invent.

Nor should you try to render your original word for word like an obedient [faithful] interpres. Horace, On the Art of Poetry I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity. Vladimir Nabokov, "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English" At present, literal translations are in vogue. The idea of a literal translation does not have a literary source. In my opinion, we can posit two possible sources: one would be legal papers (the choice of legal contracts, interpretation of documents, business agreements, etc.), which obviously require a literal translation. (This, of course, was not the case in past ages when there was an illustrious universal language: Latin). Jorge Luis Borges, "Translation"

Problems and Parables

Literalism INTERLINGUAL INFORMATION TRANSFER

Translation has many purposes, of which the most common is the interlingual transfer of information. When translation is limited, as it normally is, to mere transfer of information, denotative rather than connotative meaning with no specific emphasis on aesthetic equivalence of forms and sounds, then it should be measured as a verbal science rather than a literary art. The analysis of information transfer is properly the province of linguistics, comparative linguistics in particular, or semiotics, the mother of linguistics, but not of literary criticism. In the more inclusive sense of information transfer and communications, the translation industry provides the key to national progress and will be an indispensable sector of the economy for all countries with hopes for the twentyfirst century. While computer translation (which is primarily information transfer) is still a tentative science, it is also—like all information systems—the way of the future. And of course information transfer is the sine qua non of international legal, business, journalistic, and political communication, whether graphic (documents) or oral (interpreting). In moving factual information about from tongue to tongue, the notion of word-for-word fidelity reigns, and its ideal practice should attain the perfection of the high quality reproduction of photocopy machines. Such a restricted sense of fidelity is proper for information transfer, for all commerce and technology— but obviously not for art. At the same time, consider how unjust it would be, how disastrous, were an expressive fidelity to be applied to ordinary information transfer Here is a story about the legitimate precinct of information transfer.

PARABLE OF THE LYRICAL PROPERTY DEED

The cultivated owner of a piece of property high in the village kastro on top of a white Greek island is unexpectedly obliged to sell her house and land. The property means too much to her to allow its sale to be carried out on the basis of a colorless, unimaginative document, with no reference to the land's beauty, its flora and aromas, and the strategy of genius that informs the traditional architecture of the old house with its meter-thick, whitewashed stone walls. To sign a document without reference to the cultural and historical moment would be a denial of the existence of her island home. So she hires a man of letters to do the legal translation obligatory for the sale. The owner has the original deed translated freely, creatively, and in such a way as to produce a document that, by means of equivalences, not only conveys the intrinsic value of the property but is a work beyond mere literalism, a document that can be read and published on its own as an intimate history of the house, the land around it, and the panorama beyond. This new deed, for reasons

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introduction and General Issues only meaningful within the parable, is the only legal document in the new owner's hands. The translation of the real-estate deed avoids business terminology. As a result of the translator's imaginative use of language, the foreigner purchasing the property on the island finds himself in possession of an eloquent and spiritual document. Where the original deed contained dry—almost inhumanly accurate—measurements of land boundaries, the new deed provides a description of the borders of olive trees and stains of dark cypresses. To guarantee unobstructed views, he reads not a listing of building codes but a rhapsody on that Greek sea that led Homer and Seferis into verse. On the deed it says, as on all legal deeds: "Legal Description." With such a deed a prospective owner is not deceived in the description of the original property. The deed has one flaw. It is legally useless. As a piece of free transfer of significant real-estate facts into a business document, it becomes a translation deception. Although the jargon and rhetoric of a properly legal Greek property deed should, to a social historian, reveal as much about contemporary Greek society as the varieties of computer software literature mirror an aspect of the American mind, the spirit of these documents for all practical purposes is irrelevant. For information transfer, the letter, not the spirit, counts; and particularly the unadorned number is crucial. According to our earlier model, this deed required the literalism of narrow fidelity, responsible to original author and source, not the license of free creation, disregarding responsibility to the original author and unfaithful to the reader. Unlike traditional literature, the property document has no essential mission to entertain and enlighten. Unlike a painting or poem about the same terrain, the deed, serving as a contract between parties, has no aesthetic but only performative value. Once the sale is completed there is no need ever to reread the document except for purposes of verification. Ironically, such documents can have a new life in later times as indexes of social history, when their original mission of property information has become irrelevant. Then the accuracy of translation assumes secondary importance, and historians, linguists, and even litterateurs may dig in to draw out (they translate) key notions and words for their own professions. While the abuse of commercial translation is plainly evident in this implausible paradigm, the abuse of narrow fidelity in many related information translation activities occurs every day, sometimes more subtly, sometimes with equally exasperating blatancy. The recording of political, religious, and ethnic history (itself an act of translation as are all recordings) and its proper translation into other languages is rarely carried as simple information transfer. More often, such recordings serve as political, religious, and ethnic cheerleading, as when Chinese communists translated history into glorification in their report of Mao

Problems and Parables Zedong's "fast-as-a-motor-boat" swim from Wu Chang to Hankou in May 1956 across the Yangtze River. The intra- and interlingual translation of news events provides an excellent example of respecting or tampering with fidelity in information transfer. In authoritarian or totalitarian states, in which news is controlled for the wellbeing of the government, translation of events is infidel. It lies. The translation service normally produces propaganda or simply hot air rather than news. Translation as propaganda is also the rule both when internal news events transmitted back to headquarters are transformed intralingually for domestic and later foreign reception or information from foreign news services is transformed interlingually for controlled, uniquely domestic reception. In each instance the translation process, which should be carried out in accordance with responsible literalism (register "a" of our model) is actually transmitted to the public according to license (register "c"). Fidelity and hot air don't mix, although they pretend to. Indeed, any form of censorship normally is synonymous with an abuse of translation. A common purpose of intra- and interlingual translation of news events in harsh, self-congratulatory regimes is translation as a means of concealment of information. Distortion is so radical that we have not information but disinformation transfer. In authoritarian regimes official translation of news is rarely other than disinformation transfer. Outside of governmental and political manipulation of information transfer, we find examples in public life of all kinds of translation distortions: in business, colorful and false advertising; in politics, the glamour and mud of presidentialcampaign spin artists; in religion, the reports of miracles and cosmic happenings; in sports, the enthusiastic pumping up of field events are all a serious misuse of what should be faithful information transfer. Professional wrestling (which for tax purposes is legally entertainment not sport because it is staged) translates false punches and unholding holds into lethal blows and grips of pain, with the result that the announcer, whose role is to interpret the match, produces a Barthean myth by way of disinformation transfer. Returning to our Greek island, I have purposely made the lyrical property deed a parable of the absurd in order to show the legitimate domain of faithful information translation. There is a flip side to the coin, however. Equally ridiculous is the mindless imposition of standards for information transfer onto the translation of aesthetic texts. When Horace is translated word by word by students in a third-year Latin class, there is no artistic danger as long as it is understood that such methods are solely a testing device of a student's mastery of Latin, and not to be confused with literary transfer. Cribs or glosses have no autonomy. They are never to be read alone but only as means of learning how to read the source language. Insofar as the resultant English crib is perceived as a means of getting into the Latin poem rather than as an autonomous aesthetic entity in English, there is no

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Introduction and General Issues danger of literary crime. The crib is not Horace but a vehicle to carry one back to Horace in a process of reverse translation, permitting the reader to read (to translate in the mind) the Latin text as an understandable poem. In concrete poetry, the word gloss next to a brief poem serves as a crib, leading readers back to the original and teaching them to read it. A word gloss, however, is never by itself confused with an original or its literary translation (except in the instance of Benjamin's fabulous formula for salvational translation of Holy Writ through the gloss), the gloss functions plausibly only as an aid to confront the source text. Instruction in how to read the original might seem to be the closest thing to perfect translation. Yet it creates no translation at all in the sense of translation proper What activity does a gloss lead to? Or for that matter, a crib? (Or where are we led to by a hyperliteral, scholarly, criblike translation when it is really a dictionary with word order?) We are led back to the source, to becoming native readers of the source poem in the source language, which we transform, alter, and translate into a memorable mental text. Word glosses, then, lead us to the ultimate intralingual translation, an activity which is of course commonly called reading. Glosses, like dictionaries, make us readers of the original text. The problem begins when the student assumes that the crib is Horace rendered into English. The most extreme example of such abuse, of the imposition of information standards on literary texts, normally occurs in Bible translation where, with magnificent exceptions, the aesthetic is sacrificed for apparent theological fidelity. The Kabbalists, though their reading of source texts is anything but literal, ask one to read the original or demand a translation so "faithful" that not only the words but the letters must be translated with order and fidelity. To them, letters are as important as words, as evidenced by their pictorial representations derived from holy Scripture that show trees with letters, rather than leaves, hanging from the branches. Similarly Aquila, a second-century proselyte Jew from Pontos, spent his life doing a retranslation to replace the Greek Septuagint, which would reproduce literally every word and idiom from the Hebrew and follow Hebrew syntax when possible. Of course it was authoritative, sacred, and unreadable. That stubborn ideal of accurate replication of word order, however, appears as well in interlinear Bible cribs from Hebrew and Greek, a dream for decipherers of the source text, especially from exotic sources. By themselves, of course, the cribs present a pleasantly incomprehensible and surreal jumble of signifiers aching to find syntactic order in order to become a system of signifieds. While struggling through the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible and gliding through the Greek of the Gospels, I have been helped by using books with interlinear trots. Such trots are blessed. And they truly translate word for word. But when read independent of the source text, they are, with rare exception, meaningless. So, although they move us quickly and cheerfully elsewhere, they

Problems and Parables cannot stand still under our eyes. These delicious trots are a proof of the failure of ungrammatical word-for-word substitutions. Interlinear crib translations represent the purist fulfillment of the total literalist approach, as well as its doom. Information transfer and literalism seem, under most conditions, to be good bedfellows. Even for the tasks of information transfer, however, although a form of the literalist approach suggests itself, there are pitfalls to this romance of plainness, for in spite of the good auspices of a third-party dictionary, meaning is neither automatic nor inevitable. The word-for-word way stumbles in regard to reproducing syntax and grammar. Rough syntactic equivalents will usually work, but they are equivalents, not the absolute literalist "other." So there is literalism and literalism, and the ideal, the absolute, the fanatic approach is untenable. Once we abandon the notion of a word-for-word union of tongues, if we seek sense by means of the most elementary information transfer, we must also abandon extreme literalist notions which will undermine information transfer and lead, as Benjamin almost gleefully declares, to unintelligibility (In his quest for purity of language, Benjamin, as we shall see, disdains the decadent debris of ordinary meaning and intention and holds to literalism in translation as a means to his desired unintelligibility and the banishment of mere sense.) But moderate and even extreme belief in the superiority of literality is not rare, nor has it lacked distinguished proponents. Famous are Goethe's or Arnold's preference for prose versions of epic poetry, Dryden's metaphrase, Nabokov's lexical transfers and aversion to "vilely beautifying" a masterpiece, and Benjamin's linguistic literalism. In his diary John Addington Symonds tells us of Robert Browning's theory of translation, how the English poet insisted on the "absolutely literal," including a reproduction of the original syntax. Venice, Nov. 1888. Browning's theory of translation. Ought to be absolutely literal, with exact rendering of words, and words placed in the order of the original. Fitzgerald's 'Omar Khayyam,' a fine English poem, but no translation.

But can literalism after all cover the whole activity of translation, informational and aesthetic? For those who are concerned, I offer another session in Latin class, in which we have moved from Horace to Cicero, and from the crib to the test. PARABLE OF THE LATIN CLASS TEST

Although a limited embrace of literalism is adequate for most information transfer, it is a peril for literary translation. As suggested in the preceding pages, a crib is usually a concealed, flowing dictionary, helpful for surviving an oral test, but not in itself a coherent translation. There is another dramatic event in

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Introduction and General Issues the classroom, the written translation test that must pass as a numerically gradable translation. Is this graded translation not a major obstacle to good translation? I call the matter the translation test syndrome. A translation test from Cicero's De senectute consists of rendering Latin into English, but its purpose is only provisionally translation, for the translation has no literary autonomy, is not an end but a means: a forthright way of testing the student's ability to read and understand the Latin original. In no way does the test measure the student's ability to contrive a valuable translation. So the purpose of Latin class translation is language pedagogy rather than literary creation. The test pretends no aesthetic embellishment and seeks to provide no literary equivalence in English. The exercise is a necessary tool for Latin instruction. In the course of this exercise, the resultant English text serves merely as a marker on the way to foreign-language reading fluency. When the bluebook is construed as a literary document, albeit provisional, however, and becomes the measure of correctness, a trusted page in the struggle against howlers in other suspect, strictly literary versions of the text, the point of the test has been forgotten or misinterpreted. In this scenario, the test dignifies nonliterary translation of a literary text. More, the literal becomes quantified, with a numerical or alphabetical measure of "correct translation," for which the grade of 100 or A -I- signifies a perfect rendition. Accordingly, perfect translation is error-free translation. In the popular mind, reaching high into stern academia, this latter notion and measure of correctness retains its power. There persists the assumption that an error-free, "scholarly" literal translation contains true meaning, and departures from the literal are in the nature of unserious adornment and sinful self-indulgence. Then the art of translation is judged by demeaning, restrictive, and puritanical standards, measures that would have silenced the great imaginative Puritan poets Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. The idea that to be literal is to be accurate and error-free has amazing durability. As stated earlier, in interlingual translation A is never A but the equivalent of B. No word in one language carries the entire meaning of that language with it when rendered into another language. If words are circles of meaning, as Schopenhauer observed, circle A and circle B can at best overlap but never coincide in their transfer between tongues. As for syntax, why should there be greater accuracy in reproducing word order and structure, when the syntax of each language differs? The virtue of reproducing similar word order is not a literalist sign of accuracy but a literary means of reproducing foreign flavor in the target language. So in theory and in ordinary practice the premise that literalism equals accuracy, and absolute literalism equals absolute accuracy—as well as the notion that absolute accuracy in translation is possible—is absolutely false. When literalism leaves off pretensions to the absolute, however, then a sensibly literalist approach is both right and desirable for nonliterary information transfer.

Problems and Parables There is even a place for enlightened literality in literary translation. But to make a literalist approach aesthetically effective in literary translation requires the highest skills. In such felicitous instances, the word literalist is usually replaced by close. In his translations of Homer and Virgil the master translator of our age, Robert Fitzgerald, came as close to an accurate literal version as possible without the least compromise with a profoundly aesthetic achievement. A masterly instance of close translation is Richmond Lattimore's books from the New Testament. In his Homer he is freer than Fitzgerald, often padding to maintain tone and six-beat meter. But in his version of Scripture we hear the evangelists speak—as if we were hearing koine Greek. In his preface to The Four Gospels and the Revelation, Lattimore affirms the notion of letting Greek word order and rhetoric come through in English, as opposed to converting them to contemporary English idiom. He adopted this same method brilliantly in his versions of Pindar and Aeschylus (and less brilliantly in his rendering of Greek lyrics). The Bible in our time, sorely abused by unliterary handlers, finds in Richmond Lattimore its most effective translator. He re-creates Mark's elegant plainness. The classical scholar writes in his preface, "I have held throughout to the principle of keeping as close to the Greek as possible, not for sense and for individual words, but in the belief that fidelity to the original word order and syntax may yield an English prose that to some extent reflects the style of the original" (vii). Just as Lattimore's Pindar sounds like Pindar—not Pindar sounding like a modern, literate Lattimore—so, as Lattimore intended, Mark sounds in English like Mark. In dramatic scenes we have witnessed the ongoing primordial confrontation in translation of the literal versus the literary. There is and cannot be any victory in this confrontation. The translator's every word choice invokes a decision of conscience, painful or happy, of gain, loss, and compromise in the labyrinthine scale of the literal and literary. WRITER VERSUS SCHOLAR

At the heart of any study of the translation of literature is an understanding of the function of literalism, of its benefits as well as of its pernicious plights. Whenever there is a pragmatic felicity to the literalist approach, literalism is most welcome, even obligatory. Such felicity occurs when the target text has no aesthetic pretension qua text, when (as in information transfer) it is relatively accurate, and when in regard to literary texts it is indeed a subtext to help us read the source text (as in interlinear, bottom-of-the-page, or sometimes en face wordings). Then the literal subtext provides an enormously beneficial literary tool. We are given the key to a foreign language. Here the reader happily celebrates the existence of the trot, the pony, the crib. But in literary translation when the literalist method is its own end and not a means to returning us to a reading of the source language, there is a fundamental

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Introduction and General Issues flaw in its reasoning and raison d'être. The methodological end of literary translation must provide us with autonomous meaning in the target text. When the literalist approach offers an English crib as its final product, the crib is misleading. If the crib pretends not to return us to source but to hold the source's true full meaning, there enters a confusion of purpose, and, insofar as the literal claims to be what it is not, the crib is fraudulent. The crib method is, moreover, painfully dull. The crib and other related language exercises have in common the absence of imagination in the process and a spiritless corpse in the product. The great majority of literary texts in the "exotic" languages are still executed into English either by scholars who may know the exotic language but are not writers in English or by foreign native speakers who are not writers and whose English is not English. In both instances the translators operate under the banner of serious literalism. From classical Chinese poetry there comes a tradition of serious Chinglish. Language is wondrously complex, however, and so far has eluded every devotedly literalist or mechanical attempt at literary translation. A beautiful poem in English, whether composed originally or translated into English, is a rare and important literary event. Richard Wilbur's translation of a sonnet by Borges or Jorge Guillen or Robert Lowell's "imitation" of poems by Osip Mandelstam or Eugenio Móntale (which Wilbur arid Lowell include in their books of original poetry) constitute events for the English reader—as much as any poems by Wilbur or Lowell not designated by an origin in translation. The translations of Wilbur and Lowell are not born of literalism. Just as the harshly literal fails aesthetically, so it often fails as a means of literary information transfer because of intrusive stylistic clumsiness. Failure in the modest aim of information transfer occurs even in the highest pasture of letters, in the translation of Dante. John D. Sinclair's faithful prose version of the Commedia has gained fame for giving us, without the poetry, what Dante said. It has an extraordinary reputation Yet any of the current poetry translations of Dante, by Thomas Bergin, John Ciardi, Mark Musa, or Allen Mandelbaum, reads more clearly than the literalist Sinclair version, which sticks unimaginatively and abjectly close to a word-for-word rendering, and is distractingly hard to follow. The strange syntax—also a product of literalism—undoes the reader. Doing violence to the English idiom, it is a poor trot and fails in its basic justification: to transfer information. The semantic field of Dante's poem is rich. Sinclair deprives Dante's live, echoing, yet complex voice of its poetry and clarity. It is dead. PARABLE OF THE ESKIMO "SEAL OF GOD"

An ordinary specific example of one of the many plights of literalism occurs when the target language lacks a word because its culture lacks the experience which gave birth to that word in the source language. Such inci-

Problems and Parables dents come under the heavy-handed description of "cross-cultural translation problems." Poland has never had a whaling industry. Bronsilaw Zielinski, the prize-winning translator of Melville's Moby-Dick, had formidable language problems in producing his imaginative rendition. He could not produce a literal, word-forword translation because there was no whaling vocabulary in Polish, and one cannot translate into nonexistent words. Zielinski was obliged to be a word creator, and now words for the hunters and the whales do exist in Polish, as well as the word Moby-Dick for the big one. Going further north, there are no lambs trotting on the ice meadows of the Arctic where Eskimos live. Translators of the Bible into Eskimo have resorted to the phrase "Seal of God" for "Lamb of God" (Adams, Proteus 6). In this instance the translators saw their ecclesiastical purpose to provide a meaningful text in Eskimo rather than to use Eskimo as a subtext for learning cultural meanings in an English translation of Hebrew and Greek scriptures. Zielinski and the translators of the Eskimo Bible took their texts home and interpreted them, created them, and so communicated what a literalist version could not. (The only reservation I have with seal is not its animal species but its age. A lamb is a young sheep, and the equivalent for "Lamb of God" would work better if seal were modified to convey the presumed childhood innocence of a young seal.) The lesson of the parable is clear. The goal of translation is not to verify the translator's understanding of the sacred text but to produce a re-creation of it in another language. So, Latin teacher, student, Pole, and Eskimo interpreter, who are conscientious and enlightened, need not stick to literalist exercises but exploit their own language resources or mount friendly ponies, and should art, imagination, and conscience commingle, they will ride right back to the amber-speckled coasts of Poland, the white lights of Greenland, and the tropes of Cicero's iron rhetoric and Virgil's marble language.

The translator's "first duty," says Mr. Newman, "is a historical one, to be faithful." Probably both sides would agree that the translator's "first duty is to be faithful"; but the question at issue between them is, in what/aith/ulness consists. Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer The contradiction [lies] between [translation's] inherent impossibility and its absolute necessity. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Introduction and General Issues I remember that Chesterton said that he did not fenow Persian but that Fitzgerald's translation [of the Rubáiyát] was too good a poem to be faithful to the original. Jorge Luis Borges, "Translation" All translation seems to me simply an attempt to accomplish an impossible task. Wilhelm Humbolt, Letter to A. W. Schlegel

Fidelity and Translatability ty

Fidelity in translation is a concept behind the presuppositions of many who comment on translation and translatability. The very notion of true fidelity implies, as I have stated, the assumption of the equation A = A, a belief in the possibility of equality. But in translation the source and the target are not equal, can never be equal, for numerous semantic and phonic reasons, the most obvious of which is that meanings between languages can overlap, but never fully coincide; similarly, the sound of each language differs from every other and often (except in the same language family) has no single overlapping words. Given these differences, there can never be an identity of sound in translation. Since sound and meaning are ingredients in the phonic-semantic code of every word, there can be no full lexical identity between languages or full synonymy in the same language. Both signifiers and signified change in slipping from one language to another (and also within languages for intralingual rewording). The very existence of different languages demands differences in the phonic-graphic notations; hence, complete fidelity is out of the question. Since behind the common view of untranslatability lies the fact of difference within and between languages, we should all accept, once and for all, that perfect translatability is impossible. Everything is untranslatable. Once having established this unholy principle, we plunge ahead and translate, accepting the truth that perfection, immutability, and absolutes pertain perhaps to mathematics but only mythically to the arts, most human experience, and everything else in the world—and not at all to literary translation. Jacques Derrida discusses the polysémie word pharmafeon, with its meanings of "poison" and "remedy," to show not only how words are untranslatable between languages but that, as Barbara Johnson points out in her translation of Derrida's critical theology, "the original text is always an impossible translation [italics mine] that renders translation impossible." Johnson further declares, "Derridas entire philosophic enterprise, indeed, can be seen as an analysis of the

Problems and Parables translation process at work in studying the difference of signification" ("Taking Fidelity Philosophically" 146). In addition to aesthetic and linguistic reasons for favoring or rejecting the possibility of translation, there are philosophical and religio-political ones, and the latter often have a fiercely dogmatic bias. The politics of religion, particularly of Christianity, in regard to translation have always been ambiguous. On the one hand there is the sacred view that holds to the process of entropy, the idea that any passage between languages implies waste, corruption, and fundamental loss. On the other, there is the constant didactic and messianic need to spread the word of God to potential converts, for which Bible translation is an indispensable tool. The former view, of translation as blasphemy, sat well with early religious authorities who wanted to keep the word of God in its original sacred languages—Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and, implausibly, but for obvious political reasons concerning the site of power in Rome, Latin. The same approach to sacred texts has also led to proscriptions against translation into secular languages and the resultant battles for translations of the koine Christian Scriptures into demotic, modern Greek or of Jerome's Latin Bible (already a translation) into Spanish. A dominant element of the clergy of Jews, Christians, and Muslims has traditionally opposed the sacrilegious abasement of the holy word through translation into the "vulgar" tongues. They have resisted allowing it to fall into the hands of parishioners by means of comprehensible translation. Martin Luther's historic, revolutionary translation of the Bible into common German was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. Similarly, the twentieth-century German version by Martin Buber, a Jew, reflects both a paramount aesthetic reform from Luther's plain-speech translation as well as a major religious orientation in which the Hebrew Bible in translation ceases to speak only to a sectarian Christian reader but, rather, operates as a historical document for Jews and Christians— or anyone—alike. The Torah and the Koran are still read in their original languages at Jewish and Islamic services. In the Christian Scriptures, whose central synoptic Gospels are themselves thought to be a translation from unknown oral and possibly written Aramaic texts, Paul speaks of a man who was translated into Paradise and "heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter" (2 Cor. 12:4). On one level, Paul is describing the nature of ecstasy and divine revelation as inineffable—ineffable because in ecstasy and the accompanying state of oblivion, words cannot be rescued to describe an experience of otherness, of union with God; on another level Paul is simply proscribing the revelation to the laity of the secret language of mystical knowledge. As Steiner paraphrases Paul, "He who has been in Christ and has heard unspeakable words—'arcana verba'—shall not utter them in a

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Introduction and General Issues mortal idiom" (After Babel 239). In other words, translatability of holy texts and religious experience is denied because there are sacred words that should remain secret. In spite of all the ungenerous criticism of his pioneering study After Babel, Steiner has written more insightfully and eloquently than others about translation theory and practice in its historical frame. He distinguishes between the two radically opposed points of view in the philosophy of language, which he terms universalist and monadist. Characterizing the universalist view he writes: The one declares that the underlying structure of language is universal and common to all men. Dissimilarities between human tongues are essentially of the surface. Translation is realizable precisely because those deep-seated universals, genetic, historical, social, from which all grammars derive can be located and recognized as operative in every human idiom, however singular or bizarre its superficial forms. To translate is to descend beneath the exterior disparities of two languages in order to bring into vital play their analogous and, at the final depths, common principles of being. Here the universalist position touches closely on the mystical intuition of a lost primal or paradismatic speech. (73)

The contrary view, the monadist one, contends "that universalist deep structures are either fathomless to logical and psychological investigation or of an order so abstract, so generalized as to be well-nigh trivial" (74). In order to make the very notion of translation utterly repugnant, he states the monadist position "that universalist models are at best irrelevant and at worst misleading." In effect, translation, particularly of poetry, is doomed. "The extreme 'monadist' position— we shall find great poets holding it—leads logically to the belief that real translation is impossible. What passes for translation is a convention of approximate analogies, a rough-cast similitude, just tolerable when the two relevant languages or cultures are cognate, but altogether spurious when remote tongues and farremoved sensibilities are in question" (74). Formal contemporary translation theory derives largely from comparative linguistics. Assuming language to be a science, linguists are concerned with analysis of the process of translation. They speculate in particular on translatability and frequently hold that all but elementary information transfer resides in the realm of untranslatability. J. C. Catford, in Linguistic Theory of Translation, defines two types of untranslatability: linguistic and cultural. The former occurs when the receptor language (his term and Nida's and Steiner's for target language) lacks a verbal substitute for the word or phrase in the source language. The latter takes place when the receptor language lacks an equivalent of the cultural phenomenon or situation in the source language. Anton Popovic proposes similar arguments of linguistic untranslatability, offering more complications for cultural incompatabilities. Georges Mounin writes more optimistically of translation as a dialectic process, which, although never perfect, may have relative success.

Problems and Parables In these instances Catford and Popovic are hedging. According to their theories, they should reject the translation of anything but mathematical numbers (which for most people are universal and in no need of translation). They would be on safer ground were they to iterate, along with Paz, that "only mathematics and logic can be translated in a literal sense" (in Honig, Poet's Other Voice 156). Using semiotic terms, Paz distinguishes between science and art. As a science, "poetry is 'impossible* to translate because you have to reproduce the materiality of the sign . . . [yet] you cannot use the same signs of the original" (155). Do not expect literal or absolute translations to work, Paz is saying, but to allay the situation he has transformation, metaphor, equivalence, and correspondence up his artistic sleeve. There are instances, however, when a close rendering of poetry is effective. Poetry of the fantastic and surreal like Rimbaud's prose poems (though certainly not those in classical forms) retain their meaning in new tongues, for they rely more on imagery than on language. Clearly there is fidelity and fidelity, translatability and translatability; and information transfer may occur interlingually with a remarkable degree of fidelity when art need not be a concern and music of the language is irrelevant. Indeed, translation, particularly between cognate languages, can, even in poetry occasionally, be comparatively automatic. Peter Newmark writes dogmatically, "A translation is always closer to the original than any intralingual rendering or paraphrase" (Approaches 40). That position is overstated, but usually true in the instance of the interlingual translation of true cognates. Spanish sinfonía is "symphony" in English; symphony is obviously closer to the meaning of sinfonía than any Spanish synonym for sinfonía could be. Given the common Latin source in English and Romance languages for the jargon of linguistics, a translation of the words "the instance of the interlingual translation of true cognates" from English into French or Italian is automatic and as faithful as any spouse could desire, while an intralingual version of the same might raise eyebrows. But once we move from simple information transfer to literary translation, from what Newmark calls "semantic" (source language bias, literal, faithful) to "communicative" (target language bias, free, idiomatic), then the generalization breaks down. With regard to the deeper fidelity of quality, a translation, whether from Shakespeare or Sylvia Plath, is not necessarily better when rendered in an intralingual than an interlingual version. As in all literary translation, quality depends not on method but on the skills of the poet translator in attempting a re-creative translation. The work of the Moscow Formalists and Prague Linguistic Circle has added as much to our aesthetic lexicon as to linguistic investigation; as all theory that pertains to a general theory of literature, their work pertains equally to translation. Such was the pioneering importance of these early twentieth-century thinkers on literature and translation that without them the fullness of later theorists is difficult to imagine. They affected everyone. Yet their concern for the aesthetics

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Introduction and General Issues of literature has rarely been maintained among later linguists who comment on translation Many of the East European thinkers emigrated westward, and Roman Jakobson, the most sensitive to literature among modern linguists in the matter of hard-core theory, wrote arguably the most influential pages on translation in our times, namely his short essay "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation." Together with Claude Lévi-Strauss, he wrote a famous article on Baudelaire's poem "Les Chats," in which they focused quantitatively on word, syntax, and grammatical structure, making comparative counts of these language ingredients. Their method, derived from structuralist linguistics, became very fashionable, usually under the emblem of stylistics. That fashion is over, but what is intriguing is that at least at one moment in contemporary intellectual thought, science and art were harmoniously engaged, and a major theoretical linguist like Jakobson or Jan Mukarovsky or Victor Shklovsky was at ease in general linguistics, in translation (as an aspect of linguistic theory) as well as in literature. Their essential formalist theory of literariness required that a poem have the quality of strangeness, achievable in words rather than the object of words, in patterns beautifully formal, a poem whose principle meaning resides in the signs which convey mainly themselves. Those days now seem long past. The approach of most conventional linguists to translation theory, although of indispensable analytical importance, only minimally concerns art, intuition, language mastery or mystery, and all those qualities that compose the genius and flaws of the writer. The failure of the linguistic approach to the practice, if not to the theory, of translation lies in a fundamental misconception of the aims of literary translation, which is not a normative science but, like any form of original literature, an art. It is perfectly reasonable that linguists and semioticians should treat the texts of translation with interest in levels of expressive meanings but with little ultimate concern for art. They analyze the process of translation, a genuine field for investigation. And it is unfair to demand that those who follow the science of language also be aesthetes. By contrast, the equivalent theoreticians of literature are also interested in process, the activities of writing and reading and the triadic relationships between writer, text, and reader. But literary theorists have an advantage and even an obligation to go further, for their field is not the science of language but works of literature. They find in each reference to writer, text, and reader not only a hermeneutic need to dig in and extract but also a humanistic compulsion to make aesthetic judgments, and to recall that their theory is about art. The theory of untranslatability cannot, in an absolute sense, be shaken, since it supposes, as its false premise, an equality or even duplication of source and target. Perfectability and translation are a misalliance. The error is not to speculate on the notion of absolute translatability but to ask for its application to the

Problems and Parables tasks of literary rewordings. An interesting and logical corollary to the idea of perfect translatability is that one should justly bring perfect "readability" to a perfect translation. But perfect readability today in our anti-New Critical climate of reader theory is as unthinkable as perfect translatability, which itself also implies a prior perfect reading of the source text in order to get the translation process going. If reading itself is a relative, subjective act, a moment of creation or deconstruction, the linguist seems to be doubly correct in assuming that such uncertainty and indeterminacy cannot be reproduced in another tongue. Yet we do read, despite the unstable text, writers write in spite of the indeterminacy of their efforts, so why not translate, as best we can, without fear of failure? Failure always looms—yet achievement in art occurs. If we apply the standards of creative writing to the activity of translation, the question of untranslatability ceases to be ominous. It may be tautological to claim that artistic translation exists when, and only when, the translator brings the same art to the translation process as the earlier artist brought to the source text. Yet this simple notion is placed in jeopardy by those who would, and do, impose alien measures on translation. The one underlying plank of any working theory of literary translation is: art must be translated as art. The measure of success or failure in translation of literary texts is determined by the extent to which an equivalence of the entire cognitive and aesthetic elements is transferred and re-created in the new text. Then literary translation is possible. Steiner writes impatiently, referring to "the purists among divines and grammarians": "Logically, therefore, the attack on translation is only a weak form of an attack on language itself. . . . Like other bits of logical literalism, the nominalist and monadic refutations of the possibility of speech remain to one side of actual human practice. We do speak of the world and to one another. We do translate intra- and interlingually and have done so since the beginning of human history. The defence of translation has the immense advantage of abundant, vulgar fact" (After Babel 250). Among the doubters of the possibility of poetry translation are major poets, although major poets, in all languages, are also the authors of most of the triumphs of poetry translation. Among the detractors, Shelley, Croce, Ortega, and Frost each wrote directly, or by implication, unfriendly words on the possibility of poetry translation. In "In Defence of Poetry," Shelley said, "It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible, that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet" (Works 346). Notwithstanding, Shelley proved a superior and abundant translator of classical poetry; he rendered the Homeric hymns, a play by Euripides, scenes from Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Eí mágico prodigioso, and poems by Bion, Moschus, Virgil, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Calderón, and Goethe into English. Some of his translations have, like Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát,

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Introduction and General Issues become his own poems and part of English literary tradition. Such is the case of his translation of the lyric attributed (probably falsely) to Plato: Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled;— Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendor to the dead.

Croce denies aesthetic translation, with many ambivalent reservations. Ortega requires the reader to move within the linguistic habits of the author, that is, be a servant of original syntax and lexicon, and Robert Frost cunningly remarks that poetry is what is lost in the translation. Were the latter to be true then Frost, as well as Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Milton, would have received all but the poetry in English versions of Job, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and Isaiah. Even the great, cranky Frost might admit the poetic beauty of the poetry of the English Bible. The most intractable of the anti-translators was Vladimir Nabokov. More than other writers in our century Nabokov was a student and product of translation. He translated copiously, and his writing languages changed from Russian to German to English, imposing on him a total translation of language resources which undoubtedly enriched his writing, gave him doubts (as he confesses in the epilogue of Lolita), and led him to his candid, outrageous declarations about translation and the pitiful translations themselves. His command over the last language into which he translated his creative talents, English, is never in doubt in his novels, even in the early Lolita, which is sometimes arched and poised in its exact, thesaurus-sparkling word choices, but obviously fully compensated for by virtues of shocking sensuality. The great long disaster of modern translation (except for its important and abundant "footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers") is his version of Eugene Onegin, unread and not easy to read. In Poems and Problems he includes "On Translating Eugene Onegin" two stanzas of doggerel, which, like all his poetry, including Pale Pire, reveals a less-than-magnificent poetic flare in English. More, it shows a terrible self-hatred for himself as translator-poet. After stating that as translator he beheads, profanes, and feeds on Alexander Pushkin, Nabokov confesses that in "a language newly learned," he is "all thorn, but cousin to your rose." The poem ends with the ugly and demeaning selfindictment: This is my task—a poet's patience And scholiastic passion blent: Dove-droppings on your monument. (No. 12, 175)

Nabokov views himself the translator as minute excrement on the poet's monumental white page.

Problems and Parables Pragmatically, while absolute translatability is impossible in the same way that a perfect act of reading is unthinkable, some degree of translatability, whatever the languages and problems, is always possible. And in practice, what appears to be on the surface untranslatable offers the translator the best possibilities of an interesting success. Although it is impossible to reproduce the same sounds and meanings in iritra- and interlingual translation, 1 think that what is most interesting to translate and most susceptible of success is the impossible or, even better, the untranslatable. And there are some truly untranslatable words and phrases by any standards. These "untranslatables," like the unwilling but much desired Colombian drug "extraditables," are the richest linguistic sources to transfer to the target language, are a challenge to art and ingenuity, and stimulate the imagination of the artist-translator, who in confronting the untranslatable cannot be lazily seduced by the surface obvious into producing an unimaginative, mechanical version. Conversely, what lends itself readily to translation is questionable. But how can this be so? To translate what is cognate may be easy, yet even when well done it is rarely an artistic achievement. There is no resistance to overcome, no single effort of fantasy required to produce the obvious. At the same time an irony of translation practice is that literal interlingual translation of true cognates—or indeed of any passage of pure information—is ready-made, easier, and more accurate than any attempt to find intralingual synonymy in a rewording of the same passage. Also unlikely, yet in practice true, is that free-form surrealist poetry, of the most elusive reference but in which imagery dominates, is particularly attractive to translators; and a tasteful, very close approach is likely to be successful, since images transfer with less loss than sound. So André Breton, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre come through effectively in English in versions by diverse hands. Similarly, because of the extreme clarity of images in Chinese poetry, even when the rich tradition of tonal and rhyming sounds is ignored the poetry works in English, and a very close, moderately literal version can, in skillful hands, be brilliantly effective. Chinese poetry should, perhaps theoretically, be the least translatable of the world's poetry. In practice it is the most, and in our century, with the possible exception of poetry from Spanish, has been the most read foreign poetry in English translation and has had the most decisive influence on our poets from Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound to James Wright and Robert Creeley. But the translation of a poem in closed classical form is something else. A rendering of a short lyric by George Herbert or William Blake into a foreign tongue requires genius, since one cannot be seduced by the obvious and apparently literal. Neither true cognates nor the literal will work graphically, semantically, or phonically to achieve prosodie euphony. In such cases the translator

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Introduction and General Issues is forced away from the ordinary, the unchallenging, and can bring all the resources to the task at his or her disposal. In the case of rhyme (which is only infrequently well handled by translators) or any formal stricture, the exigencies of the poem save the translator from the obvious and force him or her into the obligatory freedom of imaginative leaps. As an instance of the benefits of formal obstacles, I resort to personal experience. In 1963 I was asked by Indiana University Press to translate into English a medieval Latin bestiary, Physiologus Teobaldi (Theobalds Bestiary). The first version that I did of the book (which was in Latin leonine hexameters) closely approximated the sense, but showed no pattern of formal prosody. (In leonine hexameter the word preceding the caesura rhymes with the line's final word.) Often such an approach works well. Here I found my version generally insipid, humorless, and unimaginative. The Latin of the short poem about the Siren reads Sirenae sunt monstra maris resonantia magnis Vocibus et modulis cantus formantia multis Ad quas incaute veniunt saepissime nautae. Quae faciunt somnum nimia dulcedine vocum Et modo naufragium modo dant mortale periclum. Qüas qui fugerent hi tales esse tulerunt: Ex umbilico sunt ut pulcherrima virgo, Quodque facit monstrum, volucres sunt inde deorsum.

My first attempt was Sirens are monsters of the sea with great resonance Whose song is formed of many voices and modulations Before whom incautious sailors often come near.

Then I saw Richard Wilbur's translation of another bestiary poem, "Of the Whale," wherein Wilbur had reproduced even the internal hemistich leonine rhymes in each line. I did not try the léonines, but 1 did decide to render this poem in prosodie form, end rhymes included, forcing myself to exploit whatever imagination and skills I had. It seemed to me that the naïveté and songlike narrations required some equivalent in English. For "The Siren" I came up with Sirens are singing monsters of the sea, With many voices and varied melody. Often the reckless sailors passing near Are sung to sleep with sweetness in their ear, And ships are wrecked and all aboard are drowned. Although the mariners who perished found A lovely virgin from above the waist, Below, birdlegs were monstrously misplaced.

Problems and Parables

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I argue that this verse translation demonstrably reproduces the poem's literal as well as its wider connotative and musical meanings more closely than my first few lines. But whatever the level of perceptible fidelity, by most standards the attempt at versification is better than the crib version with its lightly false cognates. If 1 can be believed as capable of some detachment from authorial possession, I confess that 1 am also fond of the awkward prosy lines (and perhaps rugged strength) of the first attempt. The original is so good that even what I consider a maltreatment is interesting. The line "Before whom incautious sailors often come near" has, perhaps accidentally, an element of high rhetoric and magnitude. What the three-line version lacks is any relation to the siren music, the echoes and contrasting shadows and harshness of the original Latin poem. If in the eyes of some readers my judgment is wrong and the quickly done, more clearly literal version, with no attempt at conventional meter or rhyme, is, on whatever level of quality, superior, and if its fullness and vigor and long interesting line more than make up for the failure to reproduce the magic siren song of the original, then it forcefully suggests that good translations may be close or far. Method is secondary to the combined quality of the original poem and the skills of the poet translator. To return to the original notion of formal obstacles as a liberating device, therefore, whether the rhyming pentameters I devised are magical or dreadfully banal, they came and escaped from Latin-class correctness because of the exigencies and demands for imaginative freedom to outwit formal strictures—all to the end of reproducing meter, rhyme, and some incantatory, resounding, and repeating song that could daze a sailor and sink a ship. Richard Wilbur's translation of a poem from the same fourteenth-century Latin Physiologus Teobaldi or from the French of Francis Jammes may lead to a measurably fine contribution to the canon of poetry in English. Wilbur includes his translations of poems from Russian, Italian, French, and Spanish in each successive book of poetry. Elizabeth Bishop includes her poems from Brazilian Portuguese, Marianne Moore from French, James Wright from German and Spanish. They offer these translations (not here imitations) and their conspiracies with foreign voices yield a special voice now their own. If translation of poetry is impossible, we should say, then, that at least in the cases of Wilbur, Bishop, Moore, and Wright their own good poems are also unfaithful and impossible, and consummately fine examples of the benefits of untranslatability.

/ do not admit the argument for prose translations [of poetry]. I would, in general, rather see verse in so capable a language as ours. The French cannot help themselves, of course, with such a language as theirs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk

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Introduction and General Issues There are great works composed of parts so disparate that one translator is not likely to have the requisite gifts for poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of Shakespeare and Goethe's "Faust"; and these it is best to attempt in prose only. Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer Language consists of two parts, namely words and meaning, which are like body and soul. If both of them can be rendered I do not object to word for word translation. If they cannot, it would be preposterous for a translator to keep the words and deviate from the meaning. Erasmus, preface to his New Testament

Misalliance of Theory and Practice A letter by an Alexandrian Jew named Aristeas to his brother Philocrates comprises the earliest significant treatise on the theory and practice of literary translation. This document is the Letter of Aristeas, which is also the outstanding apologia of Jewish culture and theology to the Greeks of Egypt. Written in Greek around 130 B.c., it deals largely with the translation of the Hebrew Pentateuch into Greek. Aristeas, discussed in some detail later in this book, presents theory and practice as one (miraculous) entity, the former implied in the latter. Theory and practice do not, however, always marry well. There are inevitably misrelations between theory and practice as well as inconsistency in the application of the one to the other. Yet how could it be otherwise? To ask a person both to preach and to practice those preachings may not only be arrogance but may by its very notion limit the imagination and sincerity of the preacher. There are disjunctures even between the pronouncements and practice of John Dryden, who by general agreement is the most subtle and significant thinker and commentator on translation in the history of English literature. Dryden divides methods of translation into three registers: metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation (corresponding to my literalism, middle ground, and license). He derides the servile literalism of metaphrase as in Ben Jonson's word-by-word, line-by-line translation of Horace's Art of Poetry; he praises Edmund Waller's midway paraphrase of Virgil's fourth book of the Aeneid in which "the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense" ("'Preface' to Ovid's Epistles" 68); and he worries about Abraham Cowley's turning of two odes of Pindar and one of Horace into English which takes "only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork as he pleases" (68). Dryden yields to the necessity of imitation, however, contending that when Cowley refused his author's

Problems and Parables

thoughts "he alone was able to make him amends, by giving him better of his own" (70). So, while initially recommending the via media of paraphrase, in the end Dryden finds only the genius of an original author can truly release a difficult author like Pindar into English. In this regard he explains and defends the ways of Cowley: "Pindar is generally known to be a dark writer, to want connection, (I mean as to our understanding,) to soar out of sight, and leave his reader at a daze. So wild and ungovernable a poet cannot be translated less literally; his genius is too strong to bear a chain, and Samson-like he shakes it off. A genius so elevated and unconfined as Mr. Cowley's, was but necessary to make Pindar speak English, and that was to be performed by no other way than imitation" (70). Dryden's own paraphrases of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal have aged today into elegant imitatia rendered in the Age of Reason's notion of the classics. They are wonderful works, pleasurable to read, that do not at all conform to Dryden's middle way. Moreover, the major drama he is known for, All for Love, is a translation and certainly not in his preferred category of moderate paraphrase. Dryden takes the wandering scenes of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, a divine mess by neoclassical standards, and restores the three classical unities of time, place, and action, transforming Shakespeare's energetic epic vision, ranging all over the Mediterranean world over a period of a dozen years, into a few events that take place in a day and night in the city of Alexandria. Borges writes that Shakespeare was really an Italian with an English name. Dryden thoroughly naturalizes that expansive dramatist, translating him from an Italian of Rome or Bologna into an English gentleman from London. Acknowledging his debt to Shakespeare, he said he "professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare." And strictly speaking All for Love is an inspired imitatio, a corrective intralingual imitation of Antony and Cleopatra. It would be interesting to take lines from Antony and Cleopatra and compare them with Dryden's remake as well as with his pronouncements on translation. His dicta and his play conjoin in a fine example of the false marriage of theory and practice. The contrasts between the Elizabethan and the Restoration playwrights manifestly speak for their individual geniuses and their eras and in this instance reveal how Dryden tamed Shakespeare in unnecessary reformation. The words of authors, their intentions, and their actual practice are always a puzzle of critical contradictions. With this in mind, I wish to turn to the Bay Psalm Book. PARABLE OF THE BAY PSALM BOOK

The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620 and founded the first permanent colony in New England. Just twenty years later, after raising money to bring a printer, Stephen Daye, his three menservants, a press, types, and paper to Massachusetts, the congregation in Cambridge printed 1,700 copies of the Bay

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Introduction and General Issues Psalm Book. This Puritan Psalter was the first book to be published and distributed in English America. The Bay Psalm Book contains in new English translation the psalms of David rendered into rhyming quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. Its title page reads THE WHOLE BOOKE OF PSALMES

Faithfully TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH

Metre. The book also contains a preface, probably by the learned divine John Cotton, perhaps by Richard Mather, minister of the church in Dorchester, which is a spirited defense of the method of translation used by himself and the "Roxb'ry Poets," "the thirty pious poets and Ministers" who aided Cotton in the work of translation. So the first pages of the first book published in English-speaking America are a discourse on translation theory and practice.2 The preface is a remarkable document. Learned and brewing with contradictions, it justifies "its plaine and familiar translation of the psalmes and words of David into english metre" (unpaginated facsimile). As the word Faithfully in the subtitle claims, the authors purport to remain close to the letter "and have not soe much as presumed to paraphrase to give the sense of his [David's] meaning in other words." The minister-poets declare that they have attended to the original and shunned all additions, although they do acknowledge turning "Hebraismses" into "Idioms of our owne tongue" so that their work not seem to be "english barbarismes." These first pages of text printed in America take a defiant position in matters of translation theory and practice. The lines set and printed by Stephen Daye provide a Calvinist view of principles of literary translation with specific reference to poetry. From these passages of apology and their unlikely application in the 150 poems that follow, we have in effect the main issues of translation that have been discussed since the time of Cicero and which occupy us still. An extraordinary aspect of the Bay Psalm Book (which has rarely been reprinted and scarcely commented upon for its seminal comments on translation) is its disparity between intention and practice. Despite contrary claim and intent the Puritan poet translators have thoroughly shunned a literal rewording of the Hebrew text. It is often said that translation is a genre of literature that is always alive, since its tasks must be repeated periodically if the source works are to have new births and speak to new times. The poetry of the Bay Psalm Book of 1640 is largely a literary curiosity reflecting the purposes of John Cotton and other pious New Englanders, without the enduring radiance of its near contemporary, the Book

Problems and Parables of Psalms in the King James translation of 1611. The preface, however, with its almost legalistic apology, warnings, and pretensions, its comments on purpose and standards in the art of translation, and its insights into the poetics of drawing poetry out of the shadows of glorious ancient Semitic verse stands as the universal testament to the first Puritans in colonial America. The preface to the Bay Psalm Book begins with an urgent and extended affirmation of the spirit's need to sing the psalms in the Christian Church as the Lévites sang them in the Jewish Church "and the whole Church ioyne together in heart and voyce to prayse the Lord" in the Church of Corinth. "All the creatures in heaven, earth, seas: men, beasts, fishes, foules" have been "commanded to praise the Lord, and yet none of these but men, and godly men too, can doe it with spiritual understanding." To praise means, as it says in the Psalms, to sing praise to the Lord. And Christians should do so with care in regard to the spirit and its incarnation in the word. The preface goes on to warn against the "enemie," whose instigation of bad singing can turn our nature against the Lord: "The singing of Psalmes, though it breath forth nothing but holy harmony, and melody: yet such is the subtilty of the enemie, and the enmity of our nature against the Lord, & his wayes, that our hearts can finde matter of discord in this harmony, and crotchets of division in this holy melody." We soon learn that the discourse on song in the first eight pages justifies the translation of the psalms not into plain prose but into rhythmic and rhyming verse. Psalms were for singing; only verse can be sung. Yet the minister-poets are uneasy about straying, for whatever reason, from the letter of the Hebrew text, and therefore, with devout sincerity, protest that they have adhered to it faithfully. Moreover, they are obliged to turn the Je wish songs into their own English songs, and their reasoning for the dispersal of the comprehended word of God goes to the heart of the Protestant Reformation, which is the declaration of the necessity of having the word of God translated for the people: "Now no protestant doubteth but that all the bookes of the scripture should by Gods ordinance be extant in the mother tongue of each nation, that they may be understood of all, hence the psalmes are to be translated into our english tongue." Considering what the sound of that English song should be, the poets conclude that although "Davids psalmes were sung in his owne words without meeter: we answer. First. There are many verses together in several psalmes of David which run in rithmes as those that know the hebrew and and as Buxtorf shews . . . which shews at least the lawfullness of singing psalmes in english rithmes." The authors further argue that the psalms must be translated into poetical verses and meters that are familiar to the English ear and not "according to the poetry of the hebrew language." The reason for this adaptation to sound of both word and melody is clear. "The Lord hid from us the hebrew tunes, lest wee should think our selves bound to imitate them." Having made their ingenious plea for naturalization of foreign prosody into familiar English devices, they uni-

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Introduction and General Issues versalize the need for domestic melody and versification: "Every nation without scruple might follow as the graver sort of tunes of their owne country songs, soe the graver sort of verses of their owne country poetry." But danger of falsification is truly lurking near, for does not all this transformation of word into song mean distancing the psalm from its true meaning? Of course their answer is no; they have not at all yielded to the temptation of elegant reformations: "Neither let any think, that for the meetre sake wee have taken liberty or poeticall licence to depart from the true and proper sence of Davids words in the hebrew verses, noe; but it hath been one part of our religious care and faithfull indeavour to keepe close to the originall text." The authors state that others have taken liberty in seeking meter and, rather than translating David's words by the rule (which I take to mean word for word, literally), have committed a paraphrase, with many distractions and "which we suppose would not be approved if the psalms were so translated into prose." Here they have revealed a principle of perhaps unconscious belief, which is that a prose translation of a poem must by definition, under ordinary circumstances, be a closer version than a poetry translation. These circumstances do not pertain here, however, since they have taken special caution in their "religious care and faithfull indeavour" not to take "poeticall licence," not to depart from their "close" version which is, despite the regularized "meetre," truly faithful. Moreover, the singers of the Bay psalms immediately disassociate themselves from any accusation of abuse of the sacred text through their metrical translation by asserting that while they have found song they have also been able to retain its "native purity" by favoring plainness, avoiding paraphrase or addition, and keeping the original as their chief guide. They do acknowledge differences in the habits and syntax of two languages that force them, for example, to compromise in their adherence to word-for-word fidelity: they agree not to translate 1, the Hebrew letter "vaw," meaning "and," each time it occurs in Hebrew and not to avoid English idioms, lest their English appear barbarous. The ultimate justification for their method is most moving. The fathers of the Psalter have surrendered elegance for fidelity. Their polishing is not necessary on God's altar. They conclude their apology with If therefore the verses are not alwayes so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect; let them consider that Gods Altar needs not our polishings: for wee have respected rather a plaine translation, then to smooth our verses with the sweetnes of any paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry, in translating the hebrew words into english language, and Davids poetry into english meetre; that so wee may sing in Sion the Lords songs of prayse according to his owne will; untill hee take us from hence,

Problems and Parables

57 and wipe away all our tcares, & bid us enter into our masters ioye to sing éter nail Halleluiahs

There is no reason to doubt the good intentions of the Puritan poets. Although I see in their versions of the Psalms little substantial compliance with their criteria for translation of sacred song, I take this paradox to be as predictable as the usual misalliance of principle and practice. In their eyes they have conformed. We should look now to where their eyes have been. The authors of the Bay Psalm Book cite five Hebrew words in the course of their preface, the words for psalm, hymn, song, God, and blessed (elementary words which even I recall and recognize in their Hebrew script) and, in keeping with their time, and particularly as Protestant ministers, they were schooled in the elements of Hebrew. Yet there is evidence that they had little recourse to the Masoretic text for their translation but rather, like the learned authors of the King James Version (a primary source), chose earlier English versions of the Psalms and the Vulgate as their principal source texts. Very few, if any, of the Bay psalms can be considered interlingual translations; rather they are, like much of the Authorized, models of intralingual rewording. The prosodie source of the psalms, however, lies elsewhere, not in earlier versions of the Bible The Bay poets' notion of Bible song comes from the Protestant hymnology found in earlier Psalters. Ultimately, of course, the Psalters also found their trot for hymnal versions in earlier translations of the Bible. Unlike the loose and diverse parallélisme structure of the Hebrew psalms, each stanza of the 150 hymns in the Bay translation shows absolute regularity. All poems are cast in quatrains of alternating tetrameters and trimeters, in which the second and fourth trimeter lines carry the end rhyme. Given this regularity almost any psalm would do to illustrate character, source, and principles of translation. I have chosen segments of the beautiful Psalm 139, made noble in song by Handel, and loved by all who love the Book of Psalms. Verses 7 to 18 of the King James Version read: 7 Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there 9 If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 10 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. 11 If 1 say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me. 12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. 13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb

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Introduction and General Issues 14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. 15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. 16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. 17 How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! 18 If 1 should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee. In counterpoise we have from the pen of the minister-poets the same passages, Where shall I from thy presence go? or where from thy face fly? If heav'n I climbe, thou there, loe thou, if downe in hell l lye. If I take mornings wings; & dwell where utmost sea-coasts bee. Ev'n there thy hand shall mee conduct: &r thy right hand hold mee. That veryly the darknes shall mee cover, if I say: then shall the night about mee be like to the lightsome day. Yea, darknes hideth not from thee, but as the day shines night: alike unto thee both these are, the darknes & the light. Because that thou possessed hast my reines: and covered mee within my mothers wombe thou hast. My prayse shall be of thee, Because that I am fashioned in fearful wondrous wise. At every turn of the way, the ministers deceived themselves. I have mentioned the apparent indifference to the Hebrew text. (This observation is not made as moral or aesthetic disapproval.) In many of their best moments they have simply reworded the magnificence of earlier English Bible translations. Let us consider verse 9. The authors of the Authorized version, as we saw, have //1 take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Problems and Parables while the recent Jerusalem Bible, which is essentially a translation from French into English of a new, more accurate translation from Hebrew and Greek, shows, If I flew to the point of sunrise, or westward across the sea, and going back to the Greek Septuagint, the old, pre-Christian translation of the Hebrew Bible for the Jews of Alexandria, we find (in a close English translation by Charles Lee Brenton), If 1 should spread my wings to fly toward the dawn, and sojourn at the extremity of the sea. We remember the Bay Psalm Book rendering, If I take mornings wings; & dwell where utmost sea-coasts bee. I should first like to praise the felicity of these last lines, in this case truly worthy of Herbert or early Blake. Concentrating on the if clause, we ask where the psalm comes from. Clearly from the English Bible tradition. The Jerusalem and Septuagint versions, so different from the traditional English renderings, are close to the Hebrew text, which consists of a few words: "If I flew to dawn." But what is the general pattern in the Bay version? For purposes of rhythm, rhyme, and euphony, it pads, adds, alters, omits. It is not plain, and it definitely polishes up its lines before they are heard on God's altar. It goes to English sources, not Hebrew. In the preface, the translators acknowledge that they have cast David's Psalms in English versification, yet protest that unlike those who did other versions they have not yielded to elegance at the expense of fidelity. Yet in contrast to the King James Version, which is largely a magnanimous version of earlier English versions, the Bay Psalms, whose semantic source is the Authorized, depart radically because the prosodie source, the Psalter, led the Bay translators to extreme transformation of the information in the King James Version. It is astonishing how pleasant and distinct they are. I suggest that the Bay psalms appear so different from the Hebrew originals not because translations into verse create great distancing from the form and content of the original, although this common assumption is commonly correct. In fact, translation into verse need not distance and often does not. I do believe, however, that the choice of the short lines used in the Psalter, as opposed to the long lines of the Authorized, makes it more difficult, if not impossible, not to stray into dangerous freedoms. We should remember that the Hebrew text contains fewer words than the English Authorized, not particularly because the Authorized has expanded the meaning but because Hebrew, like Chinese at the far

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Introduction and General Issues extreme, is a much more compact language than English, just as English is more compact than Romance languages. Faithfully is the central descriptive and key methodological word on the title page of the Bay Psalm Book, which reads: "The / Whole / Booke of Psalmes /Faithfully/Translated into English / Metre." Faithfulness or its synonym fidelity connote the marital and religious oaths of virtue, which the divines would scarcely have wished to ignore. Although to our eyes their playful adaptation of the text is not at all an example of literalist fidelity, their notion of English song was strictly regular, and forcing the source text (in this case largely earlier English versions of the Psalms) faithfully into that mold did not, could not, alter their purpose and vows of fidelity. Clearly in practice one person's fidelity (in marriage and religion perhaps as well as in translation) is another's license and freedom. The King James is free verse, acceptable for reading, if not for song. It shaped the poetry of Milton as earlier versions had entered into the grandeur of Shakespeare's speech. No poet of stature after the early seventeenth century has not been profoundly affected by its diction, syntax, and musical cadences, not to mention its content. Wordsworth and even free-thinking Shelley, pious though tormented Hopkins, profanely reverent Dylan Thomas, and T. S. Eliot after his conversion are more recent children of the King James Bible. Blake and Whitman wrote their own bibles, in the course of which they invented modern free verse, taking as their model the Bible. Emily Dickinson as always stood alone. She went to the Bible as did few other poets to distort and disturb and convert to her own idiolect, but her basic prosody, like that of the Bay Psalm Book, came from the hymnology of the Protestant Psalters. Because of the prestige and reverence for the great early translations of the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Authorized, such partial versions as the Bay Psalm Book have remained unjustly in their shadow. Even Milton's translation of nine biblical psalms has found little praise. As for the Bay versions, the scant attention paid their literary quality has elicited appraisals such as, "[of a] hopelessly unpoetical character." Personally, I find the Bay version endlessly charming, jingle and doggerel though it may be at times, and not far in its happiest moments from the qualities found in George Herbert or in the naive singsong of the European vernacular bestiaries. Yet my purpose here is not evaluation but the measure of discord between principle and practice. I have attributed much of the difference and freedom of the English Bay psalms primarily to the choice of forms and secondarily to the workings within those forms of the translators. As for the misalliance of their translation theory and practice, I attribute that to useful self-deception and the paradigmatic ability of religious exegetes and political figures to put down and read back whatever conforms to the requirements and aspirations of their faith. Having strayed so very far from the literal—and I applaud and enjoy their practice—the authors of the Psalter needed to suppress this fact, which thoroughly contradicted their

Problems and Parables notion of fidelity to God's commanding word. Therefore they rationalized, they justified. Although they undeservedly saw themselves as obedient to the Hebrew letter to the point of sacrificing grace and felicity, they were simply pleasant singers of English religious song, obedient to the prosody of the Protestant hymns of the day. Their misalliance of intention and practice is extreme. Now this dichotomy between theory and practice which we have witnessed in the Bay Psalter is especially apparent in our contemporary period. The most serious critics, particularly Benjamin, Bloom, and Derrida, have speculated about translation—translation as reproduction, filling in the gaps of meaning in a universal language, translation as subversion, indeed, all writing as a form of imitation or hidden translation—but in their work, Bloom and Derrida enforce that dichotomy between theory and practice by ignoring literary translations altogether, and Benjamin's practice in his versions with Baudelaire of Tableaux parisiens seems to mock his prescriptive guidelines in his preface to the book, "The Task of the Translator." In actuality, Benjamin, perhaps the most profound and spiritual of the critics who have meditated on translation, insofar as he did speak about its practice, astonishingly recommends literal translation of syntax as well as words, a method, however, which he neither comments on in particular, nor one he could be expected to have embraced seriously except as a tantalizing possibility and idealist taunt. Indeed, his German versions of Tableaux parisiens do not seem to be written by the same man who discusses theory and method in the prefatory essay. The Bay Psalm Book and Benjamin's translation have in common an absolute split between prescription and practice. Rarely does a writer come along like Nabokov, who not only proposed but actually practiced a word-for-word, syntax for-syntax conversion of Eugene Onegin into his strange, unreadable, archaizing, idiolectical English. Nabokov, however one views his ideas and practice, was consistent, and in that he is an exception. As for the others, is it a flaw that Benjamin, Bloom, and Derrida have not revealed insights that may be used by the practicing literary translator? I think not. When theory and practice merge, it is a treat. That treat is not to be found today in theoretical writings on translations. Before the second decade of our century translation theory, despite the name, was not so much theory as a history of the practice of translation. Similarly, in our time translation theory has become a discourse on language and semiotics, applied to translation, yet in such ways as not to affect or be affected by the actual practice of the art of translation. Given the chasm between theory and practice, especially in the twentieth century, I shall, in the later pages devoted to theory, investigate theory as theory, practice as practice. At the same time we should no more demand that translation theory teach us how to do elegant translations than to ask others in contemporary literary theory to teach us how to write novels, plays, and poems. In their preface the

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Introduction and General Issues gentlemen of the Bay Psalm Booh had the wit to profess their sacred principles and their claim of having left the song of God unviolated by whims of elegance and decoration; at the same time they had the imaginative grace to ignore their professions and vows before an editorial Lord and do what they could, with the prosodie resources in their command, to transfer the magnificent psalms in the Authorized prose into their own metronomic yet singing verse.

A Jew's profile in the subway is perhaps that of Christ; the hands giving us our change at the ticket window perhaps repeat those that one day were nailed to the cross by some soldiers. Jorge Luis Borges, "Paradiso, XXXI, 108"

How through False Translation into and from the Bible Jesus Ceased To Be a Jew UNFAITHFUL TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE FOR THE FAITHFUL

In E. L. Doctorow's novel Billy Bathgate, there is a scene in which Dutch Schultz, a New York gangster, converts to Catholicism. In that passage, the priest tells Schultz how the religions differ: The father put down his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair still chewing. He looked at Mr. Schultz, his heavy eyebrows raised in compassionate priestly skepticism. "From the Jewish to the Holy Church is a great revolution." "Not so great Father, not so great. We are in the same ballpark. Why else would all your bigshots wear yarmulkes? I notice also you keep talking about our guys and reading our Bible. Not so great." (173) In this section, we will look into one of the great enigmas and distortions of religious and intellectual history: how, through the manipulation of intentional falsification of translation, Jesus, in the eyes of Christians and even Jews, ceased to be one of "our guys." We learn the benefits of mistranslation, of censorship and adaptation, which inhere in mistranslation, and how, notwithstanding Mr. Schultz's exceptional, enlightened, and wiseguy understanding of things, Jesus, through the translator's deft, authorizing hand, ceased to be a Jew. Most analyses of Bible translation are concerned with accuracy, a buzz word in religious translation for linguistic and theological purity. In practice such purity is deeply subjective (as perhaps it should be) and depends on the values, prejudices, and religious politics of each denomination. Fidelity to the word of the Lord presupposes the claim of word-for-word or, at best, sense-for-sense translation, to use Horace's and Jerome's prescription. Literalist fidelity in Bible translation assumes that content of the holy events can be separated from the

Problems and Parables sound, style, tone, and form of their narration, as well as from all those qualities that constitute the general signification of a sentence, an assumption which no contemporary literary or linguistic theory of language would tolerate. As we have seen in the instance of the Bay Psalm Book, the claims of fidelity have, in older glorious translations, interfered neither with magnificence of style nor with accuracy. Translators and exegetes alike have invented meanings and words with the full powers of their determined imaginations. In our century, however, the Bible has suffered ignominiously "accurate" translations. Accurate has replaced literal as the word to justify bad translation. Not since the seventeenth-century King James and the twentieth-century Revised Standard versions has the Bible, unlike the other major texts of Greco-Roman and Judéo-Christian culture, been afforded the dignity of a literary translation into English. (An illuminating exception is Richmond Lattimore's translation of the synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John, and Revelation.) The Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures in English have suffered every form of modern literary abuse.3 Imagine if Homer, Virgil, and Dante were given to us in simplified, "Good News" translations. Consider this painfully close version by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1958 of the majestic beginning of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was towards the God, and God was the Word. This was in beginning towards the God. Everything through him became, and apart-from him became not-even one-thing. What has-become in him life was, and the life was the light of-the men. And the light in the darkness shines, and the darkness it not overcame." Because of shoddy translations of the Bible in our century, its great literature, its poets and prophets, have not been given a contemporary voice, such as T. S. Eliot called for in his attack on Gilbert Murray's old-fashioned, wooden, Swinburnian translations from the Greek and his demand for new versions of Greek tragedy. Eliot's plea has since been answered in the excellent versions by Dudley Fitts, Robert Fitzgerald, William Arrowsmith, and Lattimore, among others. There is no equivalent in Bible translation, neither in quality nor in outstanding translators who insure quality. But the Bible, as is so often the case with sacred literature, has been judged by criteria alien to the art of translation. According to our model for translation method, here the modern literary abuse of method derives from the application of a literalist (register la) rather than a middle-ground (register Ib) approach to a text given to us in the form of a great work of art. All this is, or should be, clear. A deeper infidelity in Bible translation method goes undetected, however. For although it is assumed that the felony of contemporary Bible translators is literary insensitivity, mediocrity, or overliteralism, few people realize that from earliest Bible translation to the present there has been only the appearance of literalism. Indeed, in the many moments involved in the multiple translation processes, that is, the transformation of an event into text—including witnessing, transcription of witnessing,

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Introduction and General Issues redaction, and formal translation—the original event, if there was one, experiences radical transformations. Did Stephen actually speak to the Jewish Council as reported in Acts 7, and, if so, how, a half century after the event, did Luke obtain "the verbatim text of Stephen's speech"? Is it not rather, as John B. Gabel and Charles Wheeler suggest in their recent volume The Bible as Literature, more likely that Luke, as author and redactor of the Acts, recorded what Stephen "would have (or should have) given on that occasion" in order to convince his Christian audience (7-9)? The assumption of literalism and intended fidelity has been the shield of fundamentalists and radical liberal theologians alike against an awareness of a profound religio-political infidelity. The translations of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures, consciously or not, are similar to the controlled news information in authoritarian states. In other words, license (register c) and extreme freedom has been applied to Bible translations, yet passed off as literalism (register a). There is nothing uncommon about a misalliance of theory and practice, of intention and realization. The gap between proclaimed intention and realization in regard to Bible translation is extreme, however. The many translators of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures into the "common" languages, beginning with Latin of the Vulgate, have conducted sectarian, combative missions to change the recognizable identities of the people of the Bible. Distortion of identity by means of translation holds as a pattern throughout the English and Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible and even more acutely in the Christian Scriptures. Here, I will comment only on the transfer of the Christian Scriptures from Greek into English. Early Christianity was an invention of Jews; in the early period the new faith was initially developed for and practiced by Jews and gentiles in Judea, Galilee, in communities and synagogues of Rome, Thessaloniki, and Anatolia, where Paul preached and proselytized. Some Jews dropped the specific designation of Jew, while others, particularly Greek-speaking Jews from Alexandria who looked to John the Baptist, James, and Jesus, came to be called Jewish Christians or Ebionites. Many pseudepigrapha and noncanonical apocrypha of the day are specifically Jewish Christian, others are Jewish with a Jewish Christian or Christian overlay. Of the great poetry of the first centuries nothing we have compares with the splendor of the pseudepigraphic Odes of Solomon, Jewish Christian wisdom poetry found in Syriac. The Jewish Christians, according to Ron Cameron, were close to the spirit of "Matthew, which also appears to reinterpret Jewish and Jesus traditions to provide, in part, a possible option for Jewish identity after the destruction of the Temple" (Other Gospels 103). Matthew the Evangelist, also called Levi, was himself a Jewish Christian. His audience, faithful Jews, saw the crucified rabbi Joshua as the Messiah and true interpreter of Jewish law. Their belief in the Messiah known later by the Greek name Jesus was not necessarily conceived of as apostasy but rather as in keeping with a fulfillment of Jewish tradition.

Problems and Parables During the intertestamental period (the time between the composition of the Old and New Testaments), there were many sects seeking the Messiah, as contemporary scriptures confirm. Even the pseudepigraphic Genesis Apocryphon from the Dead Sea Scrolls tells of a messiah figure among the Essenes, who like Jesus performs healing miracles, such as the laying-on of hands. The Jewish Gnostics were also essentially eschatological, that is, concerned with salvation, as were later Christian Gnostics (see Gershom Scholem's Jewish Gnosticism)', yet, failing to find the Messiah's return, both sects turned inward, seeking, through gnosis, revelation and union of the soul with God. R. M. Grant speculates that after the failure of Jewish apocalyptic hopes—that is, the messianic hope of God's intervention—Jews looked inside for illumination (Gnosticism and Christianity 26). So too the Christian Gnostics sought the inner realm of light when the Messiah did not return. But many of the religious sects, including monotheistic Pagans of Alexandria, eagerly awaited the Messiah; among these sects were those later to be designated Christians. Since early Christian leaders, saints, and followers were both Jews and gentiles, pursuing the Jewish dream of an announced Messiah, how could two thousand years of Christian antisemitism be based largely on their Scriptures, that is, on the New Testament, a collection of revolutionary texts born from the depths of the rabbinic tradition? By sleight-of-hand editing and translating, only certain figures of the Christian Scriptures remain clearly identifiable as Jews—not John the Baptist, not Mary, not Jesus, nor James and Paul: even their names are not biblically Jewish. The disguise is in place by the time of the Greek Scriptures and is reinforced in translation into other languages. Those seen to be Jews are depicted deplorably and always as guilty. Yet Jeremiah and Isaiah treated their people even more severely in their teachings, rebuking them and prophesying terrible retribution for their transgressions. Why then are Jeremiah and Isaiah not part of the long tradition of antisemitism? When the prophets reprimand Jews in the Hebrew Bible it is recognized as an internal quest for ethical improvement. When transgressors sin, the prophets are there to say so. Self-criticism within a culture, even fierce censure, does not usually provoke external wrath. No discernible tradition exists of hatred of biblical Israelites—the Hebrews, to use Christian appellations for Jews in the Hebrew Bible. In reality the books of Jeremiah and the Isaiahs are typical of biblical and later sacred books of the Jewish tradition in which harsh self-criticism, even ethical self-flagellation, pervades. And the synoptic Gospels and epistles of Paul are also part of that Jewish tradition—but with a difference. The Christian Scriptures are fearfully different because, in the Jewish world that they describe, all the good people are Christians and the evil ones Jews, and the division is no longer internal but of two alienated peoples. Internal corrective self-criticism by Jews of Jews has been transformed into the blood conflict of gentile against Jew. How could Jewish authors produce such a fearful world of

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Introduction and General Issues fatal hatreds? They did not. The original stories, in the process of telling and writing, redaction, and translation, were transformed to produce a narrative that excluded Jews from the messianic happenings in their land. Here I use translation to mean the specific translation of the Christian Scriptures into the vulgar tongues. But I also mean by it the larger process of transforming and transmitting information, which includes the intralingual editing of texts. I refer particularly to that most uncertain period when the editing and translation took place, in the decades after Jesus' death during which oral and written proto-Gospel sources, whatever they were, were compiled to yield the later synoptic Gospels. These earlier versions of the synoptic Gospels (which exclude the Gospel of John) had a Semitic source, oral or written, in Aramaic or Hebrew, and what survive today are versions of earlier versions which have gained authority as original documents and are analyzed for each critical word. In the course of these many translations and later versions in Latin and the languages of the world, the early compilers and translators of the Christian Scriptures succeeded so well in formulating the new documents that they created a disenfranchizing book about Jews in which the main figures, "good Jews," are not perceived as Jews at all. They are not meant to be. Jews, as the enemies of Jesus (the rabbi Joshua), must—and will—be punished for all generations to come. To understand the scope of the perfect realization, through translation, of the eradication of a people's identity, I offer a parable relating the Greek Socrates to the Jew Jesus. It is a retelling of the story of a Greek and a Jew, although these designations of ethnic identity are cast into curious distorting shadows of intentionality. "Who are the Greeks and who are the Jews?" stolen from Roland Barthes' Mythologies, might make a helpful subtitle. PARABLE OF THE DEATH OF SOCRATES

Plato's Apology, Crito, and Phaedo narrate the last days of Socrates, taking us through his pathos and the calm agony of his execution. But after the iconoclastic period (between the fifth and the ninth centuries), when the Church shattered visible antiquity and ordered pagan writing burned, Plato's work persisted only in Persian and Arabic translations. These Platonic scrolls, still alive in the East, offered light to the Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, but in the West the School of Translators at Toledo, who eventually returned Plato to Spain and Europe, was still many centuries away. From that earlier Western darkness came this document: "It happens that in our Italian monastery at Monte Cassino (founded in 529, nearly a century ago, by our patron Benedictus of Nursia) parchments were discovered with the Greek texts of the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. These three documents are now the only records preserved from that barbaric, pre-illuminated period misnamed 'the age of Hellenic civilization.' Our iconoclastic period took care of destroying not only every marble and basalt statue but every fragment of

Problems and Parables papyrus, every written text. Yet these three texts (like the three synoptic Gospels which suffice to give the history of our Lord) are enough for us to prove a few poignant facts. The Greeks are the Socrates-killers, killers of a man who was almost a holy Pagan in wisdom, knowledge, and virtue, and who was not a Greek. Initially, even we believed in Socrates' Greekness. But that unacceptable notion soon vanished, as, through our adjustment of the texts, we drew Socrates into our Christian fold. "I am an anonymous brother of the Church, who would walk around the globe a hundred times, with no more than bread in my pockets, were it to advance the astute ideals I am heir to in this, our Augustinian order. Together with other enlightened brothers, 1 decided to perform my decisive act for Church and for God—no less than to reconcile Pagan thought with our own doctrines deriving from Augustine, our benefactor, from Paul our guide, and from our Lord the Christ. Being motivated by faith rather than by worldly beliefs, I have no qualms about the nature of my contributions. Yet being also a pedant, one confirmed in the pleasures of bookish affirmation and confession, I have decided to set down a brief history of how my brothers and I have affected the history of antiquity. "Imbued with humanism, we monks set about to translate the dialogues of Plato into Latin. However, since ours is a time when Sappho has ceased to be recited from memory—the burning of her works was recently ordered by Pope Gregory VII—and Paganism shows always as an insinuation of sin, we determined to treat Socrates, and his resonant and symbolic death in particular, as our French brethren had Ovid in Ovide moralisé. We would not, however, resort to submitting Socrates to Christian castigation, to turn the thinker typologically into a representation of virtue. There would be no Socrates divinizzato. Why not? Our logic was shrewd: to Christianize Socrates thoroughly would be ineffective and undermine our higher intent, which is to praise the good men who lived on earth before the incarnation, to extol Aristotle and Virgil, but not to give them the light of Christian salvation. And above all we would deprive Socrates of the celebrations and temptations of his civilization by deracinating him, by making him alien in his homeland. In such ways the great word of Socrates could be used by the Church, without taint of its depraved and threatening Hellenic origin. "In the cold library at Monte Cassino we made an initial interlinear gloss. Then we altered, elaborated, making draft upon draft, shaping the message to our mission. In these rewordings the miraculous transformation took place. The falsification was never detected. Ultimately, we achieved a fresh and definitive historical version. Yet after having performed our fabrications for the belief of later generations, we, the authors, were the first to believe the message of the altered texts. When the imagination has produced a sacred scripture for the Lord, it soon becomes impossible to distinguish its own contribution, its creation, from

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Introduction and General Issues the original; and happy with the fruit of our hybrid trees, we were the first to forget the old dubious dialogues of that other scribe, the homoerotic sophist and banqueter, Plato. "While magic offers merely the dexterity of illusion, miracle, which has a transcendent deity coaching the earthly agent, not only transforms the object but creates its new truth. Magic begins with the premise of assumed falsehood while miracle demands the fabrication of truth. So our scribal version of the life and death of Socrates is not monkish magic. Our perfect rendition is miracle. "In our Monte Cassino translation, you will discover that although Socrates and his companions inhabit Greece, they are not Greeks at all. Nor are outrageous Archilochos, the pious poet Pindar, the heathens Plato and Aristotle, nor even the angry buffoon Aristophanes. None is Greek. In the city of Athens there are no identifiable Greeks among apprentice sculptors or wives of sophists or hoplite guards on honey-tasting Hymaetus or citizen masses in markets on the slope of the Agora. There is only one gang of Greeks in the marble belly of Athens—the terrible, contemptible group who condemns Socrates to death. These are the judges in the tribunal of Athens. These are the Greeks. These Greek judges accuse Socrates of 'corrupting the minds of the young, and believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.' Even Socrates, through Plato's words, has identified these treacherous judges as Greeks. In the Apology Socrates prophesies that the Greeks will not be forgiven: 'Well, gentlemen, for the sake of a very small gain in time you are going to earn the reputation—and the blame from those who wish to disparage our city—of having put Socrates to death, "that wise man"—because they will say I am wise even if I am not, these people who want to find fault with you' (Apology 38c). "About the circumstance and significance of Socrates' death, we scribes have taken our rightful revenge. Greek civilization (confined exclusively to those five hundred judges) will hereafter live in infamy for its execution of the alien philosopher. We have endowed Socrates with Christian premonitions, and it is our hope that some poet or theologian will take him out of Limbo and place him on the road to Paradiso. Although some say the Romans are behind the death of Socrates, these rumors are calumny. A similar accusation against the Romans was made some centuries later. We know now that Pilate and those Roman soldiers who nailed Our Lord up on the raw wood and punctured Him with a spear were not Romans but Jews in disguise. Rome and its officers had nothing to do with the death of Jesus, our Christian God. "In erasing all signs of Socrates' supposed Greekness, we have done for the Socratic texts what the oral witnesses and first recorders in Aramaic, those men imbued with light and reason, did for Jesus, in thoroughly suppressing any notion that a charismatic prophet and rabbi called by the people Joshua the Messiah was a Jew. They also silenced the slander that his mother Miryam was a Jew. Despite the lingering insinuation (I should say blasphemy) that Christ the Lord

Problems and Parables suffered the pain of having Semitic blood befouling his veins, in their splendid mythography it became clear that rabbi Joshua came from an unknown tribe in Jerusalem, where he lived and where he was fatally surrounded by despicable Jews. "Now earlier, across the waters, Socrates had lived fatally among despicable Greeks. There is also the lingering insinuation that Socrates had Hellenic blood befouling his veins but that too is slander. "As for the execution of Socrates, the Greeks alone are responsible. There are no scapegoat Romans, as in Jerusalem, for demagogic historians to accuse. There are only the despicable Greeks. In those extant dialogues Plato insures that Greeks are and will be forever associated, uniquely associated, with a trumpedup trial and an execution. But who then was Socrates? Was he a passerby from central Asia or an immigrant Egyptian? We know only that Socrates, man of unknown origin, lived, along with other inhabitants of similarly unknown origin, in Athens. "Of course we still have only the most miserly records of the genesis and deaths of Socrates and Jesus. There exist only our uniquely translated dialogues about Socrates' poisoning, and a sentence in a page from Josephus, an Alexandrian Jew, about Jesus' crucifixion (a sentence, by the way, now proved to be a very late spurious interpolation). Perhaps there will be new finds in some later day in the buried trash heaps of antiquity, in the Egyptian Fayuum, where there is no papyri-destroying rainfall. Then, armed with new pages to confirm the miracle of our Latin translation of the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, the wise Church may bring Socrates into the light of Christian life and philosophy, preparing him for inevitable canonization, which we desire for Saint Dionysios. For now, hear my confessions. I personally affirm that just as neither Jesus nor his mother was a Jew, so Socrates was in no way connected with the tribe of Greeks, who still carry their guilt for his execution as a drop of hemlock in their glass." This document is fiction. However, across the waters in Judea—by which of its many names should we call that land?—anonymous scribes once recorded the events of the life of Jesus in such a way as to rename a people and conceal its identity. The scribes of the Christian Scriptures practiced a strategy of disguisement in which their skills were so consummate that they proved, in effect, that there were no Jews in the Virgin Mary's house. How was this done? The primary method of destabilizing and deracinating a people is to rename them and their land. Consequently, the first strategy of the recorders and translators of the Christian Scriptures was to remove Jesus from his Jewishness. The translators changed his name and the names of those near him. We have already observed that Jesus is an English translation of Latin /«us, from Greek iesous, from Hebrew yeshua or yeshu, a contraction of yehoshua (Joshua), from yah, "Yahweh," 4- hoshia, "to help," meaning "help of Yahweh." Christ is from

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Introduction and General Issues Greek christos, the "anointed," a translation of the Hebrew word mashiah, which becomes messiah, "anointed." The Christ is the anointed. Mary is from Greek Maria or Mariam, from Hebrew miryam. Paul was once Saul, James is the curious English version of the Greek name lakobos, whose transliteration into Greek from Hebrew jaaqob is seen to be direct. To change names of people or places need not have the intention of erasing identity. Yet it may. Confucius comes from Kong Fuzi, and I know of no intended mischief in this transmission from Chinese. Ulysses, however, is Latin for Greek Odysseus, and here, as in all the Romanizations of Greek classical names (increasingly unpopular), there is clearly a whiff of Roman power and empire in the Latin translation. The translators of the Christian Testament changed names for their messianic purpose and, for the same purpose, did so inconsistently. I cite four paradigmatic changes of title and name in translations out of Greek: rabbi, Jacob, Judas, and Jesus. If we are to see a pattern in the changing of names, we must begin with the central character, Jesus. Jesus was a rabbi. The strategy to conceal Jesus' Jewish identity is consistent. In most instances in the Greek Gospels where he is addressed in Greek as "Rabbi" by Mary or by his disciples, the translation of Greek rabbi (from Hebrew rabbi) into English and other languages is "Master" or its equivalents. Although master is the standard translation of Greek rabbi into other languages, we can also assume that rabbi, which occurs some fifteen times in the Gospels, would have appeared one or two hundred times had there not been a redaction of the texts as they moved in transcription and translation from late Aramaic into Greek. How can we know this? There is persuasive evidence. In the transfiguration episode, for example, in which Jesus appears on the high mountains talking to Moses and Elijah, the scene, whose immediate source is the Gospel of Mark, is related in virtually the same words in all three synoptic Gospels, suggesting that the source of the Greek was the same for all three passages. In the King James Version we have: Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here; if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles. (Matt. 17:3) And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three tabernacles. (Mark 9:5) Peter said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three tabernacles. (Luke 9:33)

Although the Greek texts for these versions are almost identical, one significant variant occurs in each Gospel: the word that is translated into English as

Problems and Parables "Master" In Matthew we find kyrie, meaning "Lord," in Mark it is rabbi, meaning "rabbi," and in Luke, epistata, meaning "teacher." There could be an argument for a free translation to "Master" in Matthew and Luke, but no question of freedom applies to Mark. In Mark the English translation of rabbi is intentionally false, and its purpose is the concealment of Jesus' identity as a rabbi and, by extension, as a Jew. The existence of these three distinct honorific titles in the Greek, however, should also alert us to earlier tampering, and therefore a double concealment of identity: not only from Greek into English but also from the earlier source into Greek. How is it that the lost source text, in Hebrew, Aramaic, or an earlier translation from Aramaic into Greek offered virtually identical phrases in all three Gospels with the exception of the honorific title (all translated into English as "Master")? One of these three words, kyrie, rabbi, epistata, must, therefore, have been the source word. Which one? Rabbi is the most likely. Rabbi, meaning a Jewish religious teacher and priest, was the obvious word to change in the Christianization of Jesus. In the Authorized Mark, as we saw, the Greek word fxxßßC was translated (incorrectly) as "Master," but in John 1:38, the same word is rendered as "Rabbi." However, this disturbing reference to Jesus as a rabbi is immediately exonerated in a blatant illustration of exegetical intentionality.4 In an explanatory linguistic aside the English Bible informs the reader to interpret the English word rabbi as "Master": "Then Jesus turned and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou?"5 This aside in the Greek text has the purpose of persuading the reader not to read the word rabbi, which survived earlier redactions into the Greek Scriptures, as "Rabbi," a priest and teacher of Jews, but as "Master," the chosen evasion of the Jewish epithet. It divorces rabbi of its ordinary meaning, which indicates Jewish identity, and imposes another meaning on it of messianic figurehood. It thereby allows a reading in which Jesus becomes the Christian Master and Lord. This is the common device of religious exegesis, and, as we have seen, Stanley Fish's ultimate model for imaginative reading. From these examples of the mistranslation of rabbi, we can presume a much more extensive revisionist translation of the Christian Scriptures from Aramaic or Hebrew sources into Greek. We may suppose that whenever Jesus is addressed in Greek as "kyrie" (Lord), "epistata" (teacher), "didaskale" (teacher), or "despote" (master), the word in Hebrew and Aramaic was normally rabbi. If my assumption is correct, then for the English translation to be faithful Jesus would have been addressed as "Rabbi" on almost every page of the Gospels, and there would have been no possibility of forgetting that he was a Jewish rabbi. Had this one single politico-religious subversion of the text not occurred, the deracination of Jesus and his followers as Jews in the Scriptures would not have been plausible. Clearly, to address Jesus as "Rabbi" identifies him as a religious teacher of

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Introduction and General Issues the Jews. To call him "Master" averts this unpleasant designation. In John 11:8 we have another revealing passage of strange contradictions: "His disciples say unto him, Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again?" Now, of course the Greek word is rabbi, and the King James Version again falsely translates it for missionary ends. This is not astonishing. What is amazing is the apparent contradiction in the Greek itself, the unreason of stating, "Rabbi, the Jews of late sought to stone thee." Is a rabbi not a Jew? Was not John himself a Jew? In English a Master is not meant to be a Jew; the word distinguishes Jesus from his Jewish kin and makes them two separate peoples. But in the Greek text, how can the rabbi not be perceived as a Jew? And since a rabbi must be a Jew, how, in defiance of common sense, can one say in Greek (or could one have said in the original Aramaic), "Rabbi, the Jews of late sought to stone thee"? Surely such words in Aramaic or Hebrew were neither uttered nor recorded. However, when the word Jews was added to the text, the redactors did not, as they had in other recensions, replace Rabbi with Master, Teacher, or Lord. That failure, that inconsistency, draws attention to the passage and gives us a clue to the crude adulteration of the Scriptures as they passed from their oral and written origins into Greek. The King James Version (1611), as its title and preface suggest, is not a formal translation but a version, or rewording, of earlier English Bibles—Tyndale (1525), Great (1539), Geneva (1562), Bishops' (1568), and Rheims (1582). It is instructive to see how each handled John 11:8: "Master, the Jewes lately sought meanes to stone the" (Tyndale); "Master, the Jewes lately sought to stone the" (Great); "Master, the Jewes lately soght to stone thee" (Geneva); "Master, the Jewes lately sought to stone thee" (Bishops'); "Rabbi, now the Jewes sought to stone thee" (Rheims); "Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee" (King James). Of these, only the Rheims-Douai Bible chose to translate Greek rabbi as "Rabbi." The Rheims is a Catholic Bible, translated into English by persecuted English Catholic exiles in France (see the discussion of Bible translations in chapter 4). In this instance it appears that its authors rejected the Latin original of Jerome and turned to the Greek text, following a tendency more common among Protestants to return to the Greek and Hebrew versions and connotations of the Bible. So only the Rheims allowed "Rabbi." At an earlier stage the word Jews was almost certainly not found at all in the texts but was rather people, a group, or some other word to suggest those people who were not followers of Jesus. The word Jews was unlikely, given that Jesus, his followers, those who failed to believe (which includes his unbelieving mother and brothers; see Mark 6:4-6, and John 7:1-6), as well as his outright opponents, were all Jews. In the biblical land it makes no sense to call only one segment of Jews "Jews." Later, however, as the early Jewish Christians assumed their Christian identity, it was not only sensible but mandatory to disinherit Jesus and his followers of their Jewish identity. This Christianization occurs through-

Problems and Parables out the noncanonical apocrypha where all levels of Christian and Gnostic overlays guide the texts. So the alteration of identities began. As in my earlier example of the three versions of rabbi, the process was not carried out completely. In "Rabbi, the Jews of late sought to stone thee," rne disinheritance (at least in the Greek text) is also incomplete. Rabbi remains. Yet the overall process of mistranslation has, throughout the Christian Scriptures, been efficient and effective As seen before, it consists of dividing Jews intj two categories—those who follow Jesus, and those who do not—and of concealing the true Jewish identity of the first group while making the second category of nonfollowers the antagonist Jews. In a religious or political society who¿e aim is manipulation of information, we often see extreme infidelity to source (register c), although the moral posture of the society pretends to responsible literalism (register a). Such unfaithful, that is false, translation of information is .he formula in authoritarian states for producing propaganda. The result here is a distorting, licentious transfer of meaning into the Greek Scriptures, with the revolutionary script of engendering hatred for Jesus' people. In contrast to the synoptic Gospels, in the Gospel of John the pattern of mistranslating rabbi as "Master" occasionally breaks down. When the people discover Jesus at Capernaum, they say to him, "Rabbi, when earnest thou hither?" (6:25, KJV). And at Bethsaida, Nathanael links Jesus both to the rabbinate and Israel: "Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel" (1:49). In one extraordinary instance of editorial inconsistency, the pattern breaks down entirely when all the bad connections—Jew, ruler of the Jews, rabbi, Pharisee— appear favorably in the good person of Nicodemus. We read: "There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God" (3:1-2). Ironically, the Gospel of John (written by a Jew whose name has come to us as John), the only Gospel which may be a Greek original, is the most fiercely anti-Jewish in its pattern of engendering hatred for those whom John identifies as Jews, and the word Jew, meaning "enemy," appears on almost every page of the Gospel. In the following lines, for example, we can see the effectiveness of transforming unfriendly people in the ur-text into Jews: "Where is he? And there was much murmuring among the people concerning him. for some said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceiveth the people. Howbeit no man spake openly of him for fear of the Jews" (7:11-13). Here and throughout John and the Christian Scriptures, people who are allied with Jesus are simply people. However, any group perceived as opposing Jesus are Jews. Although Jesus comes from Judea (the word Jew means "one from Judea"), those who are kin, friends, or disciples of Jesus have ceased to be addressed as Jews. The word is used not as a geographical or ethnic name but as an epithet to malign enemies of the Christ, particularly those who do not accept his divinity. Curiously, Jesus' immediate family—Mary and his brothers—who

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Introduction and General Issues are harshly criticized as unbelievers in his divinity, nonetheless remain exempt from the negative epithet. What is the background for using translation for purposes of misinformation? Why is the word Jew at its center? Some Jews followed a young rabbi named Joshua, later called Jesus, and established a new sect of Judaism called Christianity, meaning the religion of the Messiah, the Christ. The new faith realized the most profound soteriological dream of the Jews: the coming of their Messiah to deliver them. Had these first Jewish Christians not been only some but instead the whole body of Jews, the word Jews would either not have appeared at all in the Christian Scriptures or would have been a complimentary word designating Jesus, his family, and his apostles. Could Jew then have retained its negative connotations? If all the Jews had disappeared from the earth by alteration of faith or through weakness of genes, then not. There would be no harsh words for the ancestral holy Jews. The survival of the Jews as Jews, however, has been a constant, irritating, and extreme embarrassment to many of the descendants of those Jewish Christians. We can infer that the editing and translation of these texts from their unknown beginnings only sharpened the process of subversion. By rigorously following this pattern, the authors, compilers, editors, and translators of the Scriptures have, over a period of two millennia, created a Jesus whom an overwhelming number of Christians perceive as a gentile among gentile friends and Jewish enemies, a Christian in the land of Israel. In the opening lines of the Greek Christian Scriptures appears the first of two genealogies of Jesus. Among sixty-five names from fourteen generations we find the name lakobos. While Jesus' biblical Hebrew name Joshua (or Jeshua) has been translated from Hebrew into Greek as "lesous," and translated from Greek (via Latin) into English as "Jesus," Jacob's Hebrew name jaaqob has not been altered in the Greek text but remains a transliterated "lakobos." And consistent with the Greek lakobos of the period, the translators have in every English translation with which I am familiar, including the more accurate Jerusalem Bible, given us "Jacob" in English. Jacob is familiar to us from the Hebrew Bible as Jacob son of Isaac, and also in the Matthew genealogy as Jesus' grandfather, the father of Joseph. The cognate translation of Greek lakobos into English is "Jacob." Yet in the following examples, the translation is first "Jacob" and then "James." It cannot be both. But it is, and there is a logic to this inconsistency. After the first lines of the King James Matthew in which we find lakobos translated as "Jacob," Greek lakobos becomes English James when referring to: the Apostle James, son of Zebedee (Matt. 10:2, Mark 3:17); the Apostle James, son of Alphaeus (Matt. 10:3, Mark 3:18); or the brother of Jesus (Matt. 13:55), also said to be the author of the Letter of James. In the Greek text, however, these

Problems and Parables four figures are lakobos, lakobos, lakobos, and lakobos. Why, then, is the name in its first appearance translated as "Jacob" and thereafter rendered in all four Gospels as English "James"? If, however, "James" is the preferred translation of lakobos, why is lakobos originally "Jacob"? The inconsistency is perfectly understandable and purposeful. Every later translation of lakobos as "James" refers to a new Christian: to Jesus' companions or his brother. To use "James" for the reference to a figure from the Hebrew Bible would actually be unthinkable; the change here is dictated precisely by the need not to associate James, one of the coterie around Jesus, with Jacob, the patriarchal figure centrally identified with the earliest ancestry of Judaism. So to keep things safe for the practice of separating Jew from Christian in English, Greek lakobos is Jewish "Jacob" in the Old Testament and Christian "James" in the New. Again, the translators from the Greek have created a labyrinth of disguisement and concealment in order to separate Jesus and sacred figures of Christian Scriptures from those inhabitants of Judea identified as Jews. In such manner Jesus is not seen, and in large part never has been seen, as a Jew. In the revolutionary struggle to break away and initiate a new religion, to suggest that Jesus, his apostles, or Mary, his mother, are Jews like those hated culpable figures would subvert the message of authentic Christian faith; apparently, such was the reasoning, consciously or by obedient convention, of the translators of the Christian Scriptures But which of Jesus' associates should retain his association with the Jews? The traitor Judas Iscariot, of course. Yet to achieve this required some complex maneuvers, for the Greek name loudas, from Hebrew yekudkak, refers in the Hebrew Bible to the fourth son of Jacob, son of Isaac, and in the Christian Scriptures to Jesus' favored disciple and apostle, the traitor; to Jesus' second brother; and to a disciple and apostle who may be the aforementioned brother and who is said to be the author of the last Letter in the Christian Scriptures. Here we have four figures (or perhaps three, if the brother is the letter writer) who were all yehudhak in Hebrew and loudas in the Greek scriptures. How to separate these figures from each other? The translators saw a problem of identity and allegiance in having four such disparate figures with the same name. They resolved it as we have seen them deal with the translation of other names. The Greek distinguishes between the four loudasts by use of cognomens. The English translators might therefore have followed the Greek pattern and referred to Judas the son of Jacob, Judas Iscariot, Judas the brother of Jesus, and Judas the author of the Letter of Judas. But the betrayer of Jesus, they felt, should stand alone. He would be known as Judas. In the King James translation, the Old Testament loudas, the earliest mentioned Judas of the genealogy in Matthew, is correctly and cognately translated as "Judas." In the Revised Standard Version, however, which has no basis in the

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Introduction and General Issues Greek text, "Judas" is changed to "Judah." In spite of the correct example of the Authorized Version, the authors "revised" "Judas" into "Judah." (It perhaps never occurred to the English translators to go back to the original Hebrew yehudhah.) They evidently considered it better to have one of Jesus' direct ancestors, even in the Hebrew Bible, be called untainted Judah rather than Judas. There is also the other, shadowy Judas, who is actually listed as one of Jesus' three brothers (Matt. 13:55, Mark 6:3), and has only two, negative functions in the Scriptures. In Matthew 12:46-50, Mark 3:31-35, and Luke 8:19-21, Jesus snubs and rebukes his mother and brothers for doubting his divinity, for they hear the word of God and do not act upon it. Jesus rejects them because they are not his true kindred. His true mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and act upon the word, that is, those who follow him: "Then came to him his mother and his brethren, and could not come at him for the press. And it was told him by certain which said, Thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to see thee. And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are those which hear the word of God and do it" (Luke 8:1921, KJV). In Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3 Jesus complains that a prophet is not honored in his own country. Actually, the famous aphorism in English (and in most modern languages) that grew out of this complaint ignores the specific reference to the prophet's mother and brothers, whom Jesus is again rebuking for failing to recognize his divinity. The actual setting for the plaint is the country where Jesus, in the company of his disciples, performs miracles. Among the unbelievers are his mother and three brothers, one of whom is loudas, now in the King James Version and earlier English Bibles curiously spelled "Juda" rather than "Judas," in another linguistically unjustified change. Although Juda lacks faith in his brother Jesus' divinity, because he is a relation he is not, as other unbelievers are, called a Jew in this version. In the biblical passage, the people in the synagogue ask, after Jesus has been teaching there: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?" (Mark 6:3, KJV). Jesus "marvelled because of their unbelief," yet "said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house" (Mark 6:4). What is significant is not "a prophet in one's own country" but the pointed target "his own kin, and in his own house." Although Jesus is harshly reproaching his mother and brothers for not recognizing his divinity, the translators will not go so far as to let these unbelievers, not only Juda but his mother and other brothers, be called Jews, for they share the same blood. We have a bizarre anomaly, for in the Greek Scriptures as a result of purposeful mistranslation, "Jews" are, by definition, precisely what unbelievers in Christ's divinity came to be called. A Jew is an unbeliever in Christ, the human Lord. Then are Christ's un-

Problems and Parables believing brothers Jews? No. The Lord's mother and shadowy brothers alone have the privilege of denying Christ's divinity while escaping, by their presentation in the Scriptures, any insinuation of Jewishness. Jesus' resentment against his actual brothers is shown once again in John 7:16, where, as elsewhere, he implies that his brothers do not believe in his divinity until it is proved by the resurrection. In this passage as in others, the Jews are singled out for disparagement, making them a separate people from Jesus and "his true brothers," who are those who are with Jesus in belief. Since Jesus and his followers are not discerned as Jews, the "Jews' feast of tabernacles," mentioned there, appears not to be a feast pertaining to Jesus. This pattern suggests that in the many translations and redactions of the Scripture, the editors have chronologically moved farther and farther from the reality of the recorded stories and more into sectarian religious politics. Here we see a fiercer presentation of the Jews and of Jesus' brothers who lack faith: "After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him. Now the Jews' feast of tabernacles was at hand. His brethren therefore said unto him, Depart hence, and and go into Judaea, that thy disciples also may see the works that thou doest. For there is no man that doeth any thing in secret, and he himself seeketh to be known openly. If thou do these things, shew thyself to the world. For neither did his brethren believe in him [italics mine]. Then Jesus said unto them, My time is not yet come: but your time is alway ready" (KJV). So much for Judas the brother of Jesus. The brother is presented so unsympathetically he might just as well be called Judas here in the King James Version rather than Juda, as he is called in the Revised Standard. But when it comes to the author of a Letter in the canon, placed between the Third Letter of John and Revelation, and when the first line of that Letter's introduction names the author "servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James," Judas will no longer do. Now having risen to being declared the author of an epistle in the Christian canon, the brother of Jesus must be fully distanced from the infamous Judas Iscariot, who by his betrayal can no longer be a Christian disciple but must revert to the role of treacherous Jew. The name loudas is consequently translated not "Judas" but "Jude," giving us the Letter of Jude. The decision to invent new names for the other Judases from loudas—Judah, Juda, and Jude—then, lies entirely with the translators of the Greek texts into the secular tongues, who are as faithful in their religious mission as they are faithless as translators of the Greek text into English. The above examples show ways in which the Christian Scriptures have been fashioned out of the Greek into English translation. The most inspired and fundamental name change in all the Christian Greek Scriptures occurs in the translation of the name of its central dramatis persona, the new-found Jewish "man God"; it occurs when his Hebrew cognomen becomes in its Greek equivalent the

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Introduction and General Issues most famous name in the world, and is thereafter translated into other modern languages not from the original Hebrew but by making the Greek version of his name sound English or German or Italian. As a result of the ethnic cleansing of his name through double translation, the name has become absolutely disconnected from its Hebrew original, and indeed his name in Hellenized translations is now so remote from the Hebrew original that were it simply transliterated directly from Hebrew into other languages, that name, Joshua, would for many be apostasy. It must be accepted that for a breakaway religion to establish its identity, it must dissociate its leader from his compromising background. The execution of the antagonist father-precursor is Freudian, Bloomian, and plainly ordinary politics of church and state. In the genealogy in the Luke (3:23-38), therefore, we read in Greek "tou lesous tou Eliezer tou lorim" (3:29). The translation into English of these lines in the King James Version reads, "the son of Jose, which was the son of Eliezer, the son of Jorim." The translation is false. Elsewhere in the King James lesous is "Jesus," not "Jose." Why in the Luke genealogy is Jesus changed to Jose? Clearly, the false translation took place to disguise the notion asserted in the Greek text that Jesus had an Old Testament ancestor named Jesus. The King James Version is not alone in changing "Jesus" to a more acceptable name for an Old Testament Jew. The Tyndale Bible and the Great Bible came up with the imaginative evasion of "Jeso." The next generation of English Bibles, however, the Geneva and the Bishops', takes us a bit further from "Jesus" by giving us "Jose." Their "Jose" was surely the model for the Authorized evasion. Again, only the Catholic Rheims rendered lesous as "Jesus." The Revised Version (1881) and its American equivalent, the American Standard (1901), chose to "correct" the text and, like the Rheims, used "Jesus." But the next major revision, in our century, the Revised Standard Version (1946, 1960), could not stomach "Jesus" as the translation for the lesous who was an Old Testament progenitor of Jesus, and so it translated lesous as "Joshua," the closest parallel to the original Hebrew name from which Jesus derived. By calling iesous "Joshua," the authors of the Revised Standard insured that no ordinary reader would associate Jesus by name with any Hebrew Bible Jew.6 The existence of an Old Testament progenitor of Jesus named Jesus has deeply troubled New Testament translators. In these examples from major English Bibles ranging from 1525 to 1960, the translators have found four different ways of rendering one word into English: Jeso, Jose, Joshua, and Jesus. These translation inconsistencies are not an error with regard to the deeper religio-political Christian mission. On the contrary, the inconsistencies obey a higher order of consistency just as translation faithlessness obeys a higher order of faith. Here faith demands that the translation extirpate all evidence suggestive

Problems and Parables that Jesus was a Jew or came from an ancient family of Jews. To allow the accepted Christian name "Jesus" to appear in the opening lines of the Gospel of Luke in a key passage in a genealogy that includes David, Levi, Noah, and Adam would destroy the pattern of segregation of Jews from Christians. An attentive reader of Scripture should know that Jesus was indeed a Jew, a rabbi profoundly in the Jewish tradition of Jobian questioning, Davidian rebellion, and perhaps Essenian revisionist orthodoxy. Yet few until our time—and few today outside of enlightened academies—popularly think of Jesus as a Jew or of his early followers as Jewish Christians. Curiously, recognition of Jesus* Jewishness remains an iconoclastic, defiant posture. In earlier periods the declaration was virtually unthinkable. It would not have saved a Jew in danger, and such "blasphemy" as declaring kinship with Jesus might even have cost a life. Curiously, there has been no denunciation of these texts that do their best to conceal Jesus' Jewishness. Jesus has not been accorded the dignity of truthful acceptance of who he was. Because he limited his ministry to Jews and instructed his twelve disciples, "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans" (Matt. 10:5), 1 find it unthinkable that he would have agreed to the petty denial and concealment of who he was. The universal attribution of guilt to Jews for Jesus' agony only makes sense in light of polemical denials of Jesus as Jew, of misrepresentation, all formulated through the power of redaction and translation. Christian antisemitism begins with and derives historically from the New Testament, from the falsifying translations into and out of the Christian Scriptures in which Jesus ceases to be a Jew. The result of this transmission of the history of Joshua the Messiah has been two millennia of hatred and extermination, from diasporas and ghettos to pogroms and holocaust. These examples of the strategies—and ultimate effects—of translation in the Christian Scriptures can be found on virtually every page. And the changing of names is only a more obvious and effective means to subvert identity. The translators of the Hebrew Bible employed similar translation methods. The most notorious and successful means of deracinating the Jews from their own Bible has been to change the very name by which they are addressed there. They are called Hebrews (with reference to a language) or Israelites (with reference to a place). They are often referred to as "the ancient Hebrews" as we speak of ancient Greeks, thereby further distancing them, as a mythic, legendary, or symbolic people, from any real association with the Jews of the Christian Scriptures and thereafter. But the Jews of the Christian Scriptures are also presented as a deracinated people, separated from their biblical ancestors. They are never Jews, and certainly not "the ancient Jews," which might identify the prophets and patriarchs even more closely with them. And no quibbling about etymology can disguise the purposes of deracination and concealment of the ancient Jews

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Introduction and General Issues of the Bible through the magic of editorializing translation. In the Hebrew Bible the people are sacred figures, and therefore they will not normally be called Jews.7 The Jews do not appear as Jews until the Christian Scriptures, when the word Jew uniformly means "unfriendly/' "unreformed," "unrepentant," and much worse. It is used to designate all the implicit enemies of the sect that is being born, which will later be called Christianity. Yet again through magical transformation, the participants in these first moments of the foundation are themselves exempt from their heritage. They are just there, with no designation of race or religion (later they will anachronistically be called the first Christians), and Jesus, his family, and his entourage are not Jews, ancient Jews, or even Hebrews or Israelites (which might at least link them to worthy ancestors), but simply unaffiliated people. Yet let us dream. Imagine if the Christian Scriptures were retranslated today, and instead of encountering Jesus and James; Mary, Peter, and Paul, we found Joshua and Jacob; Miry am, Kepha, and Saul. Or better, if the New Testament were redacted without tribal references to Jews as distinct from Jesus' tribe. Imagine if the criticism there were Jewish self-criticism, as in the writings of the prophetic books, rather than Christian antisemitism. Given these miracles, the deracination of Joshua the Messiah, his followers, and his believers, would end. The presentation of Jesus and the Virgin Mary as Gentiles among alien Jews (the parabolic equivalent of Socrates and Plato as non-Greeks among Greek judges) would, after two millennia, be ineffective. Had we but world enough and time to cancel time and re-collect, retranslate, and re-edit documents, the four Gospels would, like the Dao de Jing, be books of wisdom and love, while containing, as in the divergent views in Akira Kurosawas Roshomon, four literary retellings of the murder of the wise man. More, a great narration would no longer be the primary document to incite and justify the hatred, persecution, and killing of the descendants of Joshua the Messiah. Even in textual dreams, we see the translator's powers to transform. Given the unpleasantness which effective translation can lead to through the manipulation of information transfer, I should like to present a very pleasant example of misunderstanding, or perhaps, higher understanding, which the translation of the Bible elicited among the Chinese Jews who followed the Hebrew Bible. PARABLE OF THE CHINESE JEWS

The Italian Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), was a cultivated man of letters, who reported Chinese thought and ways to the West. He also translated Western religious and secular classics into Chinese, which he

Problems and Parables had confided uniquely to the amazing memory palace of his brain. In his memoirs he recorded an incident that amused and impressed him. Among those books that Ricci had made known to the interested Chinese literati was the Bible. Although he sought and found few converts to Christianity in China, word of the bishop and his Bible reached the ancient community of Jews in Kaifeng, who had for centuries been cut off from their Western co-religionists. They sent a delegation to Beijing of their leaders, who by now were perfectly Chinese in manner and appearance, to speak with Ricci. They had heard that a Jew from Italy was in China, a devout Jewish priest spreading the word of the Bible. They came to ask Ricci whether he would come back to Kaifeng and be the rabbi for their synagogue. They were unconcerned that the missionary had with him some additional Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures. Ricci did not persuade them of the minor sectarian distinctions. In this true story from China is a parable which puts some of our problems of translation and reception of the Bible in a cheerfully clear perspective. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like Cod, knowing good and evil" So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.... The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I aten Genesis 3:5-6, 12 Adam was a snitch. He blamed Eve. Yet Eve opened our eyes. By eating that fruit she became author of her being, a god translating herself and Adam from darkness into light, from ignorance into wisdom. Pierre Grange, "God the Eternal Translator," Dream Time and Other Earthly Signs

Thirteen Quick Looks at Sacred Originals All originals are sacred in the eyes of the translator. All translations are profane in the eyes of the world. Bui at times translators forget, suppress, or conceal the original, thereby making a profane transformation into a scared original. Much of the Old and most of the New Testament is disguised translation, and so the Bible passes uniformly as a sacred original.

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Introduction and General Issues • Keep track of Ezra Pound's deceits and win an apple. The opening lines of his Cantos are not heavily influenced by Homer, as readers tend to say. They are Homer. They are Homer mediated through Virgilian Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Specifically they are Pound's translation of Andreas Divus' sixteenth-century Latin version of the Odyssey, rendered into English in the Anglo-Saxon speech and rhythms of his own "Seafarer." Yet it is good for Pound in his versions, for the Evangelists in their Gospels, for the physiologoi (naturalists) in their bestiaries, and for all who have been so close to earlier texts in a tradition as to be their translators, not to be recognized as translators. After Chaucer, "the grant translateur," the title Translator is the least worthy in a coded scale of tradition, emulation, imitation. Much better for Pound, the deceitful translator, to be worldly yet independent, informed yet fully and sacredly original.

• Between the original text and its translation is a familial tie of holy father to secular children. • Between the creation and its translation is the inviolable tie of God the original creator of void into form and light to his servants Adam and Eve in the garden who must faithfully obey. His utterances are theirs to copy into their behavior.

• The mother of us all is known for not obeying the Scout Law. • A woman of taste, Eve chose to pick wisdom, and with her courage for the unknown translated eternity into time, her word into memory, and her entire self into the eternally ticking earth.

• Eve has given the world her gift of translation. A translator steals and gives. • Eve is the mother of translation. She transformed forbidden fruit into knowledge, secret sperm into children, and the text of her story into us. • Eve's word continues when her offspring read her meaning through their eyes. • Eve doesn't mind a reader who steals what she has stolen. Fulfilled as mother of the world, she laughs when her children arrogantly make her invisible translation their own immaculate and holy creation.

íí is easy to translate authors... with hardly anything but subject matter to transfer; but it is risfey to undertake those who have given their language much grace and elegance. Michel de Montaigne, "Apologie de Raimonde Sebonde"

Nor ought a Genius less than his that writ, Attempt Translation . . . since nothing can beget A vital spirit, but a vital heat. That servile path thou nobly dost decline Of tracing word by word, and line by line. Those are the labour'd births of slavish brains,

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Nor the effects of Poetry, but pains; Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words. A new and nobler way thou dost pursue To make Translations and Translators too.

They but preserve the Ash«, thou the Flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame. Sir John Denham, "To Sir Richard Fanshaw upon His Translation of Pastor Fido," 1648 Then seek a Poet who your ways do's bend, And chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend: United by this Sympathetic!* Bond, You grow Familiar, Intimate, and Fond; Your thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree, No longer his Interpreter, but He. Wentworth Dillon, earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse, 1684 To translate is to serve two masters. Franz Rosenzweig, "The Impossibility and Necessity of Translation"

I Carl Sandburg] is probably the most artificial and studied ruffian the world has had. I heard somebody say he was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language. Robert Frost, Letter to Lincoln MacVeagh, 19 May 1922

Translation as the Double Art TRANSLATION AS SERVICE OR IMITATION

The most eloquent meditations on the art and practice of translation in recent years are contained in the book edited by Edwin Honig, The Poet's Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation, a volume in which the most distinguished poet translators of our age engage in dialogues with the editor, a sympathetic provocateur who avoids univocal monotony and authorial domination. He persistently asks to what degree the translator chooses to be at the service of the source author or to speak for him- or herself. Robert Fitzgerald speaks in favor of respect for the author's voice: "I think that one poet is lending himself to the other poet, that the obligation is to the other poet, and that one is taking

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Introduction and General Issues on for the first time the spirit and impulse and intents of the other poet, and so the wish is to make all that clear in one's own language rather than express oneself" (103). At one end of the spectrum, we have Robert Fitzgerald and Edmund Keeley, at the other Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell. Given the high quality of their poems in translation, the debate concerns not artistic merit but method and the need to make clear when a translation is an imitation. Critics praise Lowell and Pound for their resurrection of earlier poets while faulting them for not letting the original poet speak. "People don't read Pound's 'Homage to Sextus Propertius* to learn what Propertius is like," Michael Hamburger gingerly observes, and Christopher Middleton, in praising Keeley's and Philip Sherrard's versions of George Seferis' poems, declares, "But God forbid that Seferis should ever be translated by Ezra Pound, because then no one would know Seferis" (Honig, Poet's Other Voice 179, 193). Middleton conveniently names the two extreme species of translators: "the constructor-translators like Pound and target-translators like Keeley" and agrees that "one shouldn't expect either to be the other" (193). Clearly, however, these poet translators show their preference for the approach of poets who serve, without usurping, the work of the poets. Fitzgerald elegantly and paradoxically goes to the master, Pound, for advice and confirmation of his own method, one very much opposed to the Poundian approach. But Pound does not encourage imitators of his own stupendous freedoms and outrages. Rather, as Fitzgerald reports, he instinctively corroborates Fitzgerald's intent: "I remember before I began the Odyssey, I called on Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's. At that point I was thinking that the way to do it would be to hit the high spots, to translate what I could translate, so to speak, and let the rest go. I said this to Pound, and he said, 'Oh no, let Homer say everything he wanted to say'" (113). When Homer speaks little, we are at the other extreme of close literary translation; imitation. Fitzgerald, who himself consorted more brilliantly than others with Virgil and Homer, calls the work of the Pounds and Lowells "collaboration under the name of 'imitation.'" The term imitation, Fitzgerald says, "warns the reader that what he is about to read is not a version of the original but something in the nature of a collaboration between Cal Lowell and another poem in a different language" (Honig, Poet's Other Voice 113). Homer, our first poet in the West and its most translated, has consequently been the subject of more literary translation controversy than any other early figure, including Virgil and Horace. A measure of agreement after the mid-eighteenth century finds a mean position between license and servility. Even Dryden, who excuses the sometime necessity of imitation, speaks for an in-between measure of respect for source, just as William Cowper a little later and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century do. Fifty years after Pope's dominating version of the Greek epics, Cowper defended his blank-verse translation of Homer against the excesses of Pope's virtual imitation. Cowper's eloquent 1791 preface

Problems and Parables to his Iliad contains a long meditation on translation and questions of mimesis worthy of Eric Auerbach and Robert Fitzgerald's obligation to conserve the sense of the original. In his rejection of Pope's rhymes as skillful imitation rather than translation, however, Cowper strays into an unnecessarily narrow notion of fidelity, which his own excellent, moderate translation of Homer belies. Moreover, to reject them on the basis of their "fetters" and "impossibility" severely restricts responsible freedom and is less cogent than had he denounced Pope's heroic couplets on the basis that neither Homer nor any of the Greek or Roman poets used rhyme as a prosodie device: There is indisputably a wide difference between the case of an original writer in rhyme and a translator. In an original work the author is free; if the rhyme be of difficult attainment, and he cannot find it in one direction, he is at liberty to seek it in another; the matter that will not accommodate itself to his occasions he may discard, adopting such as will. But in a translation no such option is allowable; the sense of the author is required, and we do not surrender it willingly even to the plea of necessity. Fidelity is indeed of the very essence of translation, and the term itself implies it. For which reason, if we suppress the sense of the original, and force into its place our own, we may call our work an imitation, if we please, or perhaps a paraphrase, but it is no longer the same author only in a different dress, and therefore it is not translation. Should a painter, professing to draw the likeness of a beautiful woman, give her more or fewer features than belong to her, and a general cast of countenance of his own invention, he might be said to have produced a jeu d'esprit, a curiosity perhaps in its way, but by no means the lady in question. ("Preface to the First Edition [1791] of the Translation of Homer," Letters and Prose 5:62) This endless conflict of close or faithful literary translation versus imitation, between "grammarians" and "libertines," began as we know with the Roman writers Horace, Cicero, Quintilian, and Terence, who freely mocked the notion of a /idus interpret Imitation was a Renaissance habit in Italy, proclaimed in England by Abraham Cowley in his preface to the Pindarique Odes (1656), understood if not practiced by Dryden, and the method of Neoclassical Pope, PreRaphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and modern Pound and Lowell. Above all we should recall a now largely forgotten tradition of imitation, dominant in the Middle Ages, when originality and authorial possession were not sacred or copyrighted; when a bestiary by Bishop Theobaldus or the lais of Marie de France or a new version of the Dance of Death in its countless guises were read without regard to fidelity to a precursor. At that time, Bloomian misreading was blatant and unembarrassed law. In our century, Cathay, which many consider Pound's unmatched lyrical achievement, persists as literature in English, while doing "homage" to Li Bai. There is no deception, no false expectation, as long as the method of transformation is named and acknowledged. Then, to use

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Introduction and General Issues the analogy of composer and musician, the listener will know when hearing a work whether the musician mildly interprets or radically invents the score; or, using Fitzgerald's elaboration, whether the musician reads the notes or rewrites them to become a collaborating composer. The earliest and most bellicose proponent of not only naturalizing foreign texts in English but producing libertine imitations is Cowley. Between the two Fitzgeralds, Edward of the Rubáiyát and Robert of the Aeneid, Cowley would surely have preferred the way of the freely creative Edward. In the opening lines of his preface to Pindarique Odes, he dismisses faithful literalists: "If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought one Mad-man had translated another" His manifesto for freedom continues with a blast at the "Grammarians" and an affirmation of the need to compensate for linguistic losses by adding his own wit and invention. And if detractors dislike his ways and will not even dignify him with the title of Translator, he has no affection for that name, and would prefer another good name for the art, a name which, he complains, he still lacks. He writes: We must needs confess, that after all these losses sustained by Pindar, all we can adde to him by our wit or invention (not deserting still his subject) is in some measure to be applyed to all Translations, and the not observing of it, is the cause that all which ever I yet saw, are so much inferior to their Originals. The like happens too in Pictures, from the same root of exact Imitation; which being a vile and unworthy kinde of Servitude, is incapable of producing any thing good or noble. I have seen Originals both in Painting and Poesie, much more beautiful then their natural Objects; but I never saw a Copy better than the Original, which indeed cannot be otherwise; for men resolving in no case to shoot beyond the Mark, it is a thousand to one if they shoot not short of it. (Quoted in Steiner, English Translation Theory 67)

In these questions of originality, authorship, and artistic collaboration, 1 turn again to the magician in the art of shadows and echoes, to Borges, who, as Ben Belitt remarked, "wrote the central fable about translation in Tierre Menard' (Honig, Poet's Other Voice 77). Borges makes the haunting point that even the authorship of Miguel de Cervantes is provisional, for he sees Cervantes as the archetypal translator, whose great rendering is the Quijote. For reasons of literary politics and irony, Cervantes maintains that Don Quijote is actually a translation from the work of Cid Hamete, an Arab storyteller. As for Cervantes' complex reasons for saying throughout the Quijote that it is a translation, we should measure his several conflicting pronunciations. In the preface to his volume, Cervantes proclaims the originality and priority of his fiction as the first novel in Europe and rejects earlier Italian attempts, dismissing them as extended romances. At the same time he throws the reader off by citing Cid Hamete as the true author of his work, which, he says, is a translation, presum-

Problems and Parables

ably from the Arabic. Of course this presumed translation is, like Borges' invention of Menard, another fiction. What is interesting, however, is the light which calling his work a translation throws on the notion and status of translation in Golden Age Spain. To produce a translation, an imitation of a classic (in this case from the exotic Arabic), was a natural activity of a serious writer, and Cervantes' other long works, La Galatea and La historia de los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda, are indeed imitations of earlier fables. As for Borges' Pierre Menard, we know that the Frenchman has performed the ultimate invisible translation, thereby cheating that uncouth seventeenthcentury Spaniard of his own version from the Arabic, offering a modern reader what appears to be a fragmentary duplicate, but one signed by a civilized turnof-the century French author. In actuality we will never find the true author of any text, dead or alive, for, as many have said, there is no work of literature which is not an act of translation from an earlier source. Hence, we will never be able to distinguish fully between the author-creator and a translator-creator. And even when the translators demand respect for the source author, as Robert Fitzgerald has done, their own translation creations, filled with all the resources of their own formal skills and imagination, belie their modest intent. Whether it be Paz, Wilbur, or Boris Pasternak, the best poet translator gives us, ultimately, a collaboration under suspect nameship, a splendid forgery (and thoroughly forged as one) of the art of at least two creators in one new language. THE DOUBLE ART

Given the murky maze of authorship associated with both originality and translation, there is nevertheless, as we have observed in our schemata, an obvious range between attempted service and flagrant imitation. In regard to the latter, often the art may not reside in the "original" source text, but only in the receiving text, in which case the original is forgotten or at best deemed insignificant. The poetic dramas of Shakespeare are with few exceptions translations, versions, or imitations of earlier narratives, their so-called sources, in which the source is merely the story and of insignificant aesthetic value. Even Plutarch, a major writer in the canon of classical literature, serves for Shakespeare merely as a source for the plot but not the dialogue and poetry. Hence, Antony and Cleopatra does not suffer the ignominy of being typed a translation. In reality, Antony and Cleopatra is a translation of a translation, for Shakespeare did a free version of Thomas North's translation of Plutarch. Of course the word translation is seldom used to describe the transportation and transformation of sources into Shakespeare's plays, since translation suggests a closeness to the form, genre, and length of the original text. Even the words adaptation or imitation, the freest forms of translation "proper," are rarely applied to Shakespeare's translation process—though some might, without resource to translation theory, call his plays adaptations. Yet why diminish the glory of

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Introduction and General Issues Shakespeare with suggestions of a tainted originality, which the word translation normally elicits? Fortunately, in the instance of Shakespeare's translations of earlier sources, even that loaded word could do no harm, for his re-creations are the masterpieces of the world. Yet masterly re-creation is just what great translation is about. Examples of translations that assume the status of masterly re-creations are more readily recognized when they occur in a version of the Bible (where the translation, rightly or wrongly, clearly eclipses the original in both authority and sacredness) or in long poems, particularly narrative epics. In these "good translations" there is no division of art and originality. They exist in both the source and the target text. There is Troilus, a character in various classical tales, and Troilus the lover of Cressida, in a tripartite communion of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. The source text has one author—if there is ever an initial source. The translation, however, has at least two. For this reason, for the doubleness, perhaps the duplicity of the translation venture, I think of translation always as a "double art." The word double refers not only to the art invested in both source and target texts, but, more significant, to the collaboration of two (three, four) artists, who have joined their arts and who, by the mediation of changing languages, have produced in the new work a double art. Since no art, except the art of being God, is entirely self-sufficient and selfcreated, art depends on a context, which we call source, background, canon, and, most commonly, tradition. The artist translates that source—intralingually, interlingually, or intersemiotically (to use Jakobson's essential description)— from his or her own language, another language, or another sign system (word into song, novel into film, and so on). This is the double art. One never works alone. In art no man or woman, translator, or "original" artist is an island. Even Homer did not create his own world. Although the two books attributed to him are, after the Bible, the most translated books in the world, the poet did not invent his bible of Greek gods. He was an editor, compiler, perhaps reteller of the tales. What is certain is that his epics comprise material he gathered and translated from earlier sources. That material we call the other and identify with a text, author, medium, tradition. Because translatio involves the movement from A to B and is consummated by their commingling, when A, the other, is absorbed into B, one's own text, invisibly or glaringly, by silent stealth or noisy confession, that new art object, that double-headed hybrid offspring of uncertain parentage, is born and presented to the world by means of the translator's double art. Poetic morality, the sacrifice of one's inclinations, is required to undertake a real translation. One translates out of true love for the beautiful and for the

Problems and Parables literature of the nation. To translate is to produce literature, just as the writing of one's own work is—and it is more difficult, more rare. In the end all literature is translation. Novalis, letter to A. W. Schlegel in the end all translation is literature. Pierre Grange, Dream Time and Other Earthly Signs

Originality, Translation, and Tradition TRANSITION AS A RESPECTABLE ART

We have just observed the roles of the translator, with special reference to the work of outstanding poet translators like Pope, Pound, and Robert Fitzgerald, whom I call translator-creators. It is evident that the possibilities, the borders of achievement, of a genre depend on its major artists. With regard to the art of translation, we must consider as well, however, the history of its popular reception, which from the time of the Renaissance has traditionally separated source author from translator and, with a few exceptions, has tended to reserve glory and originality for the former. The foremost exception to past disrespect for translators is Edward Fitzgerald, translator of the Rubáiyát. Yet this exception is qualified by the special perspective vis-à-vis Fitzgerald and his Rubáiyát, for by being included in the canon of English poetry, the Anglo-Irish poet is inevitably excused from the less worthy role of translator by the assertion that his work is not so much a translation as an original work derived from an earlier text. Thereby he is accorded the honor of authorial originality. And twentieth-century commentators, who may have a more accurate idea of how Fitzgerald selected lines at random, rearranged, and rewrote, grant him even greater praise for his originality. So Fitzgerald's unusual fame as a translator is achieved only at the expense of the activity of translation. His rewriting frees him from the chains and unflattering title of unimaginative translator. The underlying aesthetic premise regards the poet translator as an original poet only insofar as he removes his work from the arena of translation. The case of Fitzgerald, far from being a rare exception to prove that glory can accrue to an original translator-creator, rather unhappily confirms that for most critics and readers esteem for the activity of translation lies in the denial of the translation component of that literary activity. Currently, the other obvious example of a translation garnering praise is the Bible. But here the denial of the translation process is even more profound, for the word is now connected with God's speech. To the larger readership we are

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Introduction and General Issues not dealing with a translation at all. We hear, "as it says in the Bible," not, uas it says in this particular translation of the Bible." For the lay readership, the Bible in translation has achieved the full authority of its word by the popular concealment of that external, illusory attribute, translation. What then does it now mean to be called a translator? This very subjective assignation is crucial, since the role of the translator and how translation is generally perceived affects readership, critical reception, and, inevitably, even the attitudes and activity of the translator. Permit me to recapitulate some traditional views (which it has been in part my purpose to undermine). The word translator conjures up one who either reproduces a text faithfully or else renders it freely. The faithful translator performs a word-for-word exercise with the assumption that meaning resides fully in the semantic element of a word's phonic-semantic code, and that sound is irrelevant to meaning; the free translator takes certain liberties and perhaps even moves to the far spectrum of the translator-imitator. Sometimes we speak of the translator as creative. The product is a re-creation. Yet neither the more faithful nor the imitative mode is designated as original—nor is the author of the translation considered original. Ultimately, both critical and popular opinion grant solely to the author of the source text the virtue of originality. As we also know, it was not always so. Particularly in the Middle Ages, the author of an apparently original work could, without malice from contemporaries, also be called its translator, while, conversely, the author of an apparent translation could, without malice to the past, be called the original author. To be a translator was to be an original author; and, conversely, to be an original author was to be a translator, regardless of the degree of originality, retelling, or translation. Flora Ross Amos comments: "As in the case of the Anglo-Saxon Andreas, a retelling in English of a story already existing in another language often presents itself as if it were an original composition. The author who puts into the vernacular of his country a French romance may call it 'my tale.' At the end of Launfal, a version of one of the lays of Marie de France, appears the declaration, Thomas Chestre made this tale1 " (Early Theories 7). In short, to be both the original author and translator was correct and not a contradiction, as was calling one's work both an original creation and a translation. Traditionally the two realms of originality and translation go together, not only in the deeper sense that all thinking, writing, reading, and communication involves an elemental transformative and interpretive core that requires translation but in the everyday usage of describing a writer and a translator. In his elegant commentary, Proteus, His Lies, His Truth, Robert M. Adams elaborates the notion of accordance and distinctions between original creation and translation: As à matter of fact, though we rarely focus on the notion, a distinction between translation and original creation is often rather hard to make, and much that we

Problems and Parables consider firsthand is really second. The Chanson at Roland exists in only a single manuscript, which is an Anglo-French translation of an unknown original; Chaucer's Troiius and Criseyde claims to be a translation of Lollius, and is actually in good part a translation of Boccaccio, with some Petrarch thrown in for good measure. Spenser thought nothing of translating into his Faerie Queen* swatches of Tasso and Ariosto (who had not infrequently themselves translated from Virgil, Ovid, or Catullus, who had in turn adapted Homer, Hesiod, or Sappho); and one of the most admired speeches in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is a translation into blank verse of North's translation of Amyot's translation of Plutarch's "Life of Antony." (3)

How were these paradoxes allowed to persist for so long? Or are we today foolishly restrictive in distinguishing between originality and translation? Both the nature and value of translation as well as the territory covered by translation were once very different and more encompassing. Let us consider how ancient and modern authors would have fared according to medieval description. Euripides, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dryden, and more recently Constantine Cavafy, Joyce, and Nikos Kazantzakis all took earlier stories and "trans-lated" them, that is, "transported" them from an earlier text to their own re-creations. Since these were authors within well-defined civilizations, consciously following a tradition, they were performing the expected task of great original authors. They were, by the more ample medieval view, also translators. PLAGIARISM, SCHOLARSHIP, ADAPTATION, OR THE EMBELLISHMENTS OF TRADITION

Originality and translation each have a special relationship with tradition. Originality in writing, in subject and form, appears to be relatively independent of tradition, innovative, and, if the critics are myopic enough not to observe the great cyclical returns of art, revolutionary. The author who adheres so closely to a current tradition that every earmark is imitated, however, becomes its vassal. The ultimate dependence on a tradition that spans several languages (like epic poetry) would seem to be an interlingual translation of an earlier work, a task which, if the source text is known or detected, suggests very little originality. The ultimate dependence on tradition within the same language would be the Pierre Menard intralingual copy (without the intertextual originality that a spoofing Borges awards the copy), which to the public eye is simply plagiarism. Even more than interlingual translation, a translation that is merely an intralingual copy must be devoid of originality. And worse, it is absurd. It is a pity that plagiarism has such a bad name. Plagiarism is not only the perfect fulfillment of accurate translation but, with slight disguise of rewording, is, when found in scholarship and much poetry (particularly classical Chinese poetry), an obligatory mark of serious scholarship

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Introduction and General Issues and major poetry. That retelling in scholarship and poetry—when not revealed as translation or in translation's extreme form, which is copying and plagiarism— often marks scholarship's and poetry's finest hour. And when the retelling is not shot down as mere translation or plagiarism, it is received under the respectable title of tradition. We must thank the Chinese, who demand allusion and quotation and expect the good critical reader to catch the copying. From the poems of Wang Wei to Mao Zedong, excerpts from earlier authors are patched into the text. In the West, T. S. Eliot reinvented the overt tradition of respectable plagiarism by patching The Waste Land with scraps of texts from Western and Eastern literature and religion and confirming his thefts with source notes at the poem's end. Eliot claimed that he added those exculpatory notes at the printer's request—so that there would be enough pages to constitute a book. In these examples concerning authorial respectability and originality, the original author is a writer who appears to remove himself from detectable sources in order to invest himself with a primordial imagination, while the less original author, who is a translator, is an able linguistic scribe. The translator slips into the category of originality when his works are concealed translations or so blatantly free as to merit the designation re-creation. By strange paradox imitation carries the conflicting meanings of both boorish copying and bold innovation, depending on what critic or age is reminting the word. These categories of translation and originality are both commonplace and arbitrary. In this light we should first consider more carefully and intricately the special condition of the author before the waters of tradition. To be an author is to be part of the great river of tradition. No author invents a genre. One imitates, cultivates, borrows, steals. No one is absolutely original. Before Hesiod there was Homer. Before the "blind" poet there were other bards. Even the birds, who were presumably the singer's first source for song, learned melodies in the parliament of earlier birds. But, although in the Renaissance authorship entailed the play of subversion and concealments of tradition described by imitatio versus originality, and in recent years authors mollify their anxiety by literary patricide, the good author never ceases to think of herself as independent, whatever the debt to tradition, and will never give away membership in the union of original authors. Yet adherence to tradition plays an uncertain role in determining originality. In a period of great change, to reject tradition enhances originality just as to accept tradition diminishes it; yet at other times, as in the instance of the dramatic poet Sophocles, who served as a model for Aristotle's Poetics, immersion in tradition can paradoxically produce completely new works. Every one of Sophocles' plays derives from an earlier source and has been translated, carted from myth and precursor into his meters. Yet each play signals a whole new approach to drama. Similarly, for the great modernists—Eliot, Pound, and Joyce—the imitation of the past, the reconstruction of an earlier tradition, as

Problems and Parables Eliot performs in The Waste Land and in the Four Quartets or Joyce in Ulysses, signifies a triumphant originality. Is a thoroughly imitative poem or novel within a particular school and tradition more or less original than a splendidly creative translation? To be more specific, is the one extant Latin verse bestiary, Physiologus, attributed to the Italian bishop Theobaldus in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, an original work, or merely another of the countless translations of a bestiary going back to the now lost original by the semi-mythological Alexandrian Greek monk, Physiologos? We deem the Latin version original, just as we judge Guillaume Apollinaire's and Pablo Neruda's bestiaries to be. Apollinaire and Neruda derive from the genre of bestiary, but because there is no specific author or work they have imitated the judgment of their originality is perfectly natural. What about my English translation of Theobaldus? Since Theobaldus' version achieved recognition along with other medieval bestiaries as an original work, is not my version both translation and original work? Do these terms not complement each other? My version is translation, not original work. Such is the vision of our age. Such vision is quirky. I argue the cause of originality with less shame in the instance of Marianne Moore's translations of La Fontaine's Fables (whose Fables are also translations going back to the semi-mythical Aesop) or Pound's translations of the poems from Li Bai in his Cathay. Whatever Cathay is called, it ranks among the most important and original collections of poems in English of our century and glows with the same fresh luster as Ovid's retellings of classical myth. Adapted plays, especially in translation, offer unconcealable originality, as lines of authorship blur. Consider Albert Camus' Devotion à la croix, an adaptation from Calderón's Devoción de la cruz, Anouilh's Antigone, freely based on Sophocles; Lowell's adaptations from Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne; Jean Racine's Phèdre, from ancient myth and Euripides, and Lowell's adaptation of it; and John Gay's Beggar's Opera, which becomes Bertolt Brecht's Dreigroschenoper, and is translated into Marc Blitzstein's Threepenny Opera. In all these instances, what is an original and what is a translation? And who is the author, Sophocles or Anouilh, Gay or Brecht? But no one poses that question, for each of these works of translation has already taken on a classically original vestment. Finally, consider Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd, based on Melville's novella Billy Budd, which told the story of a true event in the British navy. Are Britten's and Melville's works original or intersemiotic translations? They are undeniably both. Hence, sometimes, by virtually any measure, we do have works which are both original and translations. Or expressed even more categorically, a translation may be an original work and an original work may be a translation. Britten's Billy Budd is an original operatic work, though not the original work, which is to say, it is not the Melvillian source text Billy Budd. Similarly, Billy Budd is not Melville's original story in his short, "original" masterpiece, for the tale, as

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Introduction and General Issues Melville notes in the opening pages, is based on that earlier newspaper version of the event which was in circulation in those years. MEASURING ORIGINALITY

For purposes of charting the movement of a text from source author to translator, 1 offer a love / hate triangle to show the claims, tensions, and possibilities between contending authors. At the apex is the source author. In that author resides uncontested originality. At the left corner is a literal translator in the service of the source author. Having renounced creativity, he or she scarcely dares carry the title of author. At the right corner is an imitator in the service of him- or herself; the imitator suppresses the source author and effectively becomes the text's new author. The servile translator and proud new author represent the extreme positions on the bottom line: source author originality

servile translator mechanical replication

new author originality and imitation

The mechanical translator's personality is absorbed into the shadow of the original author. The free imitator, however, lives in the bright light of creator. We read the "magnificent" poet Edward Fitzgerald, not the obscure Persian figure Omar Khayyam. At the extreme corners the servile translator feels resentment and lowliness before the source author yet views the glowing new author to his right as an imposter. In turn the new author feels power and, at the very least, equality before a diminished source author, while holding the literalist translator in contempt. The nature, personality, and position of the translator vary at each point along the bottom line of the triangle. Most literary translation takes place around the center of the bottom line. I contend that there should be neither shame nor pride as one moves along the translator's line to the left or to the right, for there are remarkable areas of artistry as one moves in either direction. As suggested earlier, the more stringent the rules, the more original the translator must be in redoing the inherited text. Under ideal circumstances, a Nabokov or a Lowell can dance in chains near either corner. In the actual corners, however, the penalties and rewards for extremism are severe. At the far left, the translator may become faceless and name-

Problems and Parables less. At the far right, the translator may disappear as translator to become, as did Pound in his Chinese guise, not Rihaku or Li Bai but Ezra Pound, sole author of the Cathay poems. But current recognition of the translator's virtues of originality (or simply intrinsic worth) remains problematic. On the front page of the New York Times, there was on 13 October 1990 a long article on the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who is immersed in translation, in its theory and praxis. Some of Paz's poems appeared in translation in the paper. No translator's name appeared, and one can only suppose that Paz supplied the English version, or God, in support of Hispanic culture, took care of the translation in his invisible way. The purpose of this review of the word translator and its relation to originality and authorship has been to suggest that the act of translation once included what now goes under the rubric of original writing. Words, epithets, names, categories divide us politically, religiously, professionally. In literature although taxonomy is necessary, it is misleading and impoverishing when the assumption of glory distinguishes originality from translation. The falsely convenient separation of the two reflects a limited understanding of the function of tradition for the writer. Worse, the separation of originality from translation creates the popular categories of values in which the esteem of artistry lies uniquely with original work while the less desirable designation of mere craft is associated with the act of translation. The original author is an artist, the translator an artisan. Critics have often considered T. S. Eliot's dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, "il miglior fabbro" (the better or best artisan or craftsman), to be an acknowledgment of Pound's superior skills or mastery as editor and shaper of Eliot's poem yet at the same time an implicit dig at Pound, the prolific translator, the less original artist, the raider of old literatures for his own literary comminglings, the maker of cantos quilted with translated or reworked patches from obscure classics. Yet there is superb irony in Eliot's deflating dedication, since if any modern work relies on every element of translation in its formation, from hodgepodge, direct translation to rewording, imitation, and parody, it is Eliot's great contemporary salad, The Waste Land. Given the bad atmosphere over the precinct of translation, there is an anxietyridden conflict between originality and translation in which the paternal source of a translation must be killed or at least concealed in order to grant the translated child the dignity of originality. Hence the aim of the child is self-disguisement so that the translated self can pass as self-created and original, with minimal reference to tradition and its modeling force. The source should be buried. If the burial is complete, with nothing showing, then the shadow of translation is forgotten. Bloom's central thesis of anxiety of influence and his maps of misreading apply to every aspect of the translation syndrome of denial.

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Introduction and General Issues Richard Crashaw's well-known poem on Santa Teresa de Avila, "A Song," with its key line "1 dy even in desire of death," is actually a rewording of Teresa's bestknown poem, "Vivo sin vivir en mí," and the line "Que muero porque no muero" (I die because I do not die), although no publication of Crashaw's poem, not even the standard New York University Press edition, acknowledges that his poem derives from hers. The translation has passed as poem, having successfully concealed its origin. Similarly, let us look more closely at Yeats's highly anthologized poem, "When You Are Old," which, I have noted, begins as a translation— shall we call it a Derridean gloss?—of Ronsard's most famous sonnet, "Quand vous serez bien vieille": Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle, Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant. Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant: Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j'estois belle. When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep. (In Abrams, Norton Anthology)

Clearly Ronsard and Yeats are in tune with the universal carpe diem theme of Ecclesiastes or Alkaios or Horace. Following the Renaissance tradition of imitation, of conserving the past (that is, ransacking antiquity), Ronsard borrows freely from several sources, even in one poem. One example, his sonnet "A Sa Lyre," is a literary transplantation of Pindar's "First Pythian Ode," which was in turn imitated by Horace in Carmina IV Yeats also borrows freely from several sources in "When You Are Old." He concludes with "Love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid her head among the stars," lines he restates from the next-to-last line of "A Sa Lyre": "Si de mon front les étoiles je passe." Yeats's poem, then, celebrates tradition, containing an English translation of a French translation of a Latin translation of a Greek poem. In English the Yeats lyric is loved as an original work. The poem is printed without reference to its sources, not typed as an imitation, translation, or version. It too has passed, its originality unstained. Although the unnecessary, shall we say absurd, shame of translation remains, in the end translation persists, whether gloriously open or disguised, more strongly than ever as a primary literary activity. Given the extremely fine sifting in the making of literary canons, there are cruel facts which further undercut a facile determination of worth based on the categories of originality and translation. The crudest is that time and history soon ignore as unworthy and mediocre most "original" work as well as most "translation." Formulas for originality are inconsistent and overlap. What is canonically viewed as great achievement in an

Problems and Parables original piece is not simply its high degree of originality. At the same time great translation may be highly original. Pope's Homer continues to grow as the epitome of eighteenth-century narrative literature—both for its originality and for its unsurpassed use of the English language. If there is any doubt about translation's originality and value, consider the fact touched upon earlier that the great translations of the Bible into Greek, Latin, English, German, and other languages are called authoritative, thereby usurping the role and authority of the original. Religious leaders have traditionally declared the translation superior to the source text. Catholic apologists for the Jerome version into Latin usually describe the Masoretic original Hebrew scriptures as the corrupt original. In the strongly held popular view, the translation, such as the King James Version, has the sentimental sanctity of being God's word, and that translation has become for English readers the original and only Bible. Was Geoffrey Chaucer, the "grant translateur," less a poet because he was a licentious imitator of French and Italian authors? Was he a minor poet because as a translator he took extreme liberties and lifted entire lines from his sources? Was he unoriginal as a poet because his work (like the work of most poets of the medieval period) was imbued with lessons from his own translation labors? And were we to speak regularly of Troilus as a translation, which indeed we should, is there anyone who would then say that Chaucer, the translator of Troilus, is by definition less a major poet, or his Troilus less a major work by his being a translator and Troilus being a translation? There would be none so foolish as to fence with Chaucer's reputation. But this quandary does not even arise, for the perverse fact is that Troilus is not taken as a translation but as an original—the ultimate paradoxical compliment and insult to good translation. Analogically, in terms of literary status, the compliment to Chaucer as a disguised translator whose work "passes" as an original is equivalent to the dubious praise in "but you don't look Jewish" or "you're sensitive and mature, not like other Americans," phrases that promote to worthiness while exculpating shameful origin. The case of Chaucer is especially poignant with paradoxes, for the title "grant translateur" applies best to his "original" narrative poems, not to his explicitly formal translation. When, out of love for Boethius, he became an overt translator, performing his task with professional efficiency and fidelity, the result was not outstanding. Samuel Johnson, who wrote mundanely about translation with special reference to earlier civilizations other than Greek and Roman, cites Chaucer as an example of shoddy literality: Chaucer, who is generally considered as the father of our poetry, has left a version of Boethius on the Comforts of Philosophy, the book which seems to have been the favorite for the middle ages, which had been translated into Saxon by King Alfred, and illustrated with a copious comment ascribed to Aquinas. It may be supposed that Chaucer would apply more than common attention to an author

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Introduction and General Issues of so much celebrity, yet he has attempted nothing higher than a version strictly literal, and has degraded the poetical parts to prose, that the constraint of versification might not obstruct his zeal for fidelity. (The Idler, no. 69)

Not every poet is Chaucer. Nor is every poet translator Chaucer. I have distinguished between the translator servants and the translator masters—two roles that Chaucer occupied. The poet translator's position in literary society (including Chaucer's) is usually judged high in the canon according to the degree to which he or she escapes the role of "mere" translator and lets his or her own voice dominate. The most obvious modern example of the latter is Ezra Pound's Cathay, renderings of Li Bai, whom he calls Rihaku, Li Bai's name transcribed into Japanese. The stigma of unoriginal translation is lessened by the subtitle "After Rihaku." Yet although Cathay and Pound's other translations are always anthologized along with his poems and appear in large number interspersed with the other poems in the standard Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, the doggerel of "Mauberley" and the not fully disguised translations that make up most of his early canon still receive the most serious critical attention. Scholars do not know what to do with Cathay, so they invent arguments about Fenollosa and the degree to which Chinese characters carry an iconic message to a native Chinese reader. As for treating Pound's translations as translations, the circumstance is even worse; as a translator he is chastised for straying too far from Li Bai and giving Li his own voice. But Pound's liberties are traditional, and since he labels and acknowledges his method why waste time with foolish chastisement? There is no sin in Pound's method. Freedom, if properly labeled and acknowledged, is as valid a translation method as any other, for in literary translation, the measure is art. Art must be translated as aft; and art must be judged by standards of art. Robert Fitzgerald's Aeneid, on the other hand, equals Cathay as a work, an original poem in English that affirms the tradition of English narrative. But Fitzgerald's Aeneid is also amazingly close and faithful to Virgil's original poem. With regard to method, there is no contradiction in caring for both Pound and Fitzgerald. With regard to authorship of the Aeneid, there is also no contradiction in caring for both Virgil and Fitzgerald. AUTHORITY, AUTONOMY, AND DIGNITY OF THE TRANSLATION

The literary value of a translation should be independent of descriptive positions like faithfully close or creatively far. After all, the line between originality and imitation is vague. Is Borges less original because, having translated Walt Whitman and Franz Kafka into Spanish, he thoroughly displays his translation experience throughout his fiction and poetry? Is the translation of poetry ever an original art? Poetry translation is more selfevidently an art than that of fiction or prose drama, for it is widely held that a

Problems and Parables superior translation of poetry requires the translator to be a poet, either outside of the formal act of translation or, at the very least, during it. In poetry, where the complexities of meaning are at a peak, the translated poem is seldom the equal of the great master. But such failure is not because a translated poem is less valuable but rather because it is rarely the work of the great master poet translator. Only the highest creative skills can render poetry as poetry in another language. Hence, one may be more generous in affording the poet translator, a W. S. Merwin, Robert Bly, or Robert Lowell, originality. Classical antiquity handled its traditions without the apparent neurosis over originality. When the wooden Parthenon was burnt by the invading Persians, the Greeks built a better one in marble. When Catullus translated a poem by Sappho, his translation was no less valuable than other poems he wrote. Sappho, called the tenth muse in a poem spuriously attributed to Plato, was the first of the nine poets in the pantheon of women poets, and the greatest poet of antiquity. We might find a similar list of encomia for the Latin love poet Catullus. The poem known as Catullus 51 ("Hie mi par esse deo videtur"), to Lesbia, one of his bestknown poems, is a translation of Sappho's "Phainetai moi" (P31 in Poetarwn Lesbiorum Fragmenta), and in no way diminished for being an interlingual translation. Catullus' translation reads, Hie mi par esse deo videtur, ille, si fas est, superare divos, qui sedens adversus identidem te spectat et audit dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis cripit sensu mihi: nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi Ivocis in ore] lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat, sonitu suopte tintinant aures, gemina teguntur lumina nocte. (Catvlli, Tibvfli, Propcrii carmina)

Sappho's poem reads, OÚV€TOÚ ¿toi Kf|VOC ÏCOC 6éotClV IjXlXev' (DVT)p, ÓTTIC ¿¿áVTlÓC TOi

¿coávci Kaí irXáaov €tcac V7raKOÚ€i Kai *ycXa¿cac ¿jtépocv, TÓ u/ í\ jxav Kotpoíav év CTTJtectv ¿irróaiccv, vaic* a06* Iv IT' CIKCI,

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iraîcav dypci, x^wporépa Ôè iroíac ¿Wu, TeOváKtjv ó* oXí-yco 'môcvrçc atvo|x' ai átXXa TTotv TóXjxatov ¿irct KOti TrévqTa.

The Catullus translation, which in our spectrum of method is translation rather than imitation, is found in the Latin poet's canon of poems. Horace Gregory has given us this translation: He is changed to a god he who looks on her, godlike he shines when he's seated beside her, immortal joy to gaze and hear the fall of her sweet laughter. All of my senses are lost and confounded; Lesbia rises before me and trembling I sink into earth and swift dissolution seizes my body. Limbs are pierced with fire and the heavy tongue fails, ears resound with noise of distant storms shaking this earth, eyes gaze on stars that fall forever into deep midnight. (Poems of Catullus)

Catullus' version of Sappho's poem is close to the Greek. He does, however, take the major liberty of calling the loved one Lesbia: "simul te, / Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi" (Lesbia rises before me). In other poems, in admiration of Sappho, Catullus also confers the same name, Lesbia, on his lady and muse. While the body of the Latin version remains the same, by shifting the identity of the speakers Catullus makes himself, a male, the speaker in place of Sappho; Sappho, in turn, is no longer the passionate speaker but Lesbia, the unnamed woman whom the Greek poem addresses. By these clever changes, Catullus accomplishes several purposes at once in the translation. The poem is now an encomium of a Latin poet to a Greek poet, it is a love poem to his lady and muse, Lesbia, and it alters an impassioned poem of lesbian jealousy into a conventional cry of love's despair. (Until Denys Page's Sappho and Alcaeus, 1955, classical scholars uniformly denied Sappho's lesbianism, proposing that her poems to women were wedding songs.) Since the speaker, Catullus, replacing Sappho as speaker, is a man addressing a woman, Lesbia, the love described ceases to be lesbian. In an otherwise close translation, by assuming the persona of Sappho,

Problems and Parables Catullus changes the speaker's gender, and the poem's content is radically transformed. From the Sappho source we have superb versions in English. Lowell took greater freedom than Catullus did in evoking Sappho, though he did not tamper with gender and speakers. In the introduction to Imitations he states: "My licenses have been many. My first two Sappho poems are really new poems based on hers" (xii). The first of his Sappho poems is "Three Letters to Anaktoria [Letter 1]": I set that man above the gods and heroes— all day, he sits before you face to face, like a cardplayer. Your elbow brushes his elbow— If you should speak, he hears. The touched heart madly stirs, your laughter is water hurrying over pebbles— every gesture is a proclamation, every sound Refining fire purifies my flesh! I hear you: a hollowness in my ears thunders and stuns me. I cannot speak. I cannot see I shiver A dead whiteness spreads over my body, trickling pinpricks of sweat. I am greener than the greenest green grass— Idie!

But is Lowell's version really a new poem based on Sappho's? Not at all. It is remarkably close to Sappho, only superficially licentious and differing mainly in some striking images of modernity, such as "like a cardplayer." He wants his poems to live now, as American poems, fully naturalized ones: "I have tried to write alive English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now in America" (Imitations xi). After taking aim at metrical translators (Lowell is a superb metrical translator) who "seem to live in a pure world untouched by contemporary poetry" and who are "taxidermists, not poets," whose poems "are likely to be stuffed birds," he demands that the translator be an artist and that the translation occur under the spell of inspiration: "I believe that poetic translation—I would call it an imitation—must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and Tightness of hand as an original poem" (xii). Lowell gives us a line-for-line elaboration of Sappho. Lowell's Sappho has all of his own characteristic punch. He makes the Greek poet as starkly powerful as he makes Eugenio Móntale, whom he also translates in Imitations. In a won-

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Introduction and General Issues drous line with no basis in the Greek, "A dead whiteness spreads over / my body," Lowell gives Sappho the speech of his Life Studies. In "trickling pinpricks of sweat" we hear all his early verbal trickery of "haybells tinkle as a cart" ("The Holy Innocents") or "seasick spindrift drifts or skips" ("Salem") in Lord Weary's Castle. Lowell made Sappho his own. The poem is no less Lowell than Sappho. And to argue that Sappho persists, I offer a translation that appeared in my Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets (1962), which I did without reference to or knowledge of Lowell's. Mine is modern English but more chaste and closer to the Greek, and through it we can see just how Lowell elaborated and how very close he too remains to Sappho: To me he seems like a god as he sits facing you and hears you near as you speak softly and laugh in a sweet echo that jolts the heart in my ribs. For now as I look at you my voice is empty and can say nothing as my tongue cracks and slender fire is quick under my skin. My eyes are dead to light, my ears pound, and sweat pours over me. I convulse, greener than grass, and feel my mind slip as I go close to death, yet, being poor, must suffer everything.

Mine differs in its inclusion of the last fragmentary line (which has a Greek source), with its stoic pathos. The calamity persists beyond the near-death convulsion. William Carlos Williams, who did numerous translations from the Spanish, thirteen poems from the Tang poet Li Bai, and several from Li Bai's fellow poet, Buddhist nature poet Wang Wei, made this astonishing translation of the same poem: Sappho That man is peer of the gods, who face to face sits listening

Problems and Parables to your sweet speech and lovely laughter. It is this that rouses a tumult in my breast. At mere sight of you my voice falters, my tongue is broken Straightway, a delicate fire runs in my limbs; my eyes are blinded and my ears thunder. Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts me down 1 grow paler than grass and lack little of dying. (Collected Poems, vol. 2)

Williams put his version of Sappho into one of his collections as a star piece, and it is one of his best lyrics. The translation is more interesting than another of his poems to Sappho, entitled "To a Lovely Old Bitch," which, as a wiseguy parody, lacks the drama and word magic of "Sappho" that belong jointly to the Greek and American poems. Williams' mimesis of art is a counterfeit and an original creation. Williams' poem exists in English, both for those of us who have Greek and those who have none. It has grace, strength, and the candor of the Greek Two important poets persist. That is no mean glory. And independent of authorial identity we are reading an important poem in English. The poem exemplifies translation's double art. Williams left a note with his translation of the Sappho poem, explaining why he wanted to translate it. Sappho was a great poet, poorly served by other poets. Her name, her poetry, did not survive the translations of academics whose credentials were limited to possessing Greek. Williams wanted to write the poem in the American idiom, in the tongue of William Carlos Williams. And he did achieve an enduring marriage of authorship with the ancient poet from Lesbos. He also speaks about a matter we will treat later: collaborative translation, where the poet works with informants. And he argues angrily against translations performed by scholars who have the language but not the talent of poetry: 1 have worked with two or three friends in making the translation for 1 am no Greek scholar but have been veritably shocked by the official British translation of a marvelous poem by one of the greatest poets of all time. How their ears can have sanctioned the enormities that they produced is more than I can understand. American scholars must have been scared off by the difficulties of the job not to have done better. Their prosy versions were little better—to my taste. It may be that I also have failed but all I can say is that as far as 1 have been able to do I

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We have looked at six poems—one by Sappho and five derived from her poem, by Catullus, Gregory, Lowell, Barnstone, and Williams. Each has a distinct level of authority and value. Sappho is the original. She is the speaker and we witness her experience and art. In the popular estimation, however, the poems are ranked quite differently. Readers regard Catullus' poem as no less original than Sappho's in its authority. It is an important poem in his canon, much analyzed and anthologized. Its source in Sappho's poem enhances rather than diminishes it, invoking greater interest in the Catullian lyric. Catullus takes the liberty of changing the persona, making himself rather than Sappho the speaker. In principle one might suppose that for reason of these changes the poem would be permitted the dignity of being considered an original Catullian poem. Not so. The poem's originality lies in its emergence as a work by the great Latin poet Catullus, independent of the scarcely noticed changes he made in his translation. In short, by virtue of its classical origin and the name Catullus, "Ule mi par esse deo videtur" ranks with Sappho's "Phainetai moi." Since more people read Latin than Greek, Catullus' poem is more widely read as well. Horace Gregory's translation of the Catullus is excellent, and Gregory is highly esteemed as a translator. Yet the reader of Gregory's Catullus feels he or she is reading Catullus, not Gregory, albeit in Gregory's excellent version. Gregory is the guide. He has not the fame of his predecessors. When we read Lowell's imitation of Sappho, however, we are almost reading Lowell alone. His stature as the leading American poet of his generation makes him more than a servant-author. Yet even Lowell's version, with all its Lowellian traits and strength, is not viewed as a dignified original in the way Catullus' is. Lowell is not a classical Latin poet. As for my good translation, it remains for readers a translation. It has been frequently anthologized but always as Sappho's poem. Williams' version goes further in achieving originality than Lowell's (or anybody else's in English), although it is clearly closer to Sappho's verse than is Lowell's. Williams included the poem in Pictures from Breugal, a book of "original" poems, rather than in a book of translations, as Lowell did, and he entitled it "Sappho," suggesting thus that it was a poem by him about Sappho. The contextual advantage of these strategies, along with Williams' great international reputation as a poet, moves his "Sappho" into its own terrain as a poem. At the very least we have a collaboration of two authors: Sappho and Williams. Each of these six versions has its own dignity, authority, and autonomy; their originality becomes a reader's decision, often determined by the author's repu-

Problems and Parables tation, the poetic context, and the historic period, rather than by any intrinsic quality of the wording. Only in one book, the King James Version of the Bible, do we read old poems from the Hebrew (usually by way of a Latin intermediary) as originals, and only there do the poems asssume the dignity, authority, and autonomy that we recognize in Catullus 51. Indeed, these translations are revered in ways that do not pertain to ordinary secular poems, classical or modern. Foremost, the book is not perceived as a translation but as an original, which makes the question of fidelity and quality of translation irrelevant. Second, there is no distracting foreign author to contend with. The author may be called Solomon (for the Canticles) or David (for the Psalms), but neither Solomon nor David has any standing as an author, since few ordinary Bible readers or scholars take that authorship seriously. While the translators, redactors, and editors of the Bible remain invisible, they effectively kill off the anonymous authors and scribes of the holy word, thereby giving truth to the whims of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, who have declared the death of the author. With the Jewish author dead and the poems original holy works in English, there is every reason to revere the hallowed English verses of Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters" (KJV). Given the extraordinary acceptance of the text, without suspicion of originality, translation, or authorship, the Bible poem passes magnificently. Is there anything unseemly in killing the psalm's author or blurring its foreign origin? Seen aesthetically, this holy mistranslation (which will be discussed later) has given us a profound and spiritually transcendent poem, universally known as is perhaps no other lyric in our tongue, and now entered permanently in the canon of English poetry. I ask, however, that the reader love and accept Psalm 23 as a beautiful English creation in English yet know that such poems are the legacy of translation, that they are translation's glory, not its shame, to be concealed or forgotten. Moreover, replacing the ill-designated writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, the benign King James prevails. If James does not come through as a single authorial figure, the merged presence of the royal father and his book assumes, as a merged entity, an assuring, almost godlike authority. Just as the common reader, indifferent to original authorship, has received the Authorized, one day perhaps an enlightened reader will discover the splendid merged entity of Sappho and Williams, autonomous co-authors of a poem in English, and read that poem with the same reverence and joy. The source author's death, as in the Authorized, may be ideal for reading translation that aspires to art. Apart from the Bible, the best-known example of authorial suppression is the eleventh-century Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam, who scarcely exists as a writer—only as an exotic source whose

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Introduction and General Issues name lives as an extension of the title of his work. Thereby the Rubáiyát is also read without noticeable stain of translation. Pound also managed to kill off the Tang poet Li Bai. By the time one sorts out Rihaku (Li Bai in Japanese), Fenollosa's trot, and Pound's own infusion, Li Bai is effectively dead, and Pound wins fame as the creator. Yet there must be a less absurdly ignorant and obliterating way of receiving Sappho, Catullus, and Li Bai in English. It is not necessary to murder or conceal the original author. To receive the author with justice, however, requires the felicitous bond between the author and the English poet who re-creates the poem. Then, in the confusing event that is translation, despite indeterminate or dubious authorship, when a Rimbaud, Rilke, or Cavafy comes through in English to change our lives and the limits of our language, we can welcome that event with greed. Some of us already do, suggesting that the transfusion into an English poem is real. The translated poem need not be secondary to the original. The Dao de Jing, the Kabbalah, and the Bible in English, Shakespeare in German, Whitman in Spanish, Poe in French, Tolstoi and Kafka in most languages—books and authors live as much abroad as in their native tongue, and abroad they live only in translation. If they are to live well in their foreign habitat, then Poe finds Baudelaire to translate his stories and Mallarmé his poems, Whitman finds Borges for Leaves of Grass, Eliot finds Guillen and Seferis for The Waste Land, Valéry finds Rilke, and Shakespeare finds Schlegel in German, Gide in French, and Pasternak in Russian. These are some of the great couplings the double art has brought us. Beyond these fortuitous unions of major figures, we may generalize. If the original authors of any work of art are to live in other tongues, their existence depends on a blurring of authorships, on a sympathetic and partial surrender of single property ownership to another author, the poet translator. Translation takes on many faces. It demands inspiration, art, and revision from one intralingual draft to another (a central activity). I protest its poor press and assert that often its magnificence goes unperceived. Worse is when translation is regarded as a service rather than a miracle, an exercise of craft rather than a practice of art. Translation differs from those arts that entail reproduction. Where duplication or copying is the method of survival and reproduction, the method is a craft, a craft of utterly faithful intentions. While it may be possible to copy a statue, recast a bronze, print out an etching perfectly, the commercial copier receives no praise or individual fame. But with the word, the aims are contrary. There is never replication, synonymy, nor re-creation without difference. And in poetry translation the art is what comes through (to revise Robert Frost's homily on the possibilities of translation) and is found not in duplication but in approximations, equivalences, and differences. Because poetry has been the principal model for the art and complexities of translation, when the semiosis of art trans-

Problems and Parables fer does occur in the translation of a poem, it is good not to be blind to the autonomy of the new poem: to its craft, its sly rhetorical devices, its magic or failure, and especially its new author in its ambivalent affirmation of tradition. Literary translation, in all its protean forms, is a transformation of an earlier moment of a tradition. At the heart of this transformation is the "carrying over," the making of a metaphor in which A = B is the essential equation. The medieval Spanish poet Jorge Manrique used the metaphor of the river for carrying over the great themes of existence—for time, for tradition, for life and death: Nuestras vidas son los ríos que van a dar a la mar, que es el morir. [Our lives are the rivers that will open on the sea which is our dying.) ("Coplas por la muerte de su padre" (Verses on the death of his father 1, Obra completa)

Translation then is the river. It carries us through time. When it causes earlier moments and old literatures to survive, when it floats some part of a tradition to us live and with re-created originality, then translation is art. Our early authors thought highly of translation from Greek into Latin. In the De oratore of Cicero, Lucius Crassus says that he practised this continually, while Cicero himself advocates it again and again, nay, he actually published translations of Xenophon and Plato, which were the result of this form of exercise. . . . The purpose of this form of exercise is obvious. For Greek authors are conspicuous for the variety of their matter, and there is much art in all their eloquence, while, when we translate them, we are at liberty to use the best words available, since all that we use are our very own. As regards figures, too, which are the chief ornament of oratory, it is necessary to think out a great number and variety for ourselves, since in this respect the Roman idiom differs largely from the Greek. Quintilian, "Verteré Graeca in Latinum veteres" (On Translating Greek into Latin), institutes oratoria Whoever could read an author could translate him. From such rivals little can be feared. Samuel Johnson, "Life of Pope," 1781

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Translation as the Writer's Apprenticeship In the first century the Roman rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilianus wrote at length about the value of translation as an exercise for the writer and orator. He particularly recommends the translation of oratory and poetry. While like Cicero and Horace he despises verbum pro verbo, word-for-word translation, he sees translation as a form of apprenticeship in the sense of verteré, "to translate," but also converters, "to paraphrase." The resulting paraphrasis (paraphrase) and aemulatio (emulation) serve to inspire the young writer. And Quintilian does not restrict translation and imitation to the transposition from Greek to Latin. He suggests that intralingual paraphrase and imitation of Latin into Latin, into poetry or prose, is especially valuable. Moreover, the exercise need not be secondary to the original. Quintilian speaks of the translator not as a dutiful craftsman, but as one who seeks "the lofty inspiration of verse" to elevate his own style, to rival the original, and at times to improve on the original through sensible editing, in "words that are our very own": "Nay, we may add the vigour of oratory to the thoughts expressed by the poet, make good his omissions, and prune his diffuseness. But I would not have paraphrase restrict itself to the bare interpretation of the original: its duty is rather to rival and view the original in the expression of the same thoughts" (Institutes oratoria X, v, 5). Quintilian saw translation as an art whose duty is to be an art by means of the translator's inspired re-creation, which not only interprets but rivals and replaces the original. THE SECRET TRANSLATION, OR MAKING ONE'S OWN THE TONGUE ONE MADE THROUGH TRANSLATION

Quintilian recommended translation as the habit of Roman writers, a way to learn and improve. He is so taken by the benefit of translation to the translator that he ignores the normal goal of literary translation, which is to add an important document to the literature of the target language. Yet it is commonplace that foreign texts infuse every national literature, indeed, alter every aspect of their thought and language. Only the narrowest and most naively chauvinistic view confines the true history of a national literature to a catalog of its native-born authors. Such pathetic isolation has never occurred. Foreign literary impact occurs not only because readers and writers have access to other national literatures but because authors, particularly poet translators, in their apprenticeship as translators, have ideal workshop training in the art of poetry. To translate the work of another poet affords the poet other experience, diction, prosody, which may soon enter his or her own work. The process of such entry is complex and normally misunderstood. Herder brings in the whole weight of intertextuality to proclaim his preferred method of becoming a Greek in his native language. "When I read Homer I have no choice but to become a Greek, whichever way I

Problems and Parables read him, so why not in my mother tongue. I secretly have to read him like that anyway—the reader's soul secretly translates him for itself, wherever it can do so, even if it hears him in Greek: and I, sensuous reader! I cannot imagine any really useful and vivid reading of Homer without this secret translation" ("Reading Is Translation," Fragmente 34). Filling his romantic soul with a German version, he becomes the sensuous reader of his secret translation. Obviously the writer who reads a foreign text may be influenced by it. This holds true in the instance of the poet translator, for it is reasonable to suppose that in the act of translating the foreign text, the poet reads with more intimacy and decision than in any other kind of reading experience. But although the reading of the foreign text crucially initiates the process, the greater impact on the poet translator comes from another source: the new poem in English, devised by the poet as a result of the translation mission. The poet translator creates the main source of influence, which is the text he or she creates in his or her own language In this self-reflexive labor, the poet translator, using the source poem as the stimulus, devises the translated poem in English. The act of creating the translated poem and reading that creation, of having the experience and confidence of the new creation, gives the poet translator a work model in her or his own hand, a work unthinkable except through the activity of translation. This leads us to a new formula: Poets are influenced by themselves, by their own inventions. Influence no longer derives primarily from the source text in the foreign tongue but from the target text rendered into English. The poet translator owns the new text through the experience of having created it, and, as a poem re-created by the poet, it supplies him or her with an arsenal of possibilities. Examples are many. We may consider the work of James Wright, one of the finest poets of his generation, who translated many poets writing in Spanish: Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, Federico Garcia Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and César Vallejo. Qualities of Spanish verse are obvious in his poem "Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959," which he prefaces with a line from Miguel de Unamuno, "we die of cold, and not of darkness"; or in "In Memory of a Spanish Poet" for Miguel Hernández, where he speaks of Hernandez' death in the prison hospital: Under the black ripples of whitewashed walls Your hands turn yellow in the ruins of the sun. I dream of your slow voice, flying Planting the dark waters of the spirit With lutes and seeds. (In Baland and St. Martin, Migue/ Hernández)

More important, however, than the obvious examples which contain Spanish subject matter are other poems in which the lessons from poetry in Spanish, and

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The semi-surreal nature images come from Spanish poetry. Lorcan images dominate Wright's poem: "the cathedral / Of the Wind" or "the branch / Of your green voice." But the last stanza appears to be a virtual translation by Wright, or more likely an imitation of lines translated, whether on paper or in the act of reading, from Lorcas posthumous "Gacela del amor imprevisto," whose second stanza begins Mil caballitos persas se dormían en la plaza con luna de tu frente" [A thousand small Persian horses fell asleep in the moonlit plaza of your forehead] (Diván del Tamarit, Obras completas).

Wright is a contemporary poet who absorbed the poetry of Georg Trakl and Hermann Hesse, of Hernández and Lorca, and through his own translations discovered an English idiom for his own poetry. His learning came not from the original texts, but from his own English versions of them. In summary, the poet translators like Wright who have been affected by foreign writers have been influenced not by the original text directly (although the original text is the first cause of the process) but through the intermediary of their own translations, others' translations, or their own mental translated texts. Of course, as in all generalized theories, nothing is absolute, but what is clear is that linguistically and aesthetically there is always an intermediary text in English between the foreign-language source poem and the poet's later original poem in English. POUND'S INSTRUCTION THROUGH TRANSLATION

The poet whose main instructor and inspiration was the voice he found in his own translations is Pound. Pound was the first major American poet to learn his craft and art from the Chinese. In 1915, with the help of Ernest Fen-

Problems and Parables ollosa's trot and Mori and Ariga's decipherings, he turned the work of the Chinese poet Li Bai into the wondrous poems of Cathay. He never was to repeat this achievement, neither in later dreary translations from the Confucian canon nor in the snippets of translations from Chinese that weave through the Cantos. But these early translations, more than any training in Provençal and Old English or indulgence in Homer, gave the expatriate poet from Hailey, Idaho, a clear image, a conversational confessional narrative, a plainness that often saves the tangle of language and ideas of the later cantos. In addition to translating Li Bai, Pound made early translations from Homer, Cavalcanti, Dante (from whom he imitated the notion of cantos for his Cantos), and Old English, and his own free translations became a stylistic model and source for countless lines of the Cantos. In the Cantos are many layers of early poems and translations of them, many layers of fragments of textual memories—Pound is the poet of fragments—all of which he assembles and seams together in smooth montage. These textual memories speak to each other in borrowed speech from the far edges of Europe and China; they speak in English versions of ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon. Pound begins the first lines of his epic Cantos with his translation of the first lines of the second book of the Odyssey—but Homer is only the beginning of that textual memory. Who are those other voices in the text? Let us see. While the poet wants the danger and primordial force of Homer, he also wishes to bring in the tempering quality of Virgil (like Pound a follower of Homer), and so he resorts to a sixteenth-century version of the Odyssey by Andreas Divus, who rendered Homer into Virgilian Latin. Both Divus and Pound are "out of Homer," Pound by less direct access. In the last lines of the first canto, he acknowledges Divus as his precursor translator: "Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, / In officina Wecherli, 1538, out of Homer." But even Virgil's lovely marble speech version of Homer is still not right for Pound's Englishing. He needs yet another layer. To replicate Homer's stark power he turns to the Anglo-Saxon sea poem "The Seafarer." He uses the rhythms and speech of "The Seafarer" in his Cantos—not the music of the original Old English but his translation of the poem—and that prosody provides him with a good barbaric equivalent to work into his unique translation of Homer. In "The Seafarer" Pound's alliterations speak the human hardship and its harsh counterpart in nature: the cold, the much abused keel, the ocean surge tossing against the cliffs: May I for my own self song's truth reckon, Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days Hardship endured oft. Bitter breast-cares have I abided, Known on my keel many a care's hold,

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Introduction and General Issues And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted. (Translations)

These opening lines can be read in sequence with the first lines of Canto I as two moments of reflection and setting out in a long narrative poem: And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heaving with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas. (Cantos)

These two excerpts, each a product of Pound's translations, were published in 1912 ('The Seafarer") and 1917 (Canto I). For all their obvious similarities, I should also note certain key differences. "The Seafarer" begins with a few archaic words (oft, nigh) and syntactic inversions ("Known on my keel many a care's hold"), while Canto I is direct, natural, and dramatic. Curiously, the tone of "The Seafarer" renders the translation a bit old-fashioned but not archaic. It reads like a good translation. Canto I, however uncluttered with forced diction and phrasing, nonetheless has the feeling of Homeric antiquity precisely because with all its rhetoric of magnificence it is natural and therefore reads like an original, not a translation. Like the best translations it has crossed the borders of prejudicial rejection of translation and passes into the sacred authority of originality. We hear perhaps Odysseus or Homer or Pound. We don't hear Pound translating. Pound was the great maker, the fabbro, patching his translations into his translations and into work less clearly translation. As always Ezra Pound went to school in Ezra Pound's eclectic university and stole, cheated, and counterfeited, collecting translation debits from himself to work into his epic. In the end he became the great miser of world literature, hoarding pages, parchments, papyri at a usurious rate, putting them as his own in permanent savings in the mammoth vault of Canto verse. Pound as a radical / traditional poet (more blatantly so than others) assembled words from the past and displayed them freshly in his work. His way of selfexploitation, in the era of Eliot's and Marianne Moore's translations and borrowings, is part of the great tradition of poetry. In his bank he gave those verses life, letting them grow and shine. In the Renaissance everyone seemed bent on translating and rewriting Petrarch, and from their own reworkings fashioned their own language of poetry. Fray Luis de León, Spain's mystical poet and foremost translator, as well as Garcilaso de la Vega, took from Petrarch; León took from the Italians, translated

Problems and Parables them and, significant for our discussion, used the content, the words, style, and even the prosody of the lire from his own translations to infuse his work. What is significant is how the industry of translation creates a new language for the translator-poet. In Renaissance England Wyatt and Surrey began a tradition of translating Petrarch. They then wrote their own Petrarchan poems, imitating their own translations. A little later Milton, a prolific translator from Hebrew, Latin, and Italian, wrote Petrarchan sonnets, following the same, by now English, tactics. Translation is the teacher of poets. The lessons lie not, however, in the source language but in the target language, not primarily in the source books, but in the poet's own versions. These versions are instigated by the activity of translation; what is sovereign, however, is the product of that activity, the poets' own work in their translated versions. Through the experience of translation, and of subsequent self-imitation based on foreign poems in their own versions that become their models and instructors in their own poems, poets have developed as poets, and, immersed in their foreignness, have also established an international tradition in their own languages and national literatures. For the poets, then, their translations are intermediary texts that they have created between the foreign source and their own poems. Their translations, as intermediaries, become their real source and instructor. Through their translations, the poets have created their own intimate instructors in poetry. During the translation, the poet's translator-friendly mechanical aid for discerning a foreign text is the dictionary. It can be used and abused for translation and mistranslation, in a range from total freedom to meaningless error. In the next pages I offer a few aphoristic glances at the dictionaries of the literary interpreter.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis—obviously an unproven one—that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms. Jorge Luis Borges, "Translation" When / interpret I step from one level of thought to another. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar Insubordinates and infidels who ventured to read the proscribed dictionary risked the threat of death. Whoever opened the book soon grew numb, stuck on his own heart as on a pin. Indeed, the reader would die on the ninth page at the words Verbum caro factum est. ("The Word became flesh"). Milorad Paviç, Dictionary of the Khazars

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Introduction and General Issues In a dictionary I wandered through a labyrinth of infinite letters in which free consonants sat upon singing vowels and held the human universe together in a language furiously translating itself for everyone. Pierre Grange, Dream Time and Other Earthly Signs

Eighteen Quick Looks at the Translator's Dictionaries, or A Guide to Guides of Truth and Error A dictionary is monolingual or bilingual in format and intralingual or interlingual in purpose. With it one confronts the unknown. An interlingual dictionary is a bible for the translator, containing official law for transferring meaning between languages. Laws, however, even holy ones, are not always perfect. An interlingual dictionary enlightens and deceives. An interlingual dictionary is a mirror of good news, imagination, injustice, and heresy. It translates by the laws of physics. An interlingual dictionary provides a mirror image of the unknown in a known language, but for there to be a meaning, to be semiosis, the translator must intervene with her interpreting mind, actively choosing what amid the new data provides equivalence. An interlingual dictionary offers us the truth of the mirror, which is a two-dimensional image of truth. Umberto Eco denies that a translation is complete until it goes beyond mechanical reproduction, saying, "A mirror does not 'translate'; it records what struck it just as it is struck. It tells the truth to an inhuman extent, as it is well known by those who—facing a mirror—cannot any longer deceive themselves about their freshness. Our brain interprets retinal data; a mirror does not interpret an object" (Semiotics 207-08). Charles Sanders Peirce also regards the double image in "the man and the glass" as a dual relation, which to be meaningful needs to be triadic (signobject-interpretant), requiring the "interpreting mind" of the person looking at the looking glass. When we choose the "right" definition in the dictionary, within the context for sentence and piece, we have at best mechanical literality, and perhaps nonsense. With or without a dictionary, translation is incomplete without interpretation. The image in a dictionary's mirror requires an interpreting viewer. Then comes the activity of translation. A good dictionary prescribes the laws for each word. The interpreter looks down a list of definitions, and chooses one, which may be right. To interpret the dictionary wrong by choosing the wrong definition is to be a lawbreaker.

Problems and Parables • A dictionary copies only one word at a time. Its confinement to a single-word operation puts it into a condition of being monolexic, except when it shows a set phrase, which then functions as a single word. • A monolingual (or intralingual) dictionary defines by explanation and synonymity. A bilingual (or interlingual) dictionary seeks equivalence and does not primarily define. It tries to translate. It tries to do so faithfully and literally, but leaves the decision of right choice to the translator. • A bilingual dictionary ideally replaces a monolingual entry, such as écrire, with its counterpart monolingual entry, to write. Such was the opinion of Wittgenstein, who in his pictorial view of translating holds that each "word picture," rather than the sentence, is the unit of translation. Wittgenstein believes in dictionaries' single-word translation skills. In the Tractatus he claims that "the strict application of dictionary definitions guarantees a seamless one-to-one correspondence between the words, but not between the sentences" (Zettel 3). • A bilingual dictionary is an unmatched instrument in the creation of interlinear glosses. Then it seems to be the tongue of truth, although it undiplomatically ignores cross-cultural meanings. Ecrire in French may not always convey the same meaning as write in English, and certainly not the same as write in Chinese, which signifies a knowledge of writing or brushing Chinese characters rather than just penning alphabetized words. • A bilingual dictionary is not prepared to handle sentences, since it has no memory of syntax and cares nothing about grammar. A dictionary has a multitude of cyclopses looking out from its pages. When a lexical cyclops takes on a second or third eye right in the middle of its brow, the hybrid monster is so crosseyed it cannot see or be seen unless one focuses in one eye alone. • A bilingual dictionary is water in the desert for the wanderer. • A bilingual dictionary is fresh air in a steel trunk for Houdini, who, locked and fettered inside, is lowered slowly into the icy East River. With its help Houdini may come upon the key word and talk himself out of his chains. • A monolingual dictionary is a book of words for a one-eyed man hopping on one leg into a strange land. • Without a bilingual dictionary and its monolingual word maps, the translator, no matter how erudite, will be lost. • Without a map, the translator, after recovering from fear of abandonment, may look closely at the source text which conceals its treasures in imperfectly understood signs. • Suddenly, with courage and inspiration, the translator puts aside her bilingual dictionary for a while, weary of mirrors and their mechanical illusions, of their reversals and automatic aids, deprived of her own judgment. She walks back to that imperfectly known territory and there remains vulnerable yet free of prescription, liberated for the moment from her own tongue. Like a native she

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Introduction and General Issues looks up a word in a local monolingual dictionary, finds an explanation not a translation. Yet when she returns to her own tongue to look for equivalences she will not be paralyzed by the repeatable memory of the source text. Neither the siren of Dante's melody nor tones for Tang poets will draw her away from port into shipwreck. The bilingual mirror gives a flawed reproduction for the translator, as observer, to accept on faith. But with the knowledge drawn from the foreign monolingual dictionary as well as hints from other sources (thesaurus, prior translation), the translator may find the best word and translate. In the act of choosing the word, the translator has an individual definition for the sign and so has come to the root process of translation itself: translation as semiosis. So, released from the unrealities of absolute fidelity or fatal distorting error, released from the rule of dictionary and mirror, with the word formed in and on her or his own tongue, the translator moves beyond wordbook and glass and their two dimensions of "perfect" sign and reflection. The translator enters the third dimension of literature, and, using her or his own voice, becomes a true and creative interpreter.

Pay attention to grammar. Martin Luther, "Three Rules"

The wits of Charles' times had seldom more of learning behind the colours of a gay imagination; they, therefore, translated always with freedom, sometimes with licentiousness, and, perhaps, expected that their readers should accept sprightliness for knowledge, and consider ignorance and mistake as the impatience and negligence of a mind too rapid to stop at difficulties, and too elevated to descend to minuteness. Samuel Johnson, The Idler, no. 68

How easily our bread-and-butter reviewers take translators to task with great severity and point out linguistic mistakes. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Fragmente Glory has no expected habitat. Even amid error it is at home. Pierre Grange, Dream Time and Other Earthly Signs

Problems and Parables Dear Theo, Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding! Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth! That's right! I cant work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her! I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful She claims she can't chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, l can't go on like this much longer! Vincent Woody Allen, "If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists"

The Translator as a Freely Creative Person or an Erroneous Slob FREEDOM AND ERROR

There is freedom and there is freedom, error and error. Error in translation is sometimes absolute, sometimes relative and debatable. In a spectrum of method ranging from literal to free, the errors in literal versions are readily detectable, while in freer texts and imitation, errors may be disputable or go unnoticed. Yet even in nonliterary information transfer, what to one reader is ingenious interpretation may to another be a howler. To his contemporary Christianizing Jews, Joshua the Messiah's acts were miracles—if we are to believe the translations of translations which became our synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. To later Gnostics, however, the same events were the magic tricks of the teacher, Rabbi Joshua. So as one person's miracle is another's magic and deception, in translation one person's freedom is another's error. Although error today means only "error," in its Latin root errare has the ambiguity of error and freedom, since the Latin verb errare means both "to be in error" and "to wander" (an ambiguous meaning carried over into Romance languages—Spanish errar, French errer, Italian errare). Even etymologically there appear to be two sides to what is called an error. In these pages I use the word entirely in its English sense: an error is a mistake. The translations of schoolboys, grammarians, and divines tend to have strict codes of regularity. The discomforting iconoclasts may argue that their accurate close translations render only the informative element, and ignore or abuse all the expressive aspects. So a bottom-of-page prose crib for deciphering a foreign poem may be accuratp but virtually unreadable, filled with gross error at every

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Introduction and General Issues significant level of semantic expression. Such error—failure to convey music, prosody, wordplay, cultural context, intertextual allusion—is normally forgiven, since by tradition a crib makes no pretense of going beyond surface word-byword dictionary restatement. It should not be accused of failing to carry over what it was not designed to carry over. But grave is the sin when readers accord aesthetic praise to a crib and confuse it with or establish it as a standard for literary translation. Much contemporary "Good-News-Bible" translation of poetry and prose falls into this category. In such instances we can fairly bring out a hammer and pound away at inadequacies and levels of expressive error. In the gray area of respectable, unworthy translation we have Sinclair's translation of Dante, a crib, and more pleasant to handle than an interlinear gloss to the facing Italian text, but when Sinclair, whose level of semiotic transfer is largely restricted to information transfer, is mistaken for an English Dante, then the reader is thoroughly fleeced. Sinclair's work on Dante is felicitous only as a dictionary to return to Dante's Italian. At the other end of the spectrum—free and open translation—there is also often a blurring of purpose inherent in a confusion of license and error. For one critic liberty to omit, alter, invent, or imitate sections of a text constitutes not freedom, not even license, but error. Yet in the floating relativism of translation criticism, another critic will praise the same text for its ingenuity. Another species of error, however, I call a brutal mistake. In his three grades of translation evils, Nabokov ranks "obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge" ("Art of Translation" 160) as the first but least sin. A brutal mistake can occur in any text, from technical reports to a free version of a dolce stil nuovo sonnet into another Romance tongue. The source of such error is usually a misunderstanding of the source text or ignorance of finer points of the source language. Examples. To mix up personal pronouns, to misinterpret reflexive verbs, to be duped by false cognates or simply to confuse one word for another, such as sonar in Spanish, "to sound," for sonar, "to dream," all pertain to the category of brutal mistakes. In Dylan Thomas' "Lament," from the line "she bore angels! Harpies out of her womb," the Argentine translator renders "she bore angels" into Spanish as "ella aburrió a los ángeles," as if the poem had read "she bored angels." That is not free interpretation of the verb to bear. It is a mistake. Its cause: ignorance of English. There are some errors that are as amusing as they are revealing. Albert Camus was an aficionado of all things Spanish: his mother was a Spaniard from Algiers, he translated and adapted Calderón's Devoción de la cruz into his own theater piece, and wrote with affection of Machado in his Carnets (Notebooks). In these journals he translates a short poem by Machado, "Señor, ya me arrancaste lo que yo más quería," written after the death of Machado's young wife Leonor. The quatrain ends:

Problems and Parables Tu voluntad se hizo, Señor, contra la mía. Señor, ya estamos solos, mi corazón y el mar. (Your will was done, Lord, against my own. Lord, we're alone now, my heart and the sea.) (Dream below the sun 66-67)

Camus translates the last line as "Seigneur, maintenant nous sommes seuls, mon coeur et ma mère" (Lord, we're alone now, my heart and my mother). Since Camus knew Spanish very well, there could not have been a language problem. He simply made a Freudian howler, confusing the homophones la mer and la mère. Given Camus' especial interest in words and names—his naming the characters of L'Etranger Salamano (the old man with the dirty dog), Perez (the old father figure), Marie (his girlfriend, whom he met by the sea—in which mother and sea come together)—we can perhaps read too much, too easily, into this error But error, whatever the cause and association, it is. Another kind of linguistic misreading is very common. Unamuno ends his best-known longer poem, "Salamanca," with a metaphysical affirmation of his existence. Y cuando el sol al acostarse encienda el oro secular que te recama, con tu lenguaje, de lo eterno heraldo, di tú que he sido. (In Turnbull, Ten Centuries)

This quiet affirmation strikingly recalls the concluding line of the last poem in Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, "Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin" (To the rushing water say: I am). But how does Eleanor Turnbull, a dedicated translator of many volumes of poetry from the Spanish, render Unamuno's lines? And when the sun as it sinks to its rest kindles the age old gold that adorns thee, in thy tongue of eternal herald tell what I have been. (Ten Centuries 385)

Through a misreading of one word, Turnbull has botched the ending, depriving the poem of its spiritual imprint and poise. Her translation would be correct if Unamuno had written "di tú qué he sido" (with an acute accent), in which qué would mean "what." Without the accent, que means simply "that." In her reading Turnbull has made a small linguistic misreading, not catching the distinguishing meaning of an accent, but in doing so she has completely reversed the climactic ending of the poem from one of existential endurance—"say that I have been"— to the bragging self-promotion of "say what I have been," which is more in keeping with the bombast and rhetoric of Unamuno's equally famed "Castilla." The last stanza of "Salamanca" contains a brutal mistake.

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Introduction and General Issues A translator of great skills and pioneering discoveries is Kenneth Rexroth. In his poems from the Chinese he takes great freedom, but the poems come through. No one has done better versions of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao than Rexroth. And his six poems from Machado have Machado's flavor and poetry. But Rexroth was sloppy. In one of the last preserved war poems of Machado, "Meditación," written in Valencia before he walked into exile, Rexroth translates the lines "mientras Valencia florida / se bebe el Guadalaviar" as "while flowery Valencia / drinks up the Guadalquivir" (Obras 653-54; Thirty Spanish Poems 31). Now the Guadalquivir is a major river of Spain, glorified in verse by Góngora and others, flowing through the capital city of Sevilla to the Atlantic, lying five hundred miles to the southwest of Valencia. The Guadalquivir, great as it is, could not reach that far north-east to quench Valencia's thirst. The river that Valencia drinks up is the Guadalaviar, a tiny, scarcely known river, on few maps. Is Rexroth s misreading an associative misreading like Camus' or perhaps an intentional misreading for the purpose of beefing up the credentials of the line? Whatever the cause, it is not freedom, not interpretation, not even license, but wrong. A few lines later, in the same poem, Machado mentions his favorite river in Soria, the Duero, in the phrase alto Duero, which means "the upper Duero river." Rexroth translates "por los páramos del alto Duero" as "through the steppes of high Douro" (giving the Portuguese spelling of the river). Now, alto can mean "high," "deep," or "upper," but here, since it precedes rather than follows the noun, it can only mean "upper," as in el alto Nilo, "the upper Nile." Moreover, the Duero is an important river on the páramos (the steppes) of Soria, not the name of the steppes, or of a hill or mountain, as the English reader would suppose it to be from Rexroth's rendering. (Had Machado written, el Duero alto, with adjective after noun, the meaning would have been "the high Duero" or in some cases "the deep Duero.") Here the misreading is probably enthusiasm and ignorance. In any case again it is not freedom or even license, but a mistake. The most exotic mistake I have encountered is in the title of a recent film, Comienzan los comienzos. This wishy-washy Spanish film won a national award in 1986 in Madrid and was successful at the box-office. The background melody that instigates the action and philosophy of the characters in this melodrama is Cole Porter's "Begin the Béguine," translated incorrectly as "Comienzan los comienzos," "Begin the beginnings." The moral tag of the Spanish film is that in life and love, at any age, one can always begin again. But Porter's song refers not to starting life over but to the moment when the band strikes up the music in Martinique to play a rhythmic island dance called the béguine. The verse carries no hint of renovation. Apparently the mistake occurred because begin, pronounced with Spanish vowels, comes out "begeen," identical in sound to Ella Fitzgerald's throaty "béguine" on the soundtrack.

Problems and Parables MAGNIFICENCE IN SPITE OF HOWLERS

Such mistakes, however, are usually not that brutal. They are easily recognizable; the felon committing the linguistic crime is publicly chastised, and the world of letters and song survives. In fact, in the best translations there are howlers—as there are typographical errors in the finest limited editions, giving scholars their day's work—and unless the blunders intrude they should not provide the reader with an excuse for evading sensitive evaluation or resorting to facile dismissal. Better a magnificent translation by a Borges or Camus with a few mistakes than an "accurate," ponderous rendition unredeemed by art. In his short life John Keats did not translate, for unlike his friend Shelley, who did translate, Keats could not read Greek. This may have led to the most beautiful poem on translation in the English language, its permanent literary monument. I refer of course to "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer " If ever the value and art of translation need to be justified, Keats did so in his sonnet. Yet even this poem contains a mistake. His poem on translation's glory and revelation reads: Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western isles have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien

The translation mistake derives from general source information: Keats's defective knowledge of New World explorers. He transferred one fact incorrectly into his extended simile to show Chapman's magnificence. It was not Hernando Cortez but Vasco Nunez de Balboa who "star'd at the Pacific." His error of translatio occurs when he transforms incorrect information into literature, error into an aesthetic entity. The poem, however, scarcely suffers (unless a fussy reader feels that such error undermines suspension of disbelief). The sonnet, despite its howler, is a star piece in the canon of English literature. A fascinating gift of Keats's poem is his decision, in the area of "translator as servant of author" versus "translator as author," to choose, naturally and perhaps

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Introduction and General Issues unconsciously, "translator as author." Writing candidly as one unable to enjoy the Greek epic, Keats confesses that he has no immediate experience but has "been told I That deep-brow'd Homer ruled [the realms) as his demesne." (This confession is repeated in his sonnet "Homer," where he disclaims a knowledge of both Greek and Greece: "Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades"; italics mine.) The opening six lines of "Chapman's Homer" are a dreamy debt to classical antiquity's "realms of gold" and its "bards in fealty to Apollo." The poem begins, however, when the poet truly discovers the narrative text, and he makes perfectly clear that it is neither Greek nor Homer's but Chapman's. "Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." After that epiphany, with Chapman's words stirring him, the poet moves from conventional, bookish praise of antiquity to the fresh (Homeric) extended simile of "the watcher of the skies" and the breathtaking recognition when "all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise." After such magnificence, it is well that Keats's brutal error (easily corrected by replacing conquistador "stout Cortez" with explorer "Balboa") is accorded only a textbook footnote. Keats does not care about possible error in Chapman or how quiet Chapman might be as an invisible translator or how loud he is as a visible re-creator. He sees only Chapman's text before him and, with enthusiastic spontaneity, accepts its truths. Herder deals with the same matter, defending the re-creator whose license will be censured as error, whose work Herder calls "adaptive": "Because this kind of translator must attempt, adapt, dare all the time, our censors of the raised eyebrow reward him by decrying his work because of ... attempts that have gone wrong, by taking all his bold experiments for linguistic mistakes and by treating an artist's endeavors as they would a schoolboy's homework" ("Irrelevant Criticism," Fragmente 33). There is anger at both ends, as descriptive criticism (to use I. A. Richards' formula) replaces evaluative or intrinsic judgment. In other words, the quality of the work is not judged on its own but on whether it fits into a proper descriptive category—in this instance overliteral or overfree methods. We are familiar with pedantic outrage when error is imputed to freedom. At the other end, the polemics and anger against an academic, literalist stance are equally shrill. John Hollander speaks of this breed as literalist thugs, Gregory Rabassa complains about Professor Horrendo's ordering of full-dress court martial for inevitable mistakes when company punishment would suffice, and Alastair Reid, in condemning the criticism of those who would impose a skimpy unimaginative standard on the art of translation, roundly calls these reviewers the translation police. Having recognized error's extenuating circumstances, I wish now to persist in affirming that error is error and freedom freedom, and freedom should not be used as an alibi for error. If the error is real, it is not license but misunderstanding, and some form of retribution is in order. The punishment need not be fatal,

Problems and Parables yet there should be no plea bargaining under the banner of freedom or poetic license. If after an appendectomy the surgeon leaves a scalpel in the patient's stomach, the technical mistake is not washed away as "surgical license"; the plumber who connects cold water to hot water pipes or causes a toilet to splash its user rather than the bowl cannot hide behind "plumbing license." So in the case of genuine mistakes—this least serious instance of translation failure— mercy should prevail, but allow no concealment. In sum there are petty language crimes that cause little semantic and aesthetic damage. The most grievous error is infidelity to quality. Except in the case of specific cribs and interlinear trots (for which there is academic dispensation), there is only one fitting punishment for qualitative felonies: the silence of nonpublication.

Just as there is a geography and a description of the universe, ihere should also be a translation of it. Friedrich Schlegel, "Translation as a Category of Thought"

Translation as an Instrument of Literary and Political Reform Translation not only transforms other literatures, their authors and translating authors, but in repressive societies serves specifically as an instrument to educate, inform, and alter political and hence literary values. In totalitarian states, modes of expression not permitted native authors are allowed foreign authors in translation. In the sporadic thaws of post-Mao China and late-Franco Spain, books could, by virtue of the foreign author's reputation, be translated and published whose equivalents by domestic authors could not pass through the grid of local censorship. A famous ridiculous event of overturned censorship occurred in Greece under the colonels in 1972 when the censors condemned a book for an erotic passage, only to discover in the subsequent public trial that the blue passage was a faithful transcription of a section from the biblical Song of Songs. The writers of Greece had set up the government to test the limits of censorship. The authority of the translated Bible prevailed over that of the military. Once the virus of foreign authorship, infused into the body politic through translation, has spread, the resistance to it residing in the bureau of censors, the guardians of ideological purity, inevitably breaks down. Soon the native author may replicate the new virus. The foreign form of the disease, already infecting the language and morals of the country, grows widespread through the courier of translation. The re-creative transfer of the translation virus is thereby complete and blissfully spreads its invisible message of literary liberation.

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Introduction and General Issues Nothing in the world is unusual today. This is the first morning. Izumi Shikibu, tanka, from Jane Hirschfield and Mariko Aratami, The Ink Dark Moon The Koran says: "God has given every nation a prophet in its own language." Thus every translator is a prophet among his people. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "In Praise of the Translator" Where is there a translator who is at the same time a philosopher, a poet, and a philologist? He is to be the morning star of a new era in our literature. Johann Gottfried von Herder, "Translation and Explication: Context"

The Author and Translator: God and His Servant THE AUTHOR AS GOD

Most of the major poets of our century have devoted their time to extensive translation—among them Mandelstam, Pasternak, Rilke, Pound, Lowell, and Paul Valéry—and their work as translators has not only enriched their languages with important works of poetry but deeply affected their own verse. Boris Pasternak goes so far as to question the value of his "original" work in favor of his creations as a translator. In I Remember, he writes, with mistaken modesty, "I take the opportunity to repeat [to] you, that except the €Dr. Zh.' which you should read, all the rest of my verses and writings are devoid of any sense and importance. The most part of my mature years I gave off to Goethe, Shakespeare and other great and voluminous translations" (127). Yet despite this people regard the role of the translator qua translator as secondary, minor, or useful but of limited importance. The reason is perfectly clear: the author is God while the translator is merely the servant of God. Or, to use Valéry Larbaud's cruel caricature, the translator is the beggar at the church door. Cowley expressed anxiety about the role of translator in the prefatory meditations to his Pindarique Odes, 1656, quoted earlier. Cowley was an unembarrassed champion of translation in its "libertine way of rendring" but was uncomfortable with the restrictive title and name of Translator.

Problems and Parables When then does the translator feel like an equal in the field of letters and fame? Traditionally, only when the translator usurps the role of the author, as Edward Fitzgerald did in his translation of Omar Khayyam or Jerome achieved with his Vulgate version of the Bible, does he or she, rightly or wrongly, assume the glory of the original author. Then the translator is essentially confused with the author, or even takes over the role. Adaptations (Virgil and Catullus from Greek) and imitations (the modern example of Lowell) are another form of free translation in which the translator again becomes the author god. The roles become less clear-cut when Shakespeare adapts Plutarch for his Antony and Cleopatra or Dryden corrects and redeems that adaptation for his time in All/or Love. Clearly the conscientious translator should not, as part of a working strategy, aim for an inferior version, a poor reflection of the source work. By trying to transcend the original, the translator may come out even. Yet all these postures of respectability, even superiority (including denial of precursors) are illfounded. In most excellent translations the translator is indeed a servant and enthusiastically so—even in the rare instance when the servant outshines the master. The initial enthusiasm, the desire to bring remarkable works into one's own language, spurs the translator. Such is the translator's motivation, and the reward should be in seeing the original work accepted into the body of literature of the target language. There is nothing unworthy in serving a poet from another tongue. It is admirable. If one is famous, as were T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the translators of St. John Perse and Li Bai, then one's own name brings luster to the reputation of the other poet. And for most poet translators, such reward is more than enough. Their major passion, and their training for the task of poet translators, is writing poems (just as for their own poetry the best exercise is translation). When, as in the case of Robert Fitzgerald's versions of Homer and Virgil, the translations, rather than the poets original poems, are the poet's masterpiece, that too is as it should be. The common example of the poet translator imposing so much upon the original as to render the source text a pretext for possessing the author can, however, lead to painful confusions. In Bly's fine translations of Rilke and Kabir, are we reading Rilke and Kabir or Bly? Yet here, too, the problems of originality, of fidelity and freedom, can be easily resolved by giving the appropriate designation to a translation. To keep at least one foot in Eden the translator should be Adamic and give a proper name to each version, classifying them variously as translation, version after, adaptation, or imitation. Problems arise only when a translation that reflects little of the original is not properly labeled. When the translator wishes, in the activity of translation, to become God the creator, the effort should be clearly described so the reader will have the pleasure and elevated awareness of reading the new scripture as holy scripture.

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Introduction and General Issues The fundamental reason why the translator is usually the servant rather than God lies in the nature of what is given to the translator and what the translator contributes to the art. The translator receives content and an indication of form. Once the content is understood, the re-creation of form becomes the translator's most difficult literary challenge. The translator's task consists of pouring a more readily translatable content into an invented form. This reductive division of content and form acknowledges that the source author has created both, while the translator, though imaginatively altering content, is basically the author of form alone. Because content is more highly esteemed than form—except among the Russian Formalists—the original author is more highly esteemed than the translator. As translation moves from close to free the dominance of content normally increases accordingly, and the translator-poet to that extent becomes less a collaborator and more a re-creator and fully autonomous author. Paradoxically, however, while form is less esteemed than content, a close formal translation yields a free translation of content. Indeed, to the extent that form is closely retained, content is more freely altered. The translation of a sonnet in rhyme and meter is freer in content than a translation of a contemporary free-verse poem. In the end we esteem the formal translator for curious paradoxes: for the artistry of re-creating old form and for being the author of new content demanded by the form. Personally, I see good formal and, more often, bad formal translations, good free-verse and, more often, pedestrian free-verse translations, all with varying degrees of fidelity to content. Each age has its preferred methods. As a reader I am happy when the translator gets me to Rome and all its alleys and beautiful monuments. The roads are part of the journey. But best is to enjoy Rome. THE TRANSLATOR AS COURIER OF GOD

Having granted the author the divine position of sun, let us turn at once to the reflecting light of the interpreting translator. Because the meaning of a poem resides in its form as well as its content, the translation fails if the poet translator ignores or fails to find an equivalently effective form. There are directions, which may or may not be followed, for creating the new form, and the reproduction of that form—terza rima, free verse, heroic couplets—obedient or not to the external sound and appearance of the original, is the test of genius. So that the task not be mechanical, the translator must be inspired, must assume the original experience, make content his or her own, in order to re-create and transform that experience naturally into its interlingual formal equivalent. Then, to use Pushkin's definition, the translator is "the courier of the human spirit." The original couriers were angels, bearing God's word. There is no shame in carrying out God's creative labors, in being an inspired and extraordinary translator.

Problems and Parables To be praised for his generosity, as Pushkin has praised the translator, to give another poet life in his own language and to enjoy the reflected glory of that birth should satisfy Pushkin's hero of humanity. Yet to long for more is also human, and in truth the translator lives in a shadowy terrain except when lighted by a shared work. The temptations of the ego are always there. So the faith and fidelity of even the most humane angel of translation are tested. When first disobedience sets in, the voice of the carrier—inventive, free from any tyrannical script—may become indistinguishable from the words of the creator These events are recounted in the parable of the eloquent angel. REBELLION, OR PARABLE OF THE THEFT OF THE INK BOTTLE OF HEAVEN

Oliver Twist asked for more. Sappho complained, "I could not hold the sky in my two arms." Limitations displeased Oliver and Sappho. So too even the courier of the human spirit is at times given to dreaming about a more expansive profession. The angel has always served others as a go-between. His devotion has been to carry words, and he has access to arcane letters, exotic phrases, and crucial axioms. And unlike ordinary humans, he has been given wings to deliver writings. The words of others. When he is among Kabbalists he speeds to these secret friends a system of language to hold the universe together, a system of words permitting rotation of ink clouds, heavenly orchards of trees with hanging numbers, and the highest firmaments shaped like infinite pages. One day on his flights around the Americas he lies down on the gaucho pampas west of Córdoba and decides to smoke; he flies low over the Adriatic Sea and though poor himself, he sees all the rich journeys to Ithaca; then he heads north and snoops around Wall Street, drops in on a drug clubhouse on Sackett and Howard in Brooklyn, and down in Augusta, Georgia, overhears a recruit being hammered with one obscenity after another. For the first time he has opened his eyes and ears to the words of the world's fields and streets. He is not merely the carrier of words for others but has powers over them while they are in his possession and, after so much voyage, discovers that he has words of his own. With growing awareness of all the suddenly perceived conversations and information, he begins, tentatively, to write down passages about his experiences and thoughts. Some words come as if they had dropped into his spirit from the skies, and he takes them and possesses them. Though still bound to the formal messages he has agreed to deliver, he is emerging from lexical bondage. After all, he was given wings because he too is a tinkerer with words, a jeweler of language, though always faithful to the original hairspring of the movement. Now as one long prepared and full of courage, now as one who sees what Ithacas mean, the restless angel begins to take possession of his wings and flight.

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Introduction and General Issues Since this courier has been given wings, why must they be only for the benefit of his Master? Why limit himself to servitude? Why waste himself as an errand boy as if he has no mind of his own? After all he is special, with a trained tongue, and above all the skilled habit of making his message heard everywhere, up and down and around the planet. The courier angel dreams. In his dream he sees an unfriendly picture of himself as a passive beast down in the high grass receiving orders from on high. Yet as the dream goes on he concocts a scheme for flying straight upward, beyond Babel, higher than Indian La Paz or Tibetan Llasa, into the holy meadows where he will confront the paramount Creator: the deity who invented the original word to which he, his angel, has hitherto been thoughtlessly obedient. Then, after rising slowly toward wakefulness, he the courier will challenge God on his authorial terrain. Working in difficult solitude above violet rains or in some invisible dominion where few can even decipher God's tongue, the winged messenger deciphers the obscure language and begins to overhear his own voice. By his careful wording and rewording, he has endowed the message with his memory of the first morning on the globe. Those original, foreign, dry messages, through his translations, have become his speech and art. His art. An art in competition. Wait. Through his translations? What translations? That was in another life, long ago and forgotten. Competition? There is no agon with competitors for authority. The courier angel laughs, for he too is God the maker and speaker. Now, as single master, he confidently assumes ownership of his pen and its messages, of which he was always the author. His wings were for his own explorations. He was never a mere telegraph boy. Gulping coffee in his room, with his computer and electronic network, he sits on an S-shaped chair and sends his abundant words out to the world. He is filled with sly invention and mischief, and is the happiest angel in the world. Gone is oppressive modesty, gone is the guilt of his tongue. The old former courier, and now his children, have discovered that there is no shame in stealing the ink bottle of heaven.

Writing is an art, translation is a religious art, even when it is heretical and going its own way, since God of the sacred original is hanging over the shoulder of the translator, along with his critical angels, hunting for any shift in dogma, smelling out disobedience, assuming total authority. The inspired translator is a friend of disobedient Eve, a Gnostic who rejects imposed faith and believes her life is a return to the realm of light where both her soul and the soul of the original writer will merge and reside in a new, interpenetrating,

Problems and Parables permanent third text. The way to that text, however, is not through the eye of the Demiurge nor by obedience to his first created word. Pierre Grange, Dream Time and Other Earthly Signs Bless thee Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Translation as Dream, or Parable of the Dreaming Scrivener In The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud writes, "When the work of interpretation is completed we perceive that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish" (154). But since the wish often harbors forbidden thoughts and feelings, the work of the dreamer is to transform the latent or hidden content of the wish, to disguise it in symbols in order to make it more acceptable. The dreamer becomes a censor of his wish by a process of distortion and concealment and translates the dream into a system of symbols, into an allegory or parable, which, on the surface, disguises the wish, sometimes so thoroughly as to convey the opposite meaning. Thereby hot is cold, pleasure pain, joy sorrow, lust chastity. The author of the secret dream knows the disguise and its purposes. Or rather, one agent of the unconscious mind is conscious of those devices to obscure and sees through and behind them, interpreting their meaning. When awake that agent is Daniel the decipherer of dreams, the modern shrink, the self-reflexive mind examiner. But another agent of the unconscious fears the exposure of a fleshpot of wishes, and hence the elaborate symbolization of dream camouflage. A common example concerns oedipal longings, which cannot be revealed or acknowledged by the more respectable agent in the dreamer. Hence, the oedipal desire is drastically distorted and concealed, as in Oedipus Rex, in myth The writer-translator is also a dreamer. There are principally three figures who perform translation. The most recognized type is the individual writer who renders a single earlier work into a new language. Even among these clear re-creators are writers like Pope, who dream their work to be original creation. Then there is the author who borrows and adapts the idea or story of an earlier writer to create a new, original work. Dryden, Cavafy, or Eco may be happy to make their thefts visible but they will not tolerate adaptation's stigma. The third figure is the writer who translates a work representing an entire people or religion. This translator works not for personal fame but in the service and for the glory of that people or religion. Composers of religious books translate traditional stories and events from other cultures and subsume them into a new canon. Witnesses who report happenings as miracles, historians who conceal or transform facts to their opposites so as to

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Introduction and General Issues satisfy a dreamwish for grandeur, and the makers, gatherers, and editors of myth all produce wondrous lies for the common good, for the cause of their people or their religion. These composers and translators of religious works are the great dreamers of literature. They dream of speaking in the voice of God. In their compositions they utter God's words, fulfilling that dreamwish. Ceasing to be servants of God's word, they become the word incarnate. They are God in their dreams. Like the ordinary night dreamer, the divine dreamer also has social taboos which must be disguised and presented in acceptable form. For the re-creator of religious texts, the taboo equivalent to unacceptable social and sexual desires of the ordinary dreamer is unoriginality. Such a blemish might wreck a nation, particularly when the source is a foreign culture or religion. Secularity and natural law are also enemies of metaphysical mystery, the supernatural, and the divine. Hence, as the ordinary dreamer conceals and transforms shameful wishes into elusive and respectable tales, the divine dreamer hides the shame of unoriginality, foreign ethnicity, or secularity by means of a process of fabulation. Through the created fable the translators fulfill their divine dream of national and religious wishes. A paradigm of elaborate concealment is the transmission of the primordial flood story from clay tablet to Hebrew scripture. The biblical Flood story was composed by the pious scrivener. Whatever the source—Gilgamesh or Sumerian cuneiforms—the priestly scribe of Genesis could not dream of letting that flood belong elsewhere. He reworded every clue of origin to make it Yahweh's deed and dreamed up local names and places for the story: Babylonian Ea became Yahweh, Mount Nizir became Mount Ararat, and Utnapishtim became Noah. By transforming foreign tale as glorious and original text, the scrivener of the Flood tale made translation dream.

In the beginning was the word and the word was translation, and with it God translated the heaven and the earth. But the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the word moved upon the face of the waters, translating the light from the darkness. Pierre Grange, "God the Eternal Translator," Dream Time and Other Earthly Signs

God, the Eternal Translator John informs us, 'Ev dpxtj % ó Xó-yos, "In the beginning was the word" (John 1:1). God created through the word. And what did God do with that word? With its utterance God translated divine sound into matter and being, thereby

Problems and Parables bringing the cosmos, the earth, and the earth's inhabitants, great and small, into temporal existence. Since clock time did not exist before this act of cosmic creation, of transforming significant noise into time and space, clearly the first act of translation in the history of the profession occurred with those sacred Hebrew words yehi or, "Let there be light." And just as the pious know that ultimately our souls will, on the day of our judgment, be translated back into heaven, so on that first day of creation God initiated and spoke the first sentence for the history of translation. Or did the history of translation begin as late as that first day? Although it is presumed in Western religions that God exists eternally, that is, long before he or she talked us and the earth and earthly time into being, in other theologies in the East and among Gnostics in the West God is self-created. But if God is self-created, and surely that act of self-creation occurred long before he or she turned to creating the world, such an act of translating himself—or more likely herself, if she is an early earth-mother goddess—into existence would again notably push back the beginnings of translation. God translated him- or herself—sometimes from a primeval nut or cone, sometimes from nothing—into him- or herself. But before God's Word could be uttered it had to be conceived—thought surely preceded word—and thought requires language, and language, even God's tongue, comes about from the many acts of translating the perceptual and conceptual data of consciousness into a language system. Therefore God has been eternally translating, changing precosmic data into thought, words, and the linguistic might out of which he uttered the commanding word to translate us into life. The process of translation is everywhere, on earth, in our minds, and in heaven; it is an essential activity of life itself. Fidelity must rank high among God's approved virtues in divine transformations and translations, but in the course of creating souls and bodies and translating them back into the stars of heaven, even Gods perfect translations always produce a new product, never a replication. There is always a difference. Even in the work of God the infinite dreamer. All important divinities have consistently engaged in metaphor, metáfora, never in faithful, literal, verbum-pro-verbo translation. After all, those gods who have survived have been artists, and their words, their bibles in all their languages, have the mark—if not the fact—of original creations.

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II History: H The Bible as :

Paradigm of Translation

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3

Prehistory of the Bible and Its Invisible Translations

A universality of the spirit was the response to the Babelean confusion. Octavio Paz, Traducción

Down from Babel with the Sundered Word of God The tower of Babel was built on the plain of Shinar by the early inhabitants of the earth in order to reach heaven.1 But for uninvited mortals to enter heaven was a sin. God saw danger from this trespassing herd, for "this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them" (Gen. 11:6). Heaven, after all, was vulnerable to human invasion, for the tower was lofty and heaven low. So Yahweh punished the intruding sons of Noah and Shem, and dispersed their word. The monolingual people of Babel, aspiring to make a name for themselves, were cast down along with their brick and bitumen structure. Then Yahweh confounded their lips, creating babel, a confusion of tongues, so that one person no longer understood a neighbor's words. Yahweh took the proper noun Babel (gate of God) and made it a common noun (tumult of tongues). The need for translation began with God's dissemination of the people with one tongue all over the earth. After the expulsion from Eden and the Flood, translation was initiated with the third diaspora, the Babelean linguistic dissemination, as an endeavor to return to that Edenic state when Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. Translation sought to regain the universality of that earthly knowledge that was ours before the fall, when we were a single people with a single tongue. God's dispersal offered an implicit injunction against that knowledge, yet at the same time it hurled humankind into the necessity of translation and the eventual restoration of that single tongue.2

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History Once the people had scattered, they needed a new way to follow Yahweh's words, and new words to follow. Later, after the crucifixion of Jesus, his disciples and their scribes carried his commandments to the peoples of the world. Jesus stole the fire of the word from Yahweh and his followers rekindled it through retelling and re-wording. That process of diaspora, verbal diaspora this time, we call translation. After Babel, translation of the holy word is a means of return to Yahweh's secret texts and those of Jesus. Those texts in various forms are now known as the Bible. The first of these new scriptures, the Latin language mirror of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, came to be called the Jerome Bible, or the Vulgate, meaning the word in the vulgar or lay language that the common people could understand. (Ironically, it came to be called the Vulgate only in the Renaissance, by which time Latin was rapidly losing any claim to being the language of the common people; the motive behind the by-then-false epithet of Vulgate was surely to belie the fact of its lost accessibility.) And it became sanctified as the sacred Scriptures. Yet as Latin became the erudite tongue of the master priests, they protected the Vulgate against unwanted dispersal by limiting its decipherment and censoring its rewording into the new vulgar languages (French, German, English, and the like). The Vulgate was forbidden, on pain of death, from becoming a true vulgate, and thereby kept from the ears of lay readers. In a word, the new Jerome Bible became old and was jealously guarded through injunctions against further vulgate translation. This instance of freezing biblical translation was not unique. Throughout ancient, medieval, and Renaissance history, the punishment for the sin of unapproved translation persisted, as each national group and religious sect perilously translated anew, determined its canon, and asserted dominion over rivals. So the Greek synoptic Gospels, derived from each other and from an earlier Semitic text, in fact constituted an attempt to usurp the affective word of God from the Hebrew Bible and the Jews, just as Jesus, through the drama of his human appearance and his agony, had usurped and diminished the role and authority of Yahweh, God of the Hebrew Bible, among his followers. Each new translation of the Bible, whether that of Jerome, Luther, or the scholars of King James, rebelliously attempts to retrieve and possess the lost word. In doing so, the translation assumes a new authority, endowing its created word with the glory and magnificence of the original—and indeed surpassing the "corrupt" original. In these translations—albeit of the holiest texts of the JudéoChristian world—the second text becomes the original. Yet despite the effort of secrecy by the priestly chosen to conceal meaning from the masses, despite the historical effort to limit publication of the Bible to the sacred, dead languages of old Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the force of those "little books" (as the word Bible, from Greek biblia means) and their relentless

Prehistory of the Bible translation has been such that they have entered into the literacy of all peoples on the globe. Consequently, the Bible, despite its terrible history of sectarian and national possessiveness, has undone the post-Babel edicts against universal understanding of God's word. Those edicts began as God's punishment for that arrogant assault on heaven. Now, the penance for the Babylonian venture is over. World translation into all tongues has returned the Bible to a single, unified readership, to the equivalent of pre-Babelean speech, when one universal word resided on each person's lip. God's word, unheard or unread because of that towering brick-and-bitumen monument in Babylon, has, through new interlingual retellings, regained voice and letter and, in the countless versions of the Bible, become the world's major paper monument to translation. Now, as a multilingual tower, the Bible is the polyglot Babel, and has annulled God's diaspora of the word.

There are means by which the linguistic genius of a nation defends itself against what is foreign by cunningly stealing from it as much as possible. Karl Vossler, The Spirit of Language in Civilization

Was Babel a Sumerian Ziggurat at Ur? The history of Bible translation is also the history of the Bible, including its prehistory, that is, the sources of its narration, poetry, and theology in Sumeria, Babylonia, and Egypt. Shinar, site of the tower of Babel, has been identified as Sumer, for example, and the Babel story finds a source in Sumerian legend, and the tower of Babel is convincingly thought to be a reminiscence of ziggurats at Ur and Khorsabad in Mesopotamia. These sources made their way through adaptation and translation—sometimes very close translation—into the Hebrew Bible, just as, similarly, translations of Semitic scripts and oral transmissions pervade the Greek Gospels. So the Bible, the most translated book in the world, is itself essentially a composite of many imitations, paraphrases, reword ings, reworkings, which is to say all those forms of translatio assumed under the general heading of translation. Here, however, the translatio is hidden, as if translatio were fransgressio (transgression), with the result that the BiWe is an unacknowledged and secret translation. Those hidden traditions from biblical prehistory enriched the Bible, increasing its universality. Our knowledge of that prehistory has dramatically increased with archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Israel, Anatolia, and Greece. Equally significant, our knowledge has grown not only by discovery of lost physical evidence of other cultures but through interpretation of abun-

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History dam, yet hitherto unrecognized, information already in the Scriptures about civilizations not previously associated with the Bible. A sure clue to a subscript from an earlier culture is the denunciation of a practice of worship or an alien god by later prophets. The castigation of the the worshipers of Baal by Moses, which will be discussed below, fits this category. Characteristic of all cultures is the obsession with purity and self-generation. So the inheritors denounce that part of the past which cannot be claimed as their own and eventually erase it, as never having existed at all. Readers of the Bible, for example, are in this manner led to understand that Elohim, God of the Jews, came into being uniquely for the Jews, as the sole god in the universe (sole yet implausibly above all other gods), with no precursors to help in his formation. Exemplified by the concealment of earlier gods in the formation of its Jewish deity, the Bible conceals throughout its universal dependence on traditional sources of Near Eastern regions. Later, devout Christian readers read the same Scriptures and warmed in the revelation that the same sole god came into being exclusively for the Christian population. Christians disguised and concealed their source just as the Jews had disguised and concealed theirs. In the instance of Christian concealment, the enormous act of distorting translation occurred initially not through a change in the letters of the text but, as in Pierre Menard's Qui/oie, through an act of reading the same text, a reading infused with special interpretation, aided by commentary, and determined by a strongly demanding social context. When Christian exegetes read the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, therefore, they read it as Christian prehistory. The material text lies unchanged but through the translation of active rereading its meaning alters profoundly. By guided reading, misreading, and rereading, the Jewish Bible became a Christian document. Here translatio as "movement" did not entail the physical movement between texts, since the letter of the Hebrew scripture was unchanged. It occurred not by changing scripts but by changing readings, by interpretation, by the appearance of new dragomen to reveal sacred truths. Specific alterations, however, took place in the text, in the Hebrew and Greek originals and in later standard translations, by another kind of translatio: the movement of addition, of bringing to and incorporating other information onto the page. Carrying physical commentary and annotation to the Scriptures, adding letters and words to the page, effectively changes the text by determining its interpretation. It influences the receiving reader's mind. Through rereading and reinterpretation, then, through the apparatuses for "correct understanding" inscribed on the margin or bottom of the page or before or after significant passages, the ever-mutating meaning of the original script was translated into a new work. In reality the reader's mind was translated in obedience to new historical circumstance. When the Jewish scriptures magically became

Prehistory of the Bible Christian (as if Confucian Analects had turned into Japanese kanji chronicles), the magic for this transformation lay in the controlled reading. Clearly, such reading comprises a singular and central form of translation. Each rereading (as well as each virgin reading) is an essential act of intralingual translation, a gathering of signifiers into a coherent field of significance. While the text will obviously yield different meanings when going from a Jewish to a Christian reader, even when there is no intention of altering meaning there will always be a difference; which is to say, no one escapes the contextual circumstances of training, knowledge, prejudices, and life when turning eyes to the page. We find that each culture rewrites, revises, rewords (inter- and intralingually) and often simply rereads earlier texts in order to gain national possession of them, to turn them into candidly original creations. The re in this listing, meaning "again," reflects the traditions and prehistory that normally these translation techniques zealously conceal. So it happened with Christian rereadings of Hebrew Scriptures. Later, with the formal translation of the entire Bible into other tongues, which included falsifying renditions, as we have observed (such as alteration of names of key figures in the New Testament), the ability to read exegetically became natural and inevitable. A thousand years of medieval interpretation shaped biblical reading in East and West, in Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, as saint, theologian, cardinal, or country priest willed it. In the history of Bible formation and its later translations, I focus now on biblical prehistory. In the West everything starts mainly with the Sumerians, if not the Egyptians (and, if we look hard, the East Indians). Noah Samuel Kramer of the University of Pennsylvania spent his life discovering and investigating Sumerian tablets in Turkish museums, translating and interpreting cuneiforms, and writing scholarly and popular books about the Sumerians. One of the commonly accepted sources for biblical thought is the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, from about the eighteenth century B.C., in which we find the probable source of at least fifty articles in the Mosaic laws, including the famous "eye-foran-eye" injunction. But Kramer found laws of the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu, who preceded Hammurabi, which contain similar versions of many of the laws. The Egyptians have proverbs in the hieroglyphs of the wise man Amenoem-ope from about 1400 B.C. which are sometimes virtually identical or parallel to many lines in the biblical Proverbs. In each case the Egyptian proverb records a genre of wisdom poetry lost to us today; the biblical proverb has a stronger, purely visual image: Better is bread when the heart is happy Than riches with sorrow. (Pritchard, Ancient Texts 422)

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History Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it. (Prov. 15:17)

And the Babylonians have a document called "Poem of the Righteous Sufferer" from about 2000 B.c. in which the good man Tabu-utul-bel is a ringer for the suffering and lamenting Job. The Bible, in all its complexity, was not born from the insularity of one isolated people but through sophisticated awareness of the knowledge and wisdom of the day. That awareness entered the Bible by way of translation, albeit disguised and secret, from the richness of ancient and diverse precursors. The Bible devoured everything it could from the past to become the scroll for a people and subsequently, through open, formal translation into other tongues of the world, the universal book.

When the Romans translated Greek poets into Latin they quickly replaced Greek names with what was contemporary and Roman. They seem to be asking us "should we not be allowed to breathe our soul into this dead body? for it is dead and how ugly are all things dead!"—they did not know the pleasures of the sense of history; what was past and foreign gave them grief and incited them, as Romans, to Roman conquest. Indeed one conquered, in those days, when translating—not only because history was left out; no, allusions to the present were added and, above all, the name of the original poet was rubbed out and replaced by one's own—there was no sense of thieving in this, but rather the best conscience of the Imperium Romanum. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" Translation carries the word in diverse ways. While ordinary secular retellings preserve and spread the original text and enhance the author, religious translation, with its mission to make originals, threatens the existence of both source text and its author. Pierre Grange, "The Strange Case of the Disappeared Author," Dream Time and Other Earthly Signs

Starting with Abraham of Ur DENIAL OF TRANSLATION IN THE MAKING OF THE GODS

Abraham (Abram) came from Ur, site of one of the great Sumerian ziggurats, and Ur is probably the area in Mesopotamia where the Jewish people

Prehistory of the Bible came from before migrating to Canaan. After the conquest of Ur and greater Sumer in ca. 2340 B.c. by Sargon, the Akkadian king, non-Semitic Sumerian and Semitic Akkadian cultures blended. When Abraham and his family left Ur for Canaan, Ur was no longer Sumerian, nor even ruled by its Semitic successors, the Akkadians, Elamites, and Assyrians, but had been occupied by Babylonians. The first dynasty of Babylonia was established by King Hammurabi (c. 17921750 B.C.), author of the famous code of laws. The Jews went to the land of Canaan with Abraham, and later were taken to Egypt, and when they returned to Canaan after exile in Egypt, they encountered the ancient Canaanite civilization. The people of Canaan, also identified as or related to Phoenicians and Ugaritians, gave the world our alphabet—known as the Canaanite or Phoenician or Old Semitic alphabet—from which both the Greek and Hebrew alphabets derived. The early Jewish tribes encountered the sanctuaries, deities, theologies, and practices of the Canaanites, which they absorbed and translated into something absolutely their own, or which, with rhetorical ardor, they claimed as their own. As we have seen, more often than not translation—whether of a culture or a text, of a god, a temple, or a scripture—denied or concealed through alteration of names. The existence of the earlier source is neglected, rejected, or suppressed and, out of apparent void, a fresh god, temple, or scripture appears self-created. Thus, translation historically denies itself in order to create originals. In sum, translation is frequently a historical process for creating originals. Among seminal préfigurations and borrowings emerges the God of the Jews. This god starts as Canaanite El who becomes biblical Elohim, plural of El, meaning "gods." The question of Elohim and God's explicit plurality is often excused as a convention implying the royal "we" or simply "majesty." Borges calls God's plurality to our attention, observing: "In the beginning, God was the Gods (Elohim), a plural which some call the plural of majesty and others the plural of plenitude; some have thought they noted an echo of earlier polytheisms or a premonition of the doctrine, declared at Nicaea, that God is One and is Three. Elohirn takes a single verb: the first verse of the Old Testament says literally: In the beginning the Gods created (singular) the heaven and the earth" ("From Someone to Nobody" 146). The very first line of the Bible, "bereshit bara 'elohim 'et ha-shamayim ve-et ha-'arets," is literally "In the beginning created Gods the heaven and the earth." However, by using the singular verb bara (created) with the plural noun elohim (gods), the etymological origin is suppressed and the actual grammatical form of gods is disguised in the Hebrew and in all translations from the Hebrew. The tenet of monotheism hangs, in the first line of the Bible, on the mistranslation of ¿lohim, which conceals the declaration's historically implicit polytheistic meaning. The conceptual notion in Hebrew of Elohim as one rather than multiple gods is contrived by a verb.3

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History Where else do we find El? El was the chief deity of the earlier Canaanite religion, as described in Ugaritic texts found in 1929 near the temple of Baal at Ugarit, now called Ras Shamra, in northwest Syria, where an ancient Ugaritic community lived in what was then a major Canaanite city-state. In keeping with the process of adaptation and translation of earlier religious traditions into Judaism, El as well as his offspring Baal, nature gods for the Canaanites, also appear in the Bible as names for God. We therefore have a confusion of interchangeable biblical names: El, Elohim, and Baal Among its many tricks and faces, translation is divine reincarnation, a way of reincarnating into biblical figures the deities of the Canaanites, and even of the Sumerians and Babylonians who gave their gods, under changing alibis, to the peoples of the Near East, including the Jews and the Greeks. We seem to see Baal everywhere in the Bible, both by name and by the high places associated with his adoration. For example, the god Baal-zebul (1 Kings 1:2) is probably the Canaanite Baal of the Ugaritic texts. Baal's animal symbol was the bull, the same golden calf that Aaron made in the desert (Exod. 32:4). The traditional site for Baal worship was at a high place, on a hill or upon a monumental structure. The earlier Sumerians, who are said to have come from the hills, worshiped hill gods on high places they built. In keeping with this practice, the Babylonians (contemporary with the Canaanites) also worshiped at high places, and in the first book of Kings we read that Solomon "sacrificed and burnt incense at the high places" (3:3), one of many references to a high sanctuary in the Bible, which implies the persistence of Baal worship. The triumph of Elohim (or Yahweh) over Baal is recounted by the early prophet Elijah. The banishment of Baal worship occurs after its proscription in Deuteronomy, a book which appears early in the canon but which in reality was written late, after the Deuteronomic Reform of 621 B.C. Baal, as Beelzebub (from Baal-zebul\ then becomes associated with the Devil. And so later compilers of the Bible translate one of God's other incarnations into an enemy deity, Beelzebub, the powerful demon lurking in deserts and, ironically, low places. In these metamorphoses, we witness the enigma of monotheism—it persistently drifts toward polytheism and then reasserts itself with a return to the one God-creator. God's oneness in the Judéo-Christian tradition is clear through his ultimate dominion over his precursor Baal, although his translation into the trinity, and particularly into the powerful figure of his earthly guise, Jesus, who will in Christian myth even descend to harrow Hell and its inhabitants, picks up again on the tug and flow of mono- and polytheistic energies surrounding "the Lord who is One" (Adonai ehad). The fierce denial and suppression of ancestors, of fathers, of earlier gods by the latest incarnation of them, is a familiar pattern in religion, politics, and literature. Here, in the religious politics of biblical literature, the supremacy of Elohim over Baal perfectly displays the necessary oedipal murder of the earlier

Prehistory of the Bible father god. Often commented upon are the iconic parallels of the central Jewish vision of Elohim and Moses, with similar depictions of God and man in Babylonia and Canaan. We have, magnificent on a Ras Shamra stele, the Canaanite god El (later to be Baal and Elohim), who appears with the king of Ugarit. Both the gods and their leader interpreters give way to later figures as El moves to Baal and Elohim and Moses, leader of the Jews, to Jesus and Paul, leaders of apostate Jews. The father's removal or death makes way for the triumphant son. Along with El is his consort Ashtoreth, seagoddess of fruitfulness, whose worship at Canaanite shrines was denounced by the prophets for its lewdness. She is Akkadian Ishtar of the Babylonians and of the Moabite Stone, Sumerian Enheduanna, and Astarte-Aphrodite of the Greeks. Ashtoreths name appears recurrently as Ashteroth in the Bible. Not only are earlier gods and fathers removed as they pass, through nametranslation, into original biblical figures, but even the practice of sacrifice of the first born, which we see in Genesis 22 when Abraham tries to offer his son, Isaac, to Yahweh, probably has an Egyptian origin. The Zoroastrian concept of binary deities and attributes has a fundamental presence in Jewish eschatology, specifically because of the Jewish contact with Persia during the Exile and succeeding Persian suzerainty over Israel. So the Persian god of light and goodness and god of darkness and evil are found in the biblical God and Satan. Zoroastrianism affected not only the earliest origins of Jewish theology but also those of Christianity, appearing fascinatingly in the Christmas episode in chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew, in the persons of the Zoroastrian holy men, the Magi. The Three Magi make a colorful and memorable appearance in the story of Jesus* birth. In keeping with the redaction and translation practices common to the Greek Scriptures of disguising religious elements which did not originate with Christian mythology, the Magi are often referred to euphemistically as the Three Wise Men. In fact these Magi were neither wise men nor predominantly magicians (though our European word for magician comes through Latin magas from Greek magos and Old Persian magav or magus and refers to their purported powers to cast spells and incantations) but rather Persian priests, of Median origin, and specifically Zoroastrian priests. Their description as the wise men who came to Jerusalem to do homage to the infant Jesus conceals the intrusion of a foreign religion into the Christmas story. The translation of the Persian priest-magician into a proto-Christian wise man is likewise seminal in the creation of the Christ figure, another magician or miracle maker Translation of a figura or type, it should be emphasized, may produce a likeness as often as an opposition, and so in the Christ or other messianic or magic-making figures, as noted earlier, what is perceived as miracle by some is merely sleight-of-hand magic to others. The marvelous confusion of the Gnostics, who saw Jesus in divine ways—as a magician or a man of miracles, as a man of

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History suffering, or as a mere simulacrum on the Cross laughing at his would-be tormentors—suggests the extent of the fluid, ever-changing notion and face of God. Each rival sect—Canaanite, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic—translated not only the writings about but the very figure of God into the spiritual embodiment of its beliefs. We see then that among the followers of religion, every assertion of truth, preeminence, and uniqueness becomes the privilege of each rival religious entity. Hence, translation serves, in divine matters, not as an instrument for linguistic fidelity or historical accuracy but rather as a way of hiding likenesses in proving or disproving the truth and import of an earlier text, praising or condemning the ancestral message, or, as with the Bible, revealing or concealing a prehistory. Translation denies itself. Since it popularly signifies unoriginality it is taboo for religious authors—and even more so for gods. Any authentic self-esteeming god or goddess must deny being born of translation. What powers would remain were it known that a century earlier a divinity was working for another civilization? Yet gods do change names from culture to culture, from religion to religion, and from period to period of that religion. Ancient and modern gods are forever translating themselves elsewhere, taking themselves to new sects and nations. Self-translation is a mark of divine, universal power. Of course skeptics say that gods do not translate themselves to different peoples but that the people, having invented their deities, identify them as Jews, Babylonians, Ethiopians, Hindus, or Vikings. As far back as the sixth century B.C. Xenophanes of Colophon made caustic remarks about the making of the world's gods. While the pre-Socratic philosopher mocked Pythagoras for his belief in transmigration of souls (which, he said, could lead to the translation of Pythagoras' soul into a dog being thrashed in the street), Xenophanes' universal relativism also made him speculate about the constant translation and retranslation of gods among humans according to each nationality and among beasts (to rub it in) according to each animal species. In his poem "The Making of Gods" Xenophanes says: Man made his gods, and furnished them with his own body, voice and garments. If a horse or lion or a slow ox had agile hands for paint and sculpture, the horse would make his god a horse, the ox would sculpt an ox. Our gods have flat noses and black skins, say the Ethiopians. The Thracians say our gods have red hair and hazel eyes. (Barnstone, Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets 131)

Prehistory of the Bible In keeping with deistic relativism, we have witnessed how El changes to Elohim or Baal to Baal-zebul to Beelzebub. This translation of proper names reflects a deeper translation of story and belief from culture to culture, which can also be expressed as the transcultural translation of narrative and conceptual traditions The transformation of the god's countenance, name, and powers takes place inevitably as powerful armies, merchants, and exiles move about, carrying and adapting their religions to new circumstance. But, in deep paradox, the physical and spiritual movement of gods is accompanied by a denial of their translation. Signs of an earlier incarnation are eradicated so that the new divinity will have the authority and prestige of national originality. So Baal's descent from supreme Canaanite god to the biblical devil Beelzebub reflects verbally not only Baal being down and out in his new London and Paris setting but also quashes any suggestion of his original divinity. If at one time Baal or El had a name interchangeable with Elohim, the epithet for the supreme Jewish godhead, his translation into Beelzebub reveals not only hard times for Baal in Judah and Israel but a denial that Baal ever had anything to do with the formation of Elohim or Yahweh. Baal and his alibis were finally translated into nothingness, expelled from the Jewish family. With all this translation sleight of hand, the people and God of the biblical flood story appear ahistorically, like God himself, self-created, without record of an earlier existence in Babylonia where a people had once lived and worshiped on high, and had taken over the Sumerian and Babylonian flood memory as their own. Here we have translation as denial of translation or translation as disguise, the commonest political action for denying ancestry, national existence, and identity. Political leaders change names of countries, provinces, peoples, and places all the time for the purpose of such denial. From antiquity to the present, from Tibet and Burma to Kuwait and Cambodia, new Caesars translate peoples and their memories away. BREAKING THE CODE WITH STONE DICTIONARIES, OR WHO WROTE BEFORE MOSES?

The Bible, as we have seen, is filled with proper nouns, descriptions of religious and cultural practices, and narrations that reveal its prehistory. These suggestions of ancestry are contained in the book itself. But where are the actual sources, what are their names, and how significant were they in the tradition of imitation, borrowing, and close translation that led to the biblical scriptures? The first great key to the actual texts that were transformed into biblical story came with the archaeological discovery of the Behistun carvings and the Rosetta Stone, those dictionaries of antiquity with texts in Mesopotamian cuneiform and in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Coptic alphabet, and Greek. To this list, if we add the Moabite Stone of the earliest Phoenician writing, the Dead Sea

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History Scrolls, and the Nag Hammadi Gnostic library, the literature and record of the past has, through buried treasure, cave scroll, and monument inscription, come alive. As a consequence of the discoveries of the past two centuries, beginning with that of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, we now have access to Sumerian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Hittite, and Egyptian documents. From these many prebiblical texts—such as the seventh-century B.C. bilingual Akkadian / Sumerian hymn to the moon god Sin—it is clear that in Mesopotamia translation of religious scriptures was common. But in the Greco-Roman world, apart from the one major work, the oriental Hebrew Bible that became the Greek Septuagint, such translation practice remains unknown. Although the notion of literary translation in the West was invented by the Romans, and the West has taken its early instructions from them, Rome confined itself to translation from Greek into Latin. Rome, with all its libraries and literati, linguists and grammarians, has given us virtually no cultural reference to the great Near East where its armies battled. Its ethnocentricity, favored by ignorance of the exotic tongues and lack of curiosity about those civilizations, delayed our discovery of hidden translation for hundreds of years. Soon after Napoleon s invasion of Egypt, however, French officers discovered a block of basalt in the town of Rosetta, with three registers of inscriptions: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Coptic (Ancient Egyptian written in a demotic alphabet derived from both Greek and cursive hieroglyphic writing—the hieratic script), and classical Greek. This forty-five by twenty-eight inch stone was called, after the town where it was found, the Rosetta Stone. It was placed in the British Museum. After some years the English scholar Thomas Young deciphered the name of Ptolemy on it. Then the French scholar François Champollion undertook its study, believing that the stone's trilingual inscriptions were versions of a single message. If he was correct, and he was able to decipher the top register, in hieroglyphics, he would have a dictionary to the rest of the stone. Champollion spent his life breaking the hieroglyphic code and translating the texts. He gave the world a lost language, and thereby access to all the early inscriptions and scrolls of Egypt. The Sumerians probably invented picture writing, that is, characters representing meaning rather than sound, which they usually inscribed with a stylus in wedge-shaped impressions on baked clay tablets, producing cuneiforms. A pictographic system requires a great many different characters. This system also served the Hittites, the Persians, and the Babylonians. Eventually, as had happened in Egypt, the Babylonian pictograms were replaced by ideograms that could represent more objects and ideas, and finally the system was simplified into an alphabetic script, which was easier to master and could incorporate an unlimited vocabulary.

Prehistory of the Bible We owe our ability to break the code of Babylonian cuneiforms to the extravagant vanity of Darius, king of Persia. While the Pharaohs built pyramids as monuments to their immortality, Darius in 516 B.c. insured his own posterity by having the record of his many victories chiseled several hundred feet above the ground on the smooth side of the rocks of Behistun near Kermanbshah in Persia. And he wished the message to go beyond the Farsi-speaking Persians. Aware of the babel of tongues among surrounding nations, he constructed his language tower with texts in three languages: Old Persian, Susian (Median or Elamite), and Babylonian. For those who might not decipher the cuneiforms he had the story of conquest and vengeance chiseled in large relief panels. Darius may be the first living being to give us both interlingual and intersemiotic translation in one massive display. Yet Darius' words eventually became mere decoration to the pictures for soon after their inscription cuneiform gave way to cursive phonetic scripts and probably no one for almost two and a half millennia could read them. Darius' redeemer was Henry C Rawlinson, a young British army officer stationed in Persia, whose scholarship matched his climbing skills. The inscriptions were 150 feet above the ground. Somehow he scaled the cliff and suspended himself in such a way as to copy the three texts. In 1846 he published his translation of the Persian cuneiforms. Then, working with the tablets that Austen Henry Layard had brought to the British Museum from his earlier excavation of the palace of Nineveh, Rawlinson went on to decipher the Babylonian cuneiforms and to write a study of Babylonian grammar. Eleven years later he published his results in Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. He showed that Babylonian was a Semitic language, very close to Hebrew, and in giving us both the Persian and Babylonian translations provided us with a dictionary key to antiquity, its epic literature and ordinary documents. One of the great literary works of the ancient world is the story of Gilgamesh and his teacher Utnapishtim, a man whom the authors of the Bible probably translated into Noah. WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE, OR DID NOAH FIRST GET WET IN A BABYLONIAN FLOOD?

In the nineteenth century European archaeologists dug up civilizations in Mesopotamia, uncovered palaces and tablet libraries of Babylonia and Assyria, and removed layers of flood earth under temple, ziggurat, and tomb, revealing physical evidence of a great flood in that land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. In addition to the archaeological proof of a vast deluge in the ancient Near East there was a corollary literature of flood narration. On those clay tablets scholars were able to read an account of that flood in prebiblical scriptures. The cardinal discovery relating to events from the prehistory of the Bible was the uncovering of the great palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in 1854 by Hor-

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History muzd Rassam. Ashurbanipal, who ruled Assyria from 668 to 626 B.c., collected a vast library of Babylonian literature, and, as the first known patron of translation, "he sent out his servants to search the archives of the ancient of learning in Babylon, Uruk, and Nippur, and to copy and translate into the contemporary Akkadian Semitic those texts which were in the older Sumerian language of Mesopotamia" (Sandars, Gilgamesh 8). Among the 20,000-25,000 clay tablets in his treasury were treatises on philosophy, religion, magic, mathematics, and astronomy, enough to satisfy the thirst of any desert detective for keys to the universe and parables of eternity. These texts were "written down according to the original and collated in the palace of Assurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria" (Gilgamesh 8). Then, as if one of Jorge Luis Borges' characters, sent into the wilderness to find the sect of the Phoenix or God's script under a burning pyramid, had completed his mission, in 1872 a man named Smith, working quietly in the British Museum, deciphered one of those 25,000 tablets, the eleventh of twelve containing the Assyrian recension of an epic, and so came upon the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh and the story of a great flood. It was an earlier, parallel account to the story of the Flood appearing in chapters 6 through 9 of Genesis. George Smith published a synopsis of the Gilgamesh story, with emphasis on the flood, in his Chaldean Account of the Deluge. He later discovered missing tablets that continued the description of the flood in Mesopotamia. Smith had speculated that Gilgamesh was itself a translation from a much earlier epic. Some years later the American John Punnet Peters was excavating at Nippur (18881889) and found another library of 30,000-40,000 tablets, which contained, as Smith had predicted, a much older Sumerian version of the Gilgamesh cycle. Since then Gilgamesh has been found sailing the rivers and seas of the Near East in other versions, in Indo-European Hittite, Hurrian, and Canaanite. The latter, found in Megiddo in Israel, proves that an earlier Gilgamesh existed in the Palestinian backyard before the flood story was transcribed into Hebrew. All the essential features of the Genesis Flood story are in the Babylonian epic. Because of pervasive wickedness, the water god Ea devises a catastrophic punishment: an immense inundation to cover the flat earth and drown every one of its human and animal inhabitants, except for one. Ea finds a good man, Utnapishtim, the biblical Noah, whom he forewarns and provides with a means of survival. So Utnapishtim builds an ark, caulks it within and without with pitch, and gathers his family and animals from every species. The rains come, and after seven days the Babylonian Noah sights land. Seven days later he sends forth three birds, a dove, a swallow, and a raven. Two come back but the raven, the third bird, lands on Mount Nisir, where the ark eventually comes to rest. The human and animal passengers of the ark disembark onto the mountain top and offer a sacrifice to the gods who have saved them. Gilgamesh listens to the story from the lips of Utnapishtim himself, the first new man.

Prehistory of the Bible The Babylonian and biblical accounts are disarmingly similar. Both Utnapishtim and Noah caulk their ship with pitch, though Utnapishtim uses asphalt as well as pitch. The Babylonian sends out three birds, a dove, a swallow, and a raven, and Noah two, a raven and a dove. After leaving the ship, which has come to rest on a mountaintop, each offers a sacrifice for their deliverance, and in each case the deity smells the sweet savor (accepts the offering). The earlier Sumerian version from Nippur matches the details of Genesis as well in some instances, but in general the Babylonian story, closer in time, has more areas of agreement. At Wesleyan University where I taught a section of a world literature course in 1958, students were given the following passage to identify. Despite the reference to "gods," without exception the students identified the passage as the Bible account of Noah and the ark: When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let go. She flew away, but finding no resting-place she returned. Then I loosed a swallow, and she flew away but finding no resting-place she returned. I loosed a raven, she saw that the waters had retreated, she ate, she flew around, she cawed, and she did not come back. Then I threw everything open to the four winds, I made a sacrifice and poured out a libation on the mountain top. . . . When the gods smelled the sweet savour, they gathered like flies over the sacrifice. (Sanders, Gilgamesh 109) In fact, the Bible version reads: At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, and sent forth a raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; but the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put forth his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him. He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came back to him in the evening, and lo, in her mouth a freshly plucked olive leaf. . Then Noah . . . offered burnt offerings on the altar And . . the LORD smelled the pleasing odor. (Gen. 8:6-11; 20-21) The biblical Flood story is dependent upon an earlier source. Although the Babylonian version in Gilgamesh precedes the composition of Genesis, it is impossible to determine whether Noah's ark is a version of that famous eleventh Babylonian tablet or both are versions of an earlier source. Because of the priority of Chaldean documents and the manifold influence of Babylonia on Jewish myth and theology, the dependence of Genesis Noah on this Gilgamesh sea captain is likely. After much discussion, Alexander Heidel concludes, "The most widely accepted explanation today is ... that the biblical account is based on Babylonian material" (Gilgamesh Epic 261). What is certain is that whether directly related to each other or not, the odysseys of Noah and Utnapishtim ultimately hark back

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History to a traditional Sumerian flood story, probably from the fourth millennium, and based on a real terrestrial deluge. Tablets were not the only things discovered in recent excavations. C. Leonard Woolley, directing a joint expedition of people from the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, began in 1927 to dig at Ur and uncovered a Sumerian temple and tombs in a metropolis dating from about 3300 B.C., including a huge death pit containing the remains of the Sumerian King Mes-kalanvdug and Queen Shub-ad, to which 1 shall return shortly. After encountering the royal tombs at forty feet, Woolley and his men kept digging further down through the rubbish of history: implements, ceramics, tablets, small art objects. Then they found a water-made stratum, which they assumed was the prehistoric bed of the Persian Gulf that had once covered the lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers and indeed the whole area of ancient Babylonia. But after digging another eight feet the leftovers of human history began again, although now the objects, including Neolithic implements, were very different, indicating a sharp break in the tradition producing them. As for the eight feet of clean, water-made clay, in which remains of fish, river sand, and shells were embedded, here was proof of a gigantic inundation of the Euphrates, one which, like the volcanic eruption and covering of bronze-age Thera and the tidal waves that swamped Minoan Crete, almost eradicated an entire civilization. It did not wash away the Sumerian and conquering Akkadian cultures permanently for, as noted, archaeological remains were found for the next forty feet above the water line. But the remembrance of that awful inundation was recorded in the tales of the succeeding cultures. Soon after the discoveries at Ur, Stephen Langdon found at Kish, a Sumerian capital dating back to 5,000 B.C., another water stratum at the bottom of a shaft. When he had dug through the fresh-water shells and fish remains he found that the preflood debris of civilization continued again, including a nowfamous polychromatic Sumerian head. Here was another proof of the great flood. Woolley's expedition found more than physical evidence of a historical deluge. The excavation of the tomb of King Mes-kalam-dug and Queen Shub-ad, who were buried along with many attendant victims who were killed in order to accompany their royal masters in the afterlife, as was also done in China, India, and Egypt, produced many other links to the Bible. The household gods and other objects found in the tombs suggest a direct link between the practice of human sacrifice in Sumer and in Israel during the pre-Exilic period of the Jews. These ritual objects included rams in a thicket, identical to the one in the biblical tale of Abraham's abortive sacrifice (or murder) of Isaac. The existence of this tale in Genesis of intended, but thwarted, human sacrifice poses interesting questions of chronology, ethics, and later recension of the text. Although Genesis is the first book of the Bible, it was composed after the books of the prophets. Now the later prophets vigorously condemn human sacrifice. It is reasonable to speculate that the writers of Genesis, in a time when

Prehistory of the Bible human sacrifice was unacceptable, shaped the story so that Isaac was spared. There was probably an intralingual translation of the earlier oral or written Hebrew versions. As for the much earlier sources of the tale, the details of Abraham's intention in disinheriting his adopted slave, Eliezer, in favor of his natural son, Isaac, have an uncanny resemblance to the scene portrayed in Babylonian tablets found at Nuzu, suggesting a very close translation of those practices in early Jewish life and legend. Woolley and his men also discovered at Ur the great, two hundred foot ziggurat built by Ur-Nammu, which is generally thought to be the physical model for the linguistic dream of biblical Babel (after which translation became a necessity). The ziggurat was also, as we have seen, the religious sanctuary that came down to us through Sumerian, Babylonian, and Canaanite religious worship to be translated in the Bible.4 When Sir Arthur Evans at the end of the nineteenth century discovered the elaborate Minoan ruins at Knossos, including the bull-throne in an extensive underground labyrinth palace, and when Heinrich Schliemann dug up the walls of ancient Troy in western Turkey, they confirmed that there was a historical basis to Greek legend and Homeric epic. From the Woolley and Langdon expeditions we have something more. The excavations provide not only archaeological proof of the source of a legend in one culture but physical evidence at Sumerian Ur and Kish of a cataclysmic phenomenon that initiated a literature of remembrance carried from the tablets of Babylonian Nippur to the Gilgamesh story of Nineveh, and that, after incalculable incarnations in lost documents, found its way into Jewish Genesis to become one of the major myths of the modern world In his pioneering study The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Northrop Frye dismisses the value of actual historical sources for myth on the grounds that historical truth is a distracting intrusion in what the Bible means and recognizes. He writes, "All explanations are an ersatz form of evidence, and evidence implies a criterion of truth external to the Bible which the Bible itself does not recognize" (44). At the same time Frye does acknowledge the evidence of earlier mythos and elaborates on the Deluge as an event that annuls the Creation, bringing about a return to Chaos, and he relates it to the Babylonian creation hymn Enuma élis in which salt waters threaten the gods with destruction. Further, he relates the story of the Deluge to the crossing of the Red Sea, both suggesting water imagery and the sacrament of baptism. After playing with the old puzzle of what happened to the fish in the Deluge, Frye, following the manner of the enlightened exegete, observes how the New Testament finds a Christian underlay to events in the Old Testament: "Hence both Noah's flood (I Peter 3:21) and the Red Sea crossing (I Corinthians 10:2) are regarded in the New Testament as types of the sacrament of baptism, where the one being baptized is symbolically drowned in the old world and awakens to a new world on the opposite shore. Similarly, there is a

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History dimension of the symbolism in which the redeemed, after the apocalypse, are able to live in the water of life, as they now live in the air" (147). For the history of religion and myth, the flood story, as a demonic image of vengeance and destruction or a watery fount of salvation, offers essential messages within and from culture to culture. For the history of translation, the flood myth offers myriad aspects of the translation process. A probable event years later becomes literature. This transformation from event to tale is of course at the heart of all literary creation and of the act of writing, which involves a translation of external reality into words. Conventional translation enters into the equation as the tale is repeated from culture to culture, language to language. But, following the demands of vain nationalist tradition, translation alters names and facts so as to transform an event in the history of one nation into that of another. Hence, disguisement, religio-political censorship, and proselytizing redaction, as seen throughout the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures, comprise essential manifestations and functions of translation. Just as the flood changes names while passing through the shaping and censoring filter of translation, so translation provides a similar but critical national function when, in literal translatio, it carries gods and their religions from worshiping nation to worshiping nation.

4

History of the Bible and Its Flagrant Translations

The "little Asian books" of the Bible, in Near East Hebrew and Greek, became the major book of the Western world. In the voyage they did not lose their Asian and Hellenized Jewish nature but merged it, secretly, into our formal Euro-American religions and cultures. A return to source, to original scriptures, inevitably returns us to Asian wisemen, their sky gods become one, then three, and to a Hellenized Jew, John the Evangelist, who with Greek reason and old-covenant fervor translated the messiah Veshua into the mangod of the West. Pierre Grange, Dream Time and Other Earthly Signs

The Naming of the "Little Books" of the Bible, or What a Shame We Call Those Books the Old and New Testaments Bible in English is from Latin biblia, meaning "little books," taken over from Greek biblia, "books," the plural of biblion, from byblos, an Egyptian loan word meaning "papyrus roll," reflecting the holy scrolls (not of papyrus, however, but of smooth animal skin) on which the Hebrew text was first recorded as strings of consonants not yet divided into single words. The word bible describes a large book containing sacred scriptures that diverse religions and sects hold to be their own. Although the world recognizes one special book of scriptures, called in English the Bible and an equivalent word in other languages, the book is unstable, for although the Bible's appellation is constant, not only does its text and meaning change according to translation (true of any translated classic) but its contents and subnames vary according to denomination. Religious scholars and partisans disagree about what constitutes those little books and into what critical divisions they fall. They also debate the 153

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History correctness of both the original Hebrew scriptures and the Greek gospels, those translations highly redacted for religio-political reasons from the lost Semitic documents. Before commenting on the history of Bible translation, we must first see what the Bible is and offer an impartial terminology for referring to its divisions and titles that will not carry the bias of earlier ages. For the Jews the Bible is the Hebrew Bible and includes no added Greek scriptures. But for those Jews who accepted the testament of Jeshua as the long awaited Jewish Messiah, later called Jewish Christians and then simply Christians, new scriptures needed to be added to the Bible. Hence, for the emerging Christians the Hebrew Bible became the Old Testament. For Jews the Hebrew Bible has remained simply the Bible, or the Book, as in "the people of the Book." The words Old Testament and New Testament are late Christian labeling divisions of the Bible and reflect a Christian perspective. Alas, they have come to reflect a distortion similar to the evasion I discussed earlier, of Jews as Hebrews or Israelites in the Hebrew Scriptures but as Jews in the Greek Scriptures. Jews and their Scriptures are seen from an outside, normally adversarial, perspective. The word testament in Old Testament is inappropriate, for the Bible was conceived of as a testament not by Jews but by later Latinizing Christians, who took both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Scriptures as their own, as two testaments of the marriage-union between God /Jesus and his people. And the meaning of the word testament in English, Latin, and the vernacular languages is also wrong, because it is based on a mistranslation. In the Greek Scriptures there is a division of'the entire Christian Bible into palaia diatheke and kaine diatheke, meaning "old covenant" and "new covenant." The word diatheke (covenant) was mistranslated into Latin as testamentum (testament), hence Vetus Testamentum and Novum Testamentum, and subsequently into English as "Old Testament" and "New Testament." So Greek diatheke, derived from Hebrew berith, meaning "covenant," through incorrect Latin translation led to "testament" in all vernacular tongues. The same translation error persists also in the Authorized Version; see, for example, Hebrews 9:20, when after Moses has given the law to Israel, sacrificed animals, and sprinkled their blood, the English text reads, "this is the blood of the testament which God hath enjoined unto you." To speak of the blood of the testament rather than the blood of the covenant is absurd, if not a travesty, but this translation error occurred because the revisers of the version consistently translated diathehe as "testament" rather than "covenant," surely with testamentum in mind. Nevertheless, the same translators report Moses as saying, "Behold the blood of the covenant" (Exod. 24:8). The application of the title Testament, or originally covenant, to the Hebrew Bible and Greek Scriptures is said to be based on the passage in Mark, relating the origin of Holy Communion, where on the evening before his death Jesus celebrates the Jewish Passover (the Last Supper) with his disciples. I cite the

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emendation and interpretation of the Greek text by F. F. Bruce in The Books and the Parchments, since his pages represent traditional thinking on Holy Communion and its relation to the "new" covenant. After Jesus gives his fellow rabbis a cup of wine, we read in Bruce's emended version of the passage from Mark, "This is my blood of the (new) covenant, which is shed for so many" (76). Bruce informs us that "(new)" reflects Jesus' own new covenant as opposed to Moses* old covenant, which has been discredited because of the failure of "the people of Israel" to keep their side of the covenant. (This same assertion of the Jews' failure to keep the covenant was made as recently as 15 August 1989 in a public statement by Pope John Paul U on a youth mission to Spain.) Not only have the Jews failed to keep their pact with God but God himself apparently negotiated a faulty agreement; yet from the failures of the first, God has prepared a successful second, foolproof covenant: "But although the people of Israel failed to keep their side of the covenant, the God of Israel continued to keep His. And the first covenant, inadequate though it was, was used by Him to prepare the way for another covenant which should replace the first and succeed where it failed" (77). As part of the common assertion of the superiority of the New Testament over the Old Testament, and of the New Testament God over the Old Testament God, of new covenant over old covenant, and therefore of Christian over Jew, Bruce states, "For the superiority of the New Covenant lies partly in this, that those who enter into it receive into their own lives the life of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, a life which knows and desires the will of God and a power which is able to do it1' (Books and Parchments 77). This specific explanation of New Testament deriving from "(new) covenant" in Mark depends on the word new. But that word does not actually appear in Greek, TOÛTO eCTTlV TO

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