Aaron Poochigian

I am interested in the literary translation of poetry and I define it as translation which replicates both the content and the form of an original poem in English idiom. When readers buy a translation, they take for granted that it will reproduce the content of the original. However, I regard as “cribs” or “service translations” those translations which focus on content at the expense of form — a prose translation of Beowulf, for example. Such translations are useful, necessary even, but I do not expect much in the way of aesthetic pleasure from them. With literary translation, one attempts not just to get the meaning across but to provide the same sort of aesthetic pleasure which the original provides.

Even “literary” translators often neglect or make a half-hearted attempt to recreate the form of the original. Imagine, by way of example, that a Frenchman were to translate Pope’s Essay on Man into vers libre. It’s not just that half of Pope’s meaning would be lost with the form — the translation would end up meaning something quite different than the original. Rather than embodying the poet’s argument for an ordered and rational universe, a vers libre translation would set the form and the content at odds with one another, and the result would be self-contradictory — an interesting experiment but certainly nothing like what Mr Pope wrote. To do the Essay justice, the translator, whether he be French, Chinese or Aborigine, would have to find a way to replicate the effect of Pope’s rhyming couplets in his native idiom.In short, since form and content are both essential components, only the translator who finds an apt form in the host language can be said to have translated the whole poem.

In poem 4 Catullus draws on the traditions of funerary and dedicatory epigram but drags the “epigram” out to humorous length. A retired boat, like a geezer, rambles on and on, telling its whole life story. Catullus also attains a humorous disjunction between the humble nature of the boat and the artificial epic language used for its tale. Puns are always trouble for translators. In those few instances when they can be preserved, what was a clever pun in the original often ends up being a real groaner in English. As a means to personification, Catullus puns on words that apply both to a human and a tree and both to a human and a boat.  In some instances I opted to keep the human half of the pun: for example, comata silva (a forest with hair/a forest with leaves) became “a frowzy growth”. In others I kept the naval: palmulis (little palms) became “paddles”.

Catullus 4 is in what is called iambic trimeter in Latin prosody but what we would call iambic hexameter (or the Alexandrine) in English prosody. This meter was regarded by the Greeks and Romans as the closest to everyday speech, so our English iambic pentameter was the natural choice. In this instance, the translation of an unrhymed poem into a rhymed one results, I confess, from my personal limitations — I am only able to conceive of English lyric poetry in terms of rhyme. So the question was not whether to use rhymes but how to arrange them. Clauses and sentences in the original break down into units ranging from three to five lines in length, and it occurred to me that quatrains with occasional interstanzaic enjambment would best accommodate the structure of the original. In addition, sentences spilling over from one stanza to another would reinforce the feeling that our chatty old boat is himself “running on.” The original is 27 lines and my translation is 28 — the increase in length is to be expected given the greater compression of Latin (no articles, less frequent use of prepositions, subjects implied by verbs, etc.) and the use of iambic pentameter for the 12-syllable meter of the original. 

Translation is an art of compromise and approximation. Though only readers who know Latin will be able to determine whether I have done Catullus justice, every English-speaking reader who comes across my version will decide whether I have created a pleasing English lyric in his honor. I am especially grateful to Captains Tim Murphy and Alan Sullivan for acting as naval consultants and correcting my landlubberly lapses of diction.

If Aeschylus were to hand his choral odes in as assignments for a first-year composition course, the instructor would mark them down for run-on sentences, sentence fragments, ambiguity and mixed metaphor — all signs that writing is “bad” by contemporary standards. Aeschylus comes off as a visionary, however, instead of a raving obscurantist because his relentlessly lofty diction, his at times elusive grammar and his complex imagery, for all their difficulty, make sense. I have found that my experience wrangling meaning out of Aeschylus matches that of other readers: the tone is so authoritative that, rather than simply concluding that Aeschylus is full of it, we assume that such profundity, like God Himself, is difficult to grasp. The deeper we delve into Aeschylus, the greater our reward.

The chorus of Theban women in this nightmare ode envision the fall of Thebes and their reduction to servitude. Aeschylus makes no attempt to conceal his allusion to the fall of Troy — an event which, though later in mythological chronology, was recounted in epic material which predated this tragedy by several hundred years. As a commentator on the Seven Against Thebes, G.O. Hutchinson, puts it: “As we contemplate the fall of Thebes, we must think of the fall of Troy” (Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes, 1994, n. 287–368).

To be faithful to the original I had to preserve the rapid, phantasmagoric transformation of figurative language. Metaphor and simile shift and mix in a manner which most writing instructors would label “confusing” at their most merciful. In the first strophe of “Anticipation of Rapine,” for example, the metaphor of anxieties boiling in a cauldron morphs immediately into a simile of a mother-bird watching a snake squeeze the life out of her nestlings. The mother-bird, by implication, has a boiling cauldron of anxiety in her head — a crazy image which aptly conveys the chorus’ frenzied state of mind. Rather than giving the readers a muddle, however, I wanted to keep each separate image perfectly clear, so that any remaining “confusion” would be what Aeschylus had intended and not what I had introduced though shoddy workmanship. Above all, I wanted to translate the odes in such a way that they would, as Auden says, “hurt and connect” as much as the originals.

The formal elements which comprise a choral ode are strophe, antistrophe and epode (or, in Roethke’s phrase, “the Turn, and Counter-turn and Stand”). Some choral odes, like the one translated below, consist only of strophe and antistrophe. The metrical pattern for each antistrophe is identical or nearly identical to its strophe. I resolved to preserve this metrical responsion by using the same scheme of meter and rhyme for the strophe and antistrophe. I would then distinguish each set with a different scheme. Rhyme, it seemed, was necessary to indicate that the choral odes are not conversational speech but song. Furthermore, since I had decided to render the dialogue meters of the original in blank verse the transition to rhyme would reinforce the distinction between dialogue and choral ode.

There are a few models for rhyming translations of choral odes early in the 20th century, and very few after the 1940s (i.e. Hecht’s 1976 occasionally rhyming translation of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes). In Gilbert Murray’s translations of choral odes the effect (or affect) of loftiness is achieved through archaic diction and poetic inversions. Though these devices do correlate with elements of Aeschylus’ style, contemporary readers simply have no patience for such things. I chose instead the best of Yeats’ translations of the Sophoclean Odes as my models because he uses contemporary diction and comparatively few inversions. I resolved, however, to remain more faithful to the originals than Yeats (and even Murray) and to be at least as faithful as the most recent non-rhyming translators of the odes.

Reading the tragedies of Aeschylus has given me countless hours of pleasure, as has my reading of verse- drama in English. I can only hope that my translations have done Aeschylus justice. I can only dream that my translations might inspire more rhyming translations of Greek choral odes and, eventually, even new verse-drama in English. I am especially grateful to Professor Nita Krevans for believing that her student could tackle a poet of Aeschylus’ magnitude.