44: Translation

Hi, and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know. My name is A.J. Hanenberg, and I'm joined by Graham Donaldson and Thomas Magby, and this is a podcast about the classical world. We're just trying to bring old things to you in a way that you can deal with them, so it's not, you know, we're not too intense around here, we're just taking it easy on the old classical train.

But this old stuff, you know, it made us. This is where we're from, as Westerners. Yeah. So let's learn it.

Yeah, so know your background and stuff. So we're getting real intense about it now. Sorry, I'm just really resting about it all of a sudden. Why haven't you learned this stuff?

Yeah, so yeah, this podcast is about the classical world. We hope you enjoy it. And today, we got some stuff from Mr. Thomas Magby.

I'm going to be talking about translation today, but before we get into that, it's the summer right now, and everyone's been traveling. Many people have been traveling. Some people have traveled recently. Do you want to talk about what you've been up to these last couple of weeks of vacation summertime?

Starting with Graham? Yeah, so my wife Amanda works for a company, and they sent her to London, and then for a big conference. And then I joined her later, and we went and we hung out in beautiful Cotswolds, England, which is very beautiful, but it's also where all the old people live. And so it was us and all these really old Brits, but we didn't care because it was very gorgeous.

And then we went to Portugal for something like 16 days, and drove around and drank wine. Well, I drank wine. Oh, I have a great Portugal story. So we were staying in a small town that we didn't want to stay in.

Long story. But it was a day when Portugal was playing Spain in the World Cup, and Portugal was down two goals to three. And towards the end of the game, Ronaldo scored the tying goal from a free kick, and we were watching it in this tiny little hotel in this small little mountain town, and the entire town just erupted. It was like every house was full of joy.

It was the creepiest thing, because you would put your head out the window, and you wouldn't see anybody, but you could just hear muffled screams of joy from every house. It was kind of spectacular. So watching the Portuguese not win, but tie a game in small-town Portugal. That was what I did this summer.

It was fun. So AJ, you went on the Europe trip with our students. Yeah, so we went to 17 days, several different cities, London, Paris, Lucerne. We went to Pisa briefly.

Oh. Yeah, it was cool. And then Florence, Rome. Then the other one for Pisa's trips.

We always went to Milan. Oh, okay. Or one year, Dijon. And then we went to one place called Bern.

Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn. How was it? It was great. I went to a little market.

I had a pizza. Sounds great. I missed. So it was in France, and there was this beautiful street market, but I dilly-dallied, and I waited if you wanted to order food service, it was closed enough.

And I missed. Everybody was French except for one British lady who was really sort of body and making burritos. And I really wanted a British lady's burrito, but she was closed enough. Something to go back.

Body British burritos. Yeah. It was awesome. So yeah, I traveled and did Rome and did Capri and did the whole party, and then I've been lazy ever since.

How are the monks there, maybe? I went to a monastery in Kentucky for a week. It's the disneyed abbey. It's the same monastery that Thomas Merton was a monk at.

And he did that for a week. It was great. They pray seven times a day. And it's silent.

It's silent. It's a trap. It's a trap. I don't think they watched a lot of movies there.

Maybe they watched Star Wars before they can come in. I remember Lackbar was a trap, Simone. Thank you. So yeah, that was really great.

We had a lot of reading there. It was really good. And before that, I went to Colorado with our freshman. How was that?

It was really fun. So there's a class trip for, I guess, each of our grades. Recently, our senior year trip moved to the junior year trip. And that's the Europe trip that AJ was talking about.

The ninth grade trip is a trip to Colorado. We go there, and we raft, and we hike, and we climb rocks. And it's really, really fun. You bond.

You cry at the campfire. We're totally going to be best friends when this camp is over. Your sweatshirt smells like campfire, which is my favorite thing. When that happens, I don't wash my sweatshirt or my hair from me.

Just to keep the smell. If they made a cologne, it was campfire. That's gross. So yeah, that was a really good time also.

Cool. And then spent some time out in the country to celebrate my wife's birthday this weekend. Happy birthday, Sarah. Happy birthday, Sarah.

So yeah, it's a really good summer. So we're recording now, end of June. So still a couple months left of summer. School last, maybe.

Should I? Yes. This is what's happening next. So we're actually doing an episode on leisure.

Maybe perhaps we should translate to the next part of the podcast. I really don't know what you're talking about today. Well, you all kind of never do because I give up-toothed answers. So guys, I think that translation is a total waste of time.

And so I'm actually kind of curious. You mean like translating from one language to the other? Well, yeah, because, you know, I think that we should only read things in the original languages. And so I'm wondering, AJ, how are you going to train people to read Old English so they can access this Beowulf thing?

Or, Graham, I mean, you want to read Dante's Purgatory next year. There's a lot of Italian you need to train these students in before they can actually access this book. But are you being facetious? Do you really think it's a waste of time?

No, no, do I? So yeah, what are you all going to do? Like, do you all teach them any of the original language when you go into these books of Beowulf or, I mean, all the Greek that you read, Iliad and Odyssey? I don't know any of the original languages.

I mean, I can't. You teach, you're going to teach a book written in Italian. It's true. But I can't read.

What? And Homeric Greek isn't even like normal Greek. But like, it's, it's, it's like, it's like Shakespeare is to English, right? It's bizarre.

It's different. But like, you should come back to Shakespeare a little bit. But like, can you get, I don't know, you want these kids to get these certain things from these books. I don't know.

I know what I'm saying. But like, what do you want, like, the purer, isn't it purer for them to go to the work itself in its original language and access it that way than to read through? Like, isn't the translator taking something away by moving into English instead of being in the original language? Yes, but my question is, given a good translator who faithfully reproduces the tone of the work, is it worth the effort of learning Homeric Greek so I can read the Iliad and the Odyssey?

We're talking years of study for two books. And if we're going to do that for every book we read, it's impractical to make that jump. So there's nothing worthwhile in the Iliad and the Odyssey, that would be? That's not what I said.

I said, if there are things worthwhile in the Iliad and the Odyssey and we spend time learning Homeric Greek, we are edging out all of the other things we could do. We don't have time to do that and learn the Italian for Dante and learn the Old English for Beowulf and learn the Aramaic for the Bible and learn that Greek for that Bible and learn the Greek for today's Greek books and learn Spanish and learn Canadian. We don't have time for all that stuff. So who in a boot doing other things?

What is he saying? It's all the same vowel. They only have one. Speak English.

So I hear that there's a difficulty to it, but I don't know. Like, if you're telling me that these books are important, should it also, you're telling me that books are important and also that I'm losing something by getting English translation instead of the original Greek or Old English or Italian, medieval Italian. I don't know. Like, isn't there some amount of the original language that I should know?

I kind of feel like the burden's on you to tell us why translations lose things when books have been translated and the Bible's translated into English. Has the Bible lost anything by being translated? I don't know. I don't know because I don't know the original language.

So I think it's a cost-benefit analysis. You say they should learn some of the language so they can access the book. The language that they could learn in a couple of months, that's not enough to access the high things I want them to learn. And the amount of effort we have to go through to get the few valuable things is impractical.

It's just like, should when I teach my students modern particle physics or whatever, have them go through all of the mathematical work that Galileo did to figure out his models of the universe and before that, the Ptolemaic universe, right? When he put the earth at the center and actually put the cosmos revolving around a little bit off-center, outside the earth. Should I have them do all the math and repeat what he did? Yeah, but is it worth the effort?

So you're saying that the better way to do it is original language. The better way to do it is what you just said. Like, if we had more time, we would go through all that stuff. If I was a vampire and lived eternally, I would do all these things in the original.

Before I read Dante, I would learn the Italian. I would learn how to play piano and then play Mozart rather than just listening to it, right? All of these things I would do the long way around. But we only have so many years, guys.

I'm going to argue the opposite of that. I'm going to argue that things are not lost, or at least not lost to the degree that we might think they are, in a translated work. And in fact, it might be better for us to be reading a translated work than even the process of learning the language and going back to the years. You could make this.

I knew it. I'm 100% good. I'm curious. Really?

So the main essay that I'm going off of for today's discussion is Walter Benjamin. Have you heard this guy before? No. Literary critic in the...

The accordion? That's the only accordion name. Walter Benjamin? One of those old folk albums you find at the sound of the record store.

Oh, yeah. With like the soft focus cover art. Yep. His essay is titled...

The task of the translator. Walter Benjamin was born 1892 in Berlin, died in 1940. Also in Berlin? No, in Spain.

So this is the time of World War II. He was trying to flee Germany. And so his story is essentially him moving town to town, trying to get out. And eventually, he was told that the Gestapo were going to come after him and ended up committing suicide to avoid being captured by Gestapo.

But he worked in universities. He was a student of philosophy, a student of literary criticism, and then also a translator and had many thoughts on translation, which leads us to our book today. Okay. So, AJ, in your last episode, you had some really interesting examples from Beowulf about words that are translated in there that mean different things.

So, I'm going to give you two examples that I wrote down, and I'm sure you gave more. You talked about a guy who wrecks mead benches, and you talked about someone who's a ring giver. Do you remember giving those examples? I do recall.

This feels like a calling cord, like I'm cross-examining right now or something. So, when the expression, when you say someone wrecks mead benches, if you said that phrase today, what would that phrase mean? It means I got drunk and wrecked my chair. I fell down at a garden party.

But in Beowulf, what did it mean there? It meant denying a place to drink for other men because you have killed them. So, it's a euphemism for killing people. So, imagine that you were, well, I'm actually curious about this.

You referenced two translations that you used last time. Do both of them translate that phrase? Do both of them have that Rathgar is one who wrecks mead benches? There's no reason you should know this.

No, no. I've noted that particular phrase. I think in this one, in the Tolkien translation, because his lines are longer and he tries less faithfully to stick to the meter of the verse, he actually says he denied drinking benches to other men, rather than, in the same version where it says he was a wrecker of mead benches. This is perfect.

Okay, so if we were to go back to the original Old English and look at that phrase, which I have no intention of doing. This is all theoretical. What do you think it actually says? For waitem.

Oh, thank you. That's even better. So first off, it would be incomprehensible because we don't speak Old English, but the point I'm making is if we went word by word and translated the Old English, do you think it specifically mentions mead right there? Yeah.

Oh, Beth, it does. Right, don't you think? And does it specifically mention benches right there? Yep.

And does it use some type of word that references destruction, wrecking, destroying, something in that name? Yeah. But is it helpful for us if we go word by word and only translate that and not get in contact with what that phrase means? Let me ask you a different way.

Well, the author of Bebel was unknown, correct? Yes. So when the author was writing the sentence in Old English to describe Rathgar, was the purpose and intention that the author was doing to say, Rathgar destroys benches? Is that a good translation?

It's translating it, but stripping it out of the poetry, in a way. Like, it's giving you the meaning, but it's taking away the color. It's giving you the peanut without the candy coating and chocolate of the M&M. Yes.

Okay, so it would be more utilitarian. And given peanuts are M&M peanuts, you take the M&M peanuts. Well, that's a superior way. Ten times out of ten.

Yeah, it is. M&M's better M&M. So, yeah. I mean, what are we talking about here?

Are we talking about M&M's? Because if we're talking about non-Panum M&M's, that's just the worst piece of pieces. That's what that is. Do you think we're talking about M&M's?

Do you not? Yeah. This is what I'm saying. This is what I'm saying.

A normal M&M with no peanut is a worst Reese's Pieces. So you should have all three in a bowl at once and just take a handful of it. Wait, why don't I want the lesser M&M? Yeah.

The contrast helps. See, you're going too far. I think what you do is you take a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and then you put Reese's Pieces on top of that, and then peanut M&M's on top of that. Put those in a graham cracker, and you stick that sucker in the microwave, and you got yourself a treat.

You got a spoon going. So speaking of treats, how about Beowulf, which is a treat of literature? So what do you think, Maggie? Do you think that is a good translation if you just said, Rothgar killed men?

And was a good king. So we're complaining two things, because this is important. So there's the poetry of the language in the Old English. This is often talked about.

So we're going to teach Purgatory next year. And I don't know the details of this, but you probably do. There's a very specific writing scheme that Dante uses. Thirds are emo.

I can't remember. So it's a stanzas of three, and the rhyme scheme goes A, B, A, B, C, B, C, D, C. So the ensuing... The middle line is always the top and bottom line, the next stanza.

Yes. In terms of rhyme. In terms of rhyme. And you can have as many as you want, and you end in either a single line or a couple, generally.

And you have to faint at some point. In Beowulf, yeah. In Dante, that's about all the time. Beowulf never.

He has never slept. Or read the rhyme with his nine hours in the water. And swimming in the ocean with J-Mail. But when you read an English translation of the Inferno, do they follow that rhyming scheme?

Not necessarily. No. I think there's a translation that tries, Wordsworth, and it's jinx. It's supposed to be bad.

From what little reading I do, you've actually read it, I'm sure. No. I read a little bit once in a library, and it was impossible. And then I switched.

Well, because what was Wordsworth's goal there? And so when you're reading the Inferno, they throw out, not throw out. They wish they could have the same rhyming scheme, because it's probably beautiful in whatever old Italian they're writing it in. But it just doesn't work in English.

It doesn't work in English. And so instead of butchering the English, they choose to throw it out and make an English translation. It's like when you try to take the Psalms and turn it into a song. It doesn't really work.

It probably worked really well in Hebrew. Yeah. But finding a good tune to actually fit the English translation of the Psalms is always super janky. Yeah.

Because it's not. Because hill and war don't run. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, the singing of it was tied to the Hebrew itself.

It's not tied to the English. Or that's not the goal of the translator, is to copy that same element of it. So the only point I'm trying to get at is, you lose something. There's a form that you miss in the Inferno, going from old Italian to the English that we have today.

Let's take our, we can do a higher example of it, just because we've been talking about Beowulf. Let's take Beowulf. Let's say that you went back to the original Old English, and you started with a dictionary, and you went word by word through it. Would you understand that text more than you do now?

Then I understand it in this area? Yeah. You have a dictionary. So you say word, and you look it up, and then you translate the word.

If you go word by word, would you understand Beowulf more? But that's sort of a false analogy, because when you are translating something, often you'll say, you know, you get to word, and it'll say, well, you can translate this word as avenge. You can translate this word as honor kill. You can translate this word as blood Christ.

Like, the translation said, you know, it's not like there's a one-to-one ratio between the old English words and the new English words, or our English words. In my very little Greek that I've done, in my very little Latin that I've done, you know, two students will translate the very simple Aesop's Fable, but you'll have different, you've made different choices on some of the words that have different connotations. the articles are always going to be the same, but the verbs and the nouns are a bit the same, but often the verbs and the adverbs will change the meaning of it, and you need to sort of figure out which one you think fits the best. So you're saying that they're different, but can one be better than the other?

I think yes, because it's taking them into the context of the rest of the... So a translation is an interpretation. Yes, absolutely. When you say that, is that a good thing, a bad thing, just a statement?

I think most people mean that as a negative to say, when you say that he translated Beowulf, he made choices about what he thought Beowulf was about, and therefore it's not the original. Sometimes the cover of a song is better than the song. Well, just sometimes someone who covers a famous song can do a better version of that song. Yes.

So I'll give you an example. So Be My Baby, you know, Be My, Be My Baby. There's that song in the 1950s or whatever it is. Maybe we'll put links to it in the show notes.

And then there's a cover of the song by... AJ, you told me about this guy. It's not DJ Stiff. It's DM Stiff.

DM Stiff does a cover of Be My Baby that is very different. It's the same song, but it's definitely a different kind of interpretation. It's awesome. But anyway, my point is, it's good for different reasons.

And so I assume... So Wordsworth's translation, I don't think it's Wordsworth, but whoever did the translation, I think it was Pope, who did the translation of Dante with the Tertzerima rhyme was making an interpretive choice to keep the rhyme and to maybe kick out some of the easiness of reading. Whereas Dorothy Sayers doesn't have the rhyme but has this very great translation. And then the one that I'm choosing for my 10th grade class is Anthony Esselin, which I actually haven't read yet.

I'm doing that this summer. So yeah, each translation is an interpretation. And there's a reason why some of these translations get their own sort of status in the halls of Western canon because they've taken medieval Italian and turned it into English and were faithful and created something great. So let's follow that.

I'm going to start quoting a bit from the essay as we go into it. So just to kind of summarize where I think we are right now is that anyone translating, if we are not native speakers of Old English and we have to translate at some point what these words say if we're going to translate Beowulf. So even if I go to the original text and then go word by word with the dictionary, it doesn't make it any clearer necessarily because you need to be literate of the old language yourself. You need to sort of know the field of blood and you need to live in that world to be able to bring it to us.

And that's more than just the ability to translate. It's actually like living in 500 or whenever you said Beowulf was written, like actually living in that time, then I would actually, I'd have some symbols of what things have right there. So that's kind of where we are right now. So it would still be better if we lived in that culture and then we could really get the story.

So it's always going to be a lesser version of what we read now. Right. Like if we had more time it would be great to study Italian, medieval Italian, and study Latin. And probably those things are great, but we'll get into that.

Okay, so. Well, this is why C.S. Lewis said that learning Greek and Latin was a great joy because then you can read these things in their original language and you get all this color and all of this. It's like looking at a picture on the internet of a work of art and then going and seeing it in person in Louvre.

Yeah. Or whatever. Like this is an experience our students have all the time when they go on their year trip. They've seen pictures of whatever and then they go and they're like, oh my goodness, when I get up close and I look at the paint and I can see the brush strokes, it's very, it's, yeah, it's like a very different experience.

But not everybody can take a trip to the Louvre. So some of us have to be content with just looking at pictures on the internet. I guess it's better than not seeing pictures at all. Exactly.

I don't know. I don't know how this plays into it but how many students continue on to like the highest level of language, foreign language to be able to read works in the original language. When I was in high school I took Spanish 5 and one of the hallmarks of Spanish 5 was getting to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish and I was so excited to get into it and started reading it and realized it's a different Spanish than what I've been learning for the last four years. They use a different verb form than is common in Spanish.

It's more common in saying but they use a verb form that's unfamiliar to people who learn Spanish in Texas and the word choice is different. Anyway, so there's all this excitement to get there and it's actually kind of a different experience. You're making me want what I'm realizing is what the translator does it's like they're a time traveler and they're bringing back these relics from the past to make it I'm not going to say relevant for the modern reader but they're like curators of history. I don't know.

They're little magicians. Okay, so what's his name? Walker Berman. Sorry, I forgot his name.

That's embarrassing. So he gets some of the ideas we're talking about right now is the purpose of translation just to communicate information to me from an old language into a new language and he says no any translation that intends to perform a transmitting function cannot translate anything but communication. He defines communication just as those individual words. So they can only translate communication hence something essential.

The translation of each individual word is not helpful. That's not what we go to books for. We don't go to them for these individual words. We go to them for something deeper and we'll get to that later.

And he says this is a hallmark of bad translations. People who are just trying to match bringing words from a different language into a new language. So that's a hallmark of a bad translation. He goes on.

He has this question about whether a word is translatable or not which I'm not going to go into. He talks about traditional translation being about conveying the form and meaning of the original as accurately as possible. That's how we're getting out with whoever wrote this translation of Dante with my name. The goal that they have is matching a certain form but matching a form that works in an old language is not the same as making a form work in the new language.

English is different than Italian. It is easier to rhyme words in Italian because a majority of them end with... Oh, yeah, right? I don't know.

It isn't an O or A like a majority of them or an I. A majority of them are going to end with a vowel. But it's English where it's not merely... It's the same in Spanish.

When you read Spanish poetry it's very easy to rhyme words together. It's not merely as easy in English. And so if you were to try and match the rhyming of Spanish in English it wouldn't work very well because languages are different. So this gets to what Graham was just saying and I wanted to go here for a little bit.

Benjamin says that a part of a translation is that a translation is a transformation and a renewal of something living. The original undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process. So even words if I know what a word means words change meaning over time.

So even translating word to word even this is what I want to talk about with Shakespeare like in reading Shakespeare he uses words differently than we do. And so I in 2018 cannot just read Shakespeare by itself in my camp. Well we have quote translations of Shakespeare. My students read it all the time.

They do the like no fear Shakespeare and that's like It's helpful in a way but it's... Shakespeare is not so foreign to the modern tongue you can't learn it. So it's capable of being learned but it's still different. There is still translation in it that we're doing.

But what's the name of the translation you were just talking about? No fear Shakespeare. No fear Shakespeare is not a transformation or a renewal of something living. No it's not.

I mean it's doing what the message did to the Bible. I don't know if you're familiar with the message but it's a modern it is an interpretation of the Bible as opposed to the Bible. For those who balk at the work of doing Shakespeare it's something that gives them the kernel without all the dressing. So you get information you don't get to enjoy it.

Well I was going to help them pass a ninth grade public school test is what it's going to do. Not a veritas one right? Nope. Well maybe but not at all.

My test is rough. Especially if they're only reading spark notes or whatever. It's a quick test. So original work I was going to say here's an example of act one scene one of Hamlet in No Fear Shakespeare.

Bernardo who's there? Francisco. No who are you? Stop and identify yourself.

Long let the king zap Bernardo yes to me. You've come right on time. The clock is just striking twelve. Go home to bed Francisco.

Thanks for letting me go. It's barely cold out and I'm depressed. Versus like tis now struck twelve. Get to the bed Francisco.

For this relief much thanks. Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart. Right like it's I don't know it makes me sad. What about it makes me sad?

That it's a it is a translation that is a dumbing down as opposed to a translation it's a dumbing down because as English speakers we should be able to understand Shakespeare as opposed to we need a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because it's it's written in an old English that we can't understand. You can kind of understand it. You wouldn't be able to understand Beowulf but you can kind of understand the old English of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight but the translation is necessary whereas it's not really necessary for Shakespeare. Because it closely enough resembles the English that we use today.

So it's kind of different and words mean different things and also Shakespeare just made up words because he could but we can learn those things and then still get Shakespeare. Correct. But there's still something we miss in not living at the same time as Shakespeare. I don't know.

There's more to get out of Shakespeare than just translating words. That's what I'm getting at with the no fear of like you still miss something even if you get the plot. Like it's even just the basic the bare outcomes of the plot because you miss out the different characters talk by dumbing it down all the same. Anyway so we will move on.

He speaks very highly so earlier he said that the poet is something or I'm sorry the translator is something of a poet. So the translator must be able it's not just going word to word they're making poetry and they're making poetry that needs to work in the language they're translating into. That's kind of a it makes the work of the translator something much more noble than I would normally do with it. It's not just people translating words from one language into another.

It is actually writing poetry and then putting the name of an unnamed author Beowulf or putting the name of Dante on it which is kind of a higher and that's scarier to me almost that I have to speak for Dante I have to speak for maybe whoever it is. Okay so in that same vein then then goes on to say So what the translator is attempting to do is not just change languages but to get to the theme the ideas in a work and then bring modern readers to those new ideas and that is a bigger work than just when I say the word translate I mean to move into a new language but I think that's what separates a good translator from a bad translator that they have the you gave your example of the Aeneid you need someone who understands the Aeneid so they can make better translations of that work. Is that my off base? Sorry to repeat that.

So there are differences between good and bad translators and a good translator must know the work that they are translating exceedingly well such that they make certain choices with the words that they are translating. Yeah you need to have a little bit of some swagger as a translator you need to have a belief in yourself that you understand the work in its original language to be able to bring it into the modern context or into your audience context so it is adopting for context. So wait what's the I kind of see where you're driving or at least I'm trying to see where you're driving is your point that the translation is just as good as the original because if we read it on our own in the original what we would be receiving is a kind of translation anyway so we'd be doing it ourselves and our brains. I'm going to give you an example to get at it.

So in Donkey Hote it's about a donkey right? It's about a donkey named Hote so this is the Penguin Classics version and this is probably the first time I read about translation and cared about it or thought about it so there's a part in the book he's just giving an example of the difficult choices that have to be made as a part of translation and I think this gets to what you just asked so he's talking about have you ever read Donkey Hote before? No, I've never read it. I've read, I've tried audiobooks a little bit.

It's very long. So there's this one famous description of who Donkey Hote is that you've all heard before of the Night of the Woeful Countenance something you've ever heard before that's in the musical Man of La Mancha which is based on Donkey Hote they talk about him being the Night of the Woeful Countenance which is a very like overblown romantic romantic but that's based on a certain interpretation of Donkey Hote is Donkey Hote this romantic man who while he doesn't achieve his goals he pursues his goals and so in the end he is in a way a hero or is he delusional? Is he someone who what Sarvante talks about as he reads so many stories about knights is that he doesn't use the phrase melt your brain but essentially it messes up his brain that he reads so many of these books that he thinks he's one of the knights and then he goes on this long journey so your choice about who this Donkey Hote is will change how you think of him so the original phrase that gets translated to Night of the Woeful Countenance is which literally means the night of the sad figure like if I'm just going word by word the night of the sad figure is what that means and that has been translated as the night of the ill-favored face the night of the rueful countenance the night of the sorrowful figure the night of the sad countenance any one of those but all this is the point that Donkey Hote has read a lot of books but he's not educated and Sanjo Panza is not educated either and Sanjo Panza is the one who gives him this title and so to think that Sanjo Panza an uneducated peasant would use the word rueful countenance like of course he wouldn't say that or to say even sorrowful figure sounds overblown so in the Penguin Classic it's translated instead as the night of the sorry face that sounds more like what a little uneducated squire would say that's what I'm getting at this is just one example but just me having the Spanish to say doesn't tell me like what does that phrase mean I'm not making the choice but like having read very little bits of Donkey Hote in the original Spanish you don't want it I mean I just wasn't very good Spanish so the translators are doing a work for us that we wouldn't otherwise be doing for ourselves and good translators will do good jobs at those things and bad translators will make really interesting stories like Donkey Hote really boring it's like when you get an awesome tour guide and they know the museum they know these things they have stories of it versus if you just go into the museum yourself you don't really know what you're doing you just kind of like float around or you know a little bit of all these things and you're interpreting or you're building the experience for yourself versus you are have been given a tailor-made experience by a master just continuing on that do I trust my reading of Beowulf more than I trust J.R.R. or Tolkien's reading of Beowulf not a chance do I trust my reading of The Inferno or Purgatory or Perdiso as much so I trust Anthony Esalen's or Dorothy Sayers or whomever and the answer for those would be no I do not trust mine over theirs I think that's the only point I'm trying to get at with this is that a good translation makes these books accessible in a way that even if you studied the language for years and years wouldn't be as enjoyable wouldn't be as easy as we make it sound but I don't think it's necessarily a purer experience because you still are making the same choices the translator is when you are learning the language and going to the original text of these great books I think that's my point.

Two issues with your point. Number one, isn't there the danger, especially if we take this, yeah, nothing's dangerous ever, isn't there the danger if we take this and extrapolate it to even other things beyond language that we are taking the impetus from the individual and offloading it to the experts, saying, why would you ever learn to change your oil? Are you ever going to do it as well as someone that has been changing oil for 10 years? Why would you ever do that?

If we do that too much, then we make man only specialized, and in a worst case scenario, not good at anything, because he's depending on every other expert ever. He becomes a cognitive machine, and then only other people have the will to do the things that he should do himself. So changing oil is a bad example because it's simple, but say something more complicated. Fix your computer, right?

Something like that. Isn't there the danger that we discourage students from learning a language because there are other people that have learned them better to translate the works better than you could? That's why I think it's important that schools do languages and do rudimentary basic translations so that our future translators get a taste for it who love it. So we have students who, so our school for a long time only had Latin through Latin 4, and then we had some students that got through Latin 4 early in their high school career and lobbied for Latin 5.

From last year, we had Latin 5 that had two students, and our Latin 5 teacher and these two students just sat around and from what they told me, like they enjoy Latin and they did translations of, it wasn't even, they did translations of, I think it was the immediate, or it was Ovid. And so, you know, you get, yeah, there's something, there's a point, there's a type of education, there's a type of understanding literature that you get when you have to translate it yourself, which is why one of my favorite assignments that we do, that we did this year in our senior English class was that we made our, as an extra credit, we had our students write an extra scene to Hamlet and it was the scene when Hamlet gets captured by pirates. Hamlet gets captured by pirates and he goes back to Denmark and we had the students like discover the long lost scene and they weren't trans. that sounds like Shakespeare which is a similar kind of headspace and that's a totally different, what it does is it reveals to us as teachers that the students understand Shakespeare more than just like, quote, decoding it to their natural, to like modern English.

And I'm just going to read a little bit of one of the scenes that was submitted for the extra credit. So, scene five, five. Enter Hamlet, amidst fighting on board the pirate ship. The pirate queen, accompanied by her navigator, meet him at blade point.

Pirate queen, you dare aboard my ship amidst battle time? Hamlet, alas, spare me a moment, I stand as no friend of that ship. Perhaps one of yours. Pirate queen, how now, you aim to trick me with sharp words.

What business has your impudence on deck? Hamlet, death was nigh to meet me aboard that ship. My heart resolves t'was better to perish at the blade of an unknown wielder than find my end at the hand of one called friend. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, so, that shows a knowledge and inside understanding of Shakespeare that is sort of the same kind of headspace that a translator would have to do. Now, it's English to English, but that is what a translator is doing when they do medieval Latin or Italian to English. They sort of know the blood and guts and the life of the poem in order to bring it to English. Because what would Dante say today?

Yes. I mean, it's essentially the question. You get into some of the areas like where we talked at the beginning of, you know, if they took out the meat hall or if they took out the meat bench and said, he was angry. You really get the same thing.

He killed dudes. But I think writing poetry is different than just providing a summary, so a summary would not be good. I think there's a place for experts and I do think that an expert will translate differently than a student will. I think it takes more, there's an image I have of I'm going to learn Latin or we're currently recording at Graham Donaldson's apartment and he has a copy of a book called The Intellectual Life by A.G.

Is it A.G.? And A.G. has this thing where he says, you know, Order of Preachers. That's his name.

Is that what he says? O.P.? No, it's O.P. Oh, I'm sorry.

And he has a part where he says that if you learn Latin for six months, you'll be able to read Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin. That's the thing he says. I don't know if it's true. Aquinas uses a particular type of Latin, church Latin, whatever.

So it's easier to learn than other Latin. So could I learn church Latin and read Thomas Aquinas in the original language? Maybe. Will I get as much out of it as reading a Catholic who is immersed in the theology of Thomas Aquinas who is then doing the work of translation to bring that into English?

Will I get as much out of it from the first as the second? Maybe. But it depends on how much time you put into it. So I think that's the question that is raised here.

Benjamin also says this, that the work of translation is midway between poetry and theory. Its work is less sharply defined than either of these but leaves no lesson mark on history. So what the translator is doing is not just the translation. It's not just the language learning I would get from taking Latin 1 through 4.

It's also knowing the structure of poetry in the original language and modern language and the theories, the ideas that are encapsulated in that work. I just think that's harder than, that work is harder than me learning six months of church Latin. I think that's what I do. Okay.

Yeah, I'm up to you. What's your second objection there, Bert? My second objection was, and it may be answered already, but if I'm thinking that because someone else could do it better than me, if we take that to all of language in general, then say my boss said something about, I don't know, Thanksgiving dinner to Maggie and then Maggie told me. And it sounded sketchy.

It was like, I plan on killing and eating all of the turkeys myself and I have five of them. And I was like, that sounds really weird about my boss. It seems like the principle is, well, if I heard him myself, I would still have to do some interpretation. And since Maggie is just as expert in language as me, why not just let his word stand for what Troy said in the individual?

It almost seems to validate rumor in that they are just as expert as me, they heard with their own ears and I would also have to do some sort of interpretation, so why not just depend on theirs? This is a great point. So what's the translation of the Iliad you use? It is Robert Fagel's.

It's a great translation. So my first attempt at reading the Iliad was from Great Books of the Western World. The Mortimer Razzler collection has Iliad and Odyssey in it. I don't know who translates it, but it's not good.

It's just really boring and hard to read. While the Fagel's one, the work comes alive, it's really engaging. But they're both English translations of the original Greek Iliad. Translation doesn't stop with just one translator.

There are always new translations coming out. And I want to say the Fagel's one came out in the 2000s. Yeah, it's recent. And S1 also is a recent translation of it.

The copy, the translation that's going to connect with us is not necessarily the one written in the 1800s. Well, what possesses somebody to say, you know what we need right now is a copy as a modern translation of the Iliad in 2018? Like, how do you get to that point where you say this is what we need to do? Have you still answered my objection?

I think so in saying that just because a translation has happened in English doesn't mean it's the final translation. So pretend it said that Troy shared with Graham and me and pick other people. You would talk with multiple people to understand what actually Troy said unless you were to talk with Troy himself. But that's my point, is that talking with Troy myself would still be the best option.

Sure, it might be a bad example because... Yeah, so maybe it's not a perfect analogy. So this is a written word as opposed to spoken. It's also, you know, as opposed to a five minute on a couple of interviews.

But yeah, the part of me is that just because it worked and translated in English doesn't mean it's the perfect translation. And that's why so I think the Odyssey just had a translation come out and if I'm not mistaken it's the first female translator of the Odyssey. And so I don't know what that brings to the translation but I think that's your question, Graham. Why do we need new translations?

Has it been made accessible, enjoyable, knowable to everyone yet? Or have previous works of translation only been for certain people? There's always room for any translation. Unless y'all have other questions.

That kind of gets to the main point. I guess your takeaway would be read good translations. And the only reason I clarify, like it's something to say, but like there's just the Don Quixote example especially. I lost my page.

But if you were reading a book that talked about The Night of the Rueful Countenance you'd be like, oh, this is the right one. It sounds like it's official. It sounds like it's a difficult one to read. And it just makes me think of AJ's Guide to Not Writing Bad or whatever it's called.

Right gooder is what I believe was called in the podcast. Things that are complicated sound like they're better but they're not. And that's what I love about this Penguin Classics translation of Don Quixote. It gets that.

There are two poor people who are traveling around and they talk a certain way and it's not whatever English was called in the 18th century. It's not Middle English. Whatever you would call that. Elizabethan or whatever.

So if somebody was translating Huckleberry Finn into French and they gave high-sounding words to Huckleberry Finn when he's saying his good old Southern English it would be a bad translation but not. But what you would have to do is make Huckleberry Finn sound like a French person. Tom has thou consumed my gem my source that I didn't deplete instead. But that joke is what previous translations of Don Quixote have done.

They made him sound like he's this I keep wanting to use the word highfalutin which makes me sound not highfalutin. Florid? Yeah, sure. It makes him sound floridic.

We are in Texas. I'm sorry. He's more floridic than the character himself should be. But just because it's complicated it doesn't mean that it's wrong either.

I mean, take Shakespeare for example. Perhaps that's why we get all this high-flown language is because Shakespeare does seem complicated. But the caveat that Shakespeare's good. But also, this is what I was in mind he was writing for common people.

When you went to the Globe it had a whole section of people that got him for cheap. They're the ones who were there to enjoy it. But when it is active it is easily understood. Easily understood.

When you read it sometimes it's a little tough but in the translation of actually being put on stage those passages are readily understood. That's a good point. We should do another podcast on that. We're at 52.

So this has been Classical Stuff You Should Know. I'm AJ Hanberg that's Thomas Magby and one Grab Donaldson over there. Grab. Grab.

Grab Donaldson. And it's summer and so that's happening. And if you want to tweet at us you can tweet at Classical Stuff at Twitter C-L-S-S-C-A-L stuff at twit and you can check us out online at classicalstuff.net You can email us at classicalstuff at veritasacademy.net and apparently we are still getting the Captain Ball thing wrong. He was not the confectioner to William the Conqueror.

He designed chariots for William the Conqueror's brother. So William was doing a lot of conquering. The brother was helped in William the Conqueror's army and he required his own chariots. She's relieved to the guy that built and designed those chariots.

William the Conqueror's charioteer. Yeah and so because the designer of chariots chariots aren't paid well chariot designers are paid well and so because William and his brother Daniel were very successful this guy made a lot of money eventually had a castle so it's not a castle it's still a castle. So it still owns the castle. Yeah that part we didn't screw up.

She does have a familial castle. It's that the money was not earned with confections or sweets or you know yeah sweets and stuff. Exactly. So that was our own fault.

So sorry Catherine we'll get it right. And if you would like to translate the transcript of this podcast into Shakespeare in English you can email us at classicalstuffinveritascademy.net with your excerpts and we will read it on the next podcast. Yeah that sounds great. Okay thanks for listening hope you have a good time and you know stay cool out there.

It's a hot one in Texas. If you're listening to this in Scandinavia you know go take a swim. We're jelly. I mean it's cool up there but down here it's blazing so you know stay cool folks.

Bye. Bye.