On the Art of Translation - Part II

An ardent reader of my blog has left me with a question concerning my last entry. She asks, "to what extent, then, would you say that the role of the translator is one of a plagiarist?" I thank her very much for this challenging question, and I will now offer my two-cents of wisdom.

I think the important point is to define what "plagiarism" is. By the commonly understood definition of plagiarism, it seems obvious that every translator plagiarizes, only in a different language. Thus if my assignment is to write an essay on 18th century China, and I "translate" someone else's essay from Chinese to English, without question I would be considered as a plagiarist. This view on "plagiarism" neglects a very important factor to the definition: a plagiarist must be someone who does not really know what he is talking about, and merely copy-and-paste someone else's work and take credit himself.

Given this business of "knowing what you are talking about", I think this is a good criteria in distinguishing the translator from the plagiarist. The knowledgeable translator is one who knows how both languages work. For the translator, while most passages are translatable (except for some insane literary or philosophical work like Being and Time or Faust), occasionally there are some expressions in one language simply does not translate to another language. Anybody who has fluent access to two or more languages will agree with me. Upon encountering these passages, the true translator will not translate expressions word-for-word; rather he will do something drastically different in order to communicate the same sense of language to the intended audience. For example, there is a chinese expression, when translated literally to English, will read as "slanted bowl huge rain" (I personally doubt if this is a correct literal translation). The plagiaristic translator will literally translate that (and perhaps justifying it as a metaphor: afterall, a slanted bowl implies pouring water). The true translator, on the other hand, I believe, will translate it as "raining cats and dogs". It is upon these instances one can tell just how much a translator is a plagiarist: if one reads any awkward expressions or sentence structures, one can almost readily conclude that the translator is a plagiarist.

Having no knowledge of the Greek language, I unfortunately have to make the assumption that one of the translations, Lattimore's, is the most accurate and close to Greek language, since it is line-for-line, and it is does not rhyme, giving the translator the most freedom. But here is an example:

Lattimore, at the end of Book IV, translates the following final couplet:
"For on that day many men of the Achaians and Trojans
lay sprawled in the dust face downward beside one another." (IV, 543-544)

This couplet, towards the end, is a bit awkward. Compare that to Way's translation:
"For many a man of Achaia and Troy on that wild day,
Outstretched on his face in the dust, by his foe in the death-peace lay." (IV, 543-544)

Or Fagles' translation:
"That day ranks of Trojans, ranks of Achaean fighters
sprawled there side-by-side, facedown in the dust." (IV, 629-630)

If Lattimore's translation is to be the standard, then 1) we have assumed Lattimore to be the plagiarist; 2) Fagle's translation is truly beautiful; 3) Way's translation is just terrible. In fact, I would not hesitate to call Way a plagiarist, for, if we take the rhyme ending away, his translation is also the same as Lattimore's. There is almost no "English characteristic" in Way's translation; but Fagles' translation resembles the typical English free verse line (the last line actually has ten syllables), with parallelisms on within each line and also within the couplet. Fagle's translation is definitely not plagiarism.

One might be wondering what Pope did with that last couplet. His, in fact, was nothing like the above three:
"So fought each host, with thirst of glory fir'd,
And crowds on crowds triumphantly expir'd." (IV, 636-637)

Now, one can accuse Pope of not translating but only adapting the text of Iliad. I, on the other hand, would defend Pope. I think Homer's sense of desolation of the tragically-spirited fighting is far better conveyed in Pope's words than any other translator's words. It is true that Pope really deviated from the text, but he is much closer to the spirit of the text: notice the rhyming words for this couplet - "fired" and "expired". They are exactly the opposite of one another in meaning, and hence the contrast deserves the most emphasis (and hence the rhyme). The image conveyed here is much more colourful and intense than the one painted by Fagles, and still more by Lattimore and Way. And indeed I think Homer in his Greek version would much rather end his Fourth Book with Pope's bang of powerful rhythms and rhymes than Way's pathetic whimper of poorly-constructed couplet (the word order is just awkward).

I hope this example makes clear of what I deemed to be an act of plagiarizing and an act of translating. The translator translates spirit; the plagiarizer mimicks mere words. This is not to say that plagiarizing, in an act of translation, is totally useless and valueless; the line-for-line translation of Lattimore, for example, does give us a much more accurate (but not authentic) feel of Homer. And at times, plagiarism is better than translation because the bias of the poet (especially in Pope's case) will get in the way of interpretation. Pope's translation is full of little things he drop in that affects how the reader constructs the characters within his mind. This is a great problem. A skilled translator, I believe, will learn to mediate the relationship between the act of "translation" and "plagiarism". Fagles is a good example.