The Yeats Journal of Korea/한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2015.46.35
Vol. 46 (2015): 35-54
W. B. Yeats as Translator: Form, Function, and
Fidelity in The Two Sophoclean Plays
(for the late Professor Daniel Albright)
Charles I. Armstrong
____________________________________
Abstract: This essay analyses the strategies and choices underlying William Butler
Yeats’s versions of Sophocles’s two classic tragedies, King Oedipus and Oedipus at
Colonus. Reference is made to German hermeneutics and the contemporary translation
theories of scholars such as Lawrence Venuti, Peter Robinson and Matthew Reynolds,
in order to elucidate how Yeats negotiated between fidelity and more free and
self-conscious appropriation of the Greek originals. The Abbey theatre’s use of classic,
foreign plays as part of its repertoire is also addressed as a significant context for
understanding the function of these versions. It is especially relevant for Yeats’s work
on King Oedipus
his more independent rendering of Oedipus at Colonus is shown
to be affected by the example of his friend and collaborator, Ezra Pound. Detailed
inspection of the latter text demonstrates how there are major departures from the
wording of Richard Jebb’s translations, which typically provide the point of departure
for Yeats’s versions. The final part of the essay looks at how the use of metaphors
concerning monstrosity and the underworld demonstrate a subtle link between what
Yeats wrote in these versions and how he wrote them (i.e., their form).
Key words: Yeats, Sophocles, translation, Abbey theatre, metaphor
Author: Charles I. Armstrong is a professor of British literature at the University of
Agder. Postal address: Department of Foreign Languages & Translation /
Faculty of Humanities & Pedagogy / University of Agder / PO Box 422 /
4604 Kristiansand S / Norway.
E-mail: [email protected]
—
____________________________________
제목: 번역가 W. B. 예이츠: 두 소포클레스 번역극에 나타난 형식, 기능, 및 충실성
우리말 요약: 본 논문은 W. B. 예이츠의 두 소포클레스 번역극, 오이디푸스 왕과
콜로누스의 오이디푸스에 포함된 선택과 방법을 분석한다. 예이츠가 그리스 원전을
36
Charles I. Armstrong
얼마나 자유롭고 자의적으로 활용하는가와 얼마나 충실하게 번역하는가를 설명하게
위해서, 로렌스 베누티, 피터 로빈슨, 그리고 매듀 레이놀즈와 같은 학자들의 당대 번
역이론과 독일의 해석학을 활용한다. 애비극장이 고전과 외국 극을 레버토리로 사용한
것도 이 극의 기능을 이해하기 위해서 중요한 문맥으로 다루어진다. 특히, 오이디푸
스 왕에 대한 예이츠의 작업이 더 적절해 보인다. 그가 보다 자유롭게 번역한 콜로
누스의 오이디푸스는 그의 친구이며 협력자인 에즈라 파운드의 번역에 영향을 받은
것이 보인다. 이 두 번째 번역을 자세히 검토하면, 보통 러처드 젭의 번역에서 출발하
는 예이츠의 번역문구가 얼마나 크게 차이가 나는지를 보여준다. 이 논문의 마지막 부
분은 기형과 지하에 관한 은유법을 검토하는데, 이 번역극들에서 무엇을 다루는가와
어떻게 다루는 가(형식) 사이의 미묘한 관계를 보여준다.
주제어: 예이츠, 소포글레스, 번역, 애비극장, 은유
저자: 찰스 I. 암스트롱은 노르웨이 악델 대학교 외국어 번역학과의 영문학 교수이다.
____________________________________
W illiam
Butler Yeats published two versions of Sophocles’s plays during his
lifetime: King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus. Yeats first worked on a
version of the former in 1912, before setting it aside for many years. In 1926
and 1927 work on the two texts resulted in finished translations and first
performances with the Abbey Theatre. Unlike later Irish poets such as Derek
Mahon, Ciaran Carson and Seamus Heaney, Yeats’s oeuvre gives little
prominence to translation of poetry or drama. Hence the two Sophoclean
translations represent something of a departure for him, and this singular
status may in part account for the relatively sparse attention given to it by
critics.1) In what follows, I want to discuss these two texts’ status as
translations: what was Yeats trying to do in his versions of Sophocles, and
how can we make sense of his aims and practice in light of twentieth
century translation theory?
A crucial supposition of much modern thought on translation is that it
— in one form or another, and to a heightened degree with
regard to literary texts — an element of interpretation. Just as any observation
always involves
of the world entails organizing sense experience as involving meaningful
W. B. Yeats as Translator
37
entities or objects, the representation of a text in another language involves a
process whereby one actively makes sense of the original. There is no such
thing as a neutral copying or mirroring of the text that is to be translated.
This tenet is particularly important to, and well-developed within, the German
tradition of hermeneutical philosophy. For a hermeneutical philosopher such as
Hans Georg Gadamer, every human activity is embroiled in the process of
making sense of the world, and that process is only possible due to the
presuppositions
— or prejudices, as he dubs them — of an interpreting agent
that is situated in a particular time and place (see Gadamer). A radical
consequence of this viewpoint lies in the resulting challenge to the traditional
distinction
between
interpretation
and
explication.
Whereas
traditional
philology, even if within German hermeneutics of the Bible, has distinguished
between an initial process of accounting for the basic meaning of a text and
the more active and probing process of interpretation, for many later
hermeneutical thinkers
— including Gadamer — this distinction is essentially
invalid: even the simplest retelling of the content of a text involves a selective
process that does not issue in any objective or universally applicable result.
Despite such skepticism, the contrast between explication and interpretation
arguably underlies the more recent, influential distinction between opposing
attitudes
to translation.
The
opposition
between
“foreignization” and
“domestication” was developed, by Lawrence Venuti in The Translator’s
Invisibility. Interestingly, the dichotomy was launched with direct reference to
the thought of one of the key figures of German hermeneutics, the Romantic
Friedrich Schleiermacher. Venuti has defended the ethics of “choosing a
foreign text and developing a translation method along lines which are
excluded by dominant cultural values in the target language” (“The American
Tradition” 242). Venuti’s argument has been widely influential, and the terms
he uses have become a commonplace of contemporary translation theory. Given
recent, post-structuralist critique of the metaphysics of binary dichotomies, his
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Charles I. Armstrong
position is obviously vulnerable to criticism for being too simplistic. A critique
of roughly this kind, but based on a cultural rather than philosophical premise,
has indeed been proposed by Peter Robinson:
Arguments have been made for the value of the translator’s work as
equivalent to a Russian Formalist ‘making stange’, namely ‘making foreign’,
or ‘foreignization’. This is said to be a method for resisting ‘domestication’,
‘naturalization’, or ‘annexation’ by the target culture, and is an equivalent in
translation studies to the vanguard stylist’s resistance to ‘recuperation’. […]
the idea depends upon an inert and undifferentiated contrasting term to give
it salience and privilege: the concept of ‘foreignization’ requires for its
visibility the contrastive sense of writers and readers at home in, or native
to, a language or culture. […] The archaic binary structure of foreigner,
stranger or alien confronting and active those who are comfortably and […]
complacently in the home place oversimplifies the understanding of
translation and relations between languages and cultures. (Robinson 132)
The duality falls short in discussing the finer shades of cultural belonging.
Moreover, the opposition of domestic versus foreign risks, according to
Robinson’s argument, masking important power relations, obfuscating subtle
intercultural relations by virtue of eschewing all intra-cultural tension. The
onus is on the translator to capture and embody such tension, rather than just
acknowledging and exacerbating presumed cultural differences:
To identify a more illuminatingly various picture what’s needed is to
consider the distinct location that any significant poet’s work occupies in its
own culture. […] That the poetry to be translated is not simply at home in
its own culture will not exclude it from appearing unusual when translated,
but part of that strangeness will derive from its own specificity in the
circumstances of its original writing and publication. […] Translating the
original’s ‘slight angle to the universe’ is an invitation to the target culture to
understand the work of the original in its situation by means of analogically
conflicted relations within the second language area. (Robinson 133)
W. B. Yeats as Translator
39
In what follows, I will use the foregoing sketch to suggest some key points
regarding Yeats’s translations of Greek drama. What sort of “slight angle to
the universe” in Sophocles’s drama might one find analogies of within
Yeats’s translations? And how do the domestic and the alien interact, on the
level of method, in his versions of King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus?
The pursuit of these questions will lead me to also address, towards the end
of the essay, how Yeats’s own understanding of his translation work involves
an appropriation of metaphors and themes from Sophocles’s two plays, as
well as a brief contextualization of Yeats’s complex cultural and institutional
position at the time of his work with these texts.
There is no doubt that Yeats’s original ambitions for his King Oedipus
translation were relatively modest. In a letter to Lady Gregory on 6 January
1912, he states: “I am to dictate a revision of Jebb’s Oedipus from the point of
view of speech” (CL 1794). A “revision,” one might hazard, is hardly an
original translation at all. Yet Yeats’s view changes later on. A key statement
of self-analysis occurs in a letter to Olivia Shakespeare, fifteen years later,
where Yeats draws a stark contrast between his differing modes of work with
the two translations: “My work on ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ has made me bolder &
when I look at ‘King Oedipus’ I am shocked by my moderation. I want to be
less literal & more idiomatic & modern” (CL 4972). Yeats here presents a clear
difference in attitude from one translation to the other, but does not explain
why he has seen fit to change tack. The “moderation” and relative literalness of
the original is contrasted with a “bolder” attitude that is “more idiomatic &
modern.” Presumably the idiom in question is that of contemporary English
usage, implying that the contrast here is indeed between literalness and a
translation more closely linked with the norms of the target attitude. If one adds
that Yeats is not merely talking about the result of his work with Sophocles,
but the actual attitudes underlying that work, it becomes clear that we
linguistically, if not culturally
—
— are very much in the territory inhabited by
40
Charles I. Armstrong
Venuti’s opposition between “foreignization” and “domestication.”
Unlike Venuti, though, Yeats is defending the process of domestication.
On what grounds does he do so? Well, his signalling that the “bolder” move
is also the more “modern” one is significant at this juncture. As Daniel
Albright has noted, Yeats’s relationship to modernism is complicated (cf.
Albright). Despite resisting certain key features of literary modernism, and
repeated insistences upon his own traditionalism, Yeats often saw fit to
appropriate innovative tendencies of the avantgarde. When he signals that his
own translation work is taking a “modern” turn, Yeats’s own close
relationship with one of the more unorthodox, modern poet-cum-translators,
Ezra Pound, is surely crucial. As mentioned earlier, Yeats’s initial work with
King Oedipus took place between 1909 and 1912, a period of time where
literary modernism was not yet fully developed. His later work with this play
was very much in the mould of those early efforts, completing a process
already begun. When starting upon Oedipus and Colonus, however, Yeats was
embarking upon a fresh start where it would be harder not to be influenced
by the experiments perpetrated by Pound and other modernists. Pound’s
versions of Chinese poems in Cathay (1915) represent a significant milestone :
according to Michael Alexander, “with Cathay Pound the translator abandoned
copying in favour of remaking” (Alexander 28). This opposition roughly
corresponds with the transition undergone by Yeats, when moving from one
Sophocles play to the other : while King Oedipus might be said to be a work
involving a large degree of “copying,” Oedipus at Colonus shows some more
evidence of “remaking.”
In both of these versions, Yeats’s own lack of prowess in ancient Greek
led him to use existing translations as his starting point. Particularly important
were Richard Jebb’s English translations, but Yeats also made extensive use
Paul Masqueray’s French renderings of the two Greek plays, in addition to
various other sources. Commentators such as David Clark and Brian Arkins
W. B. Yeats as Translator
41
have instructively shown what kind of textual work Yeats is engaged in, by
comparing passages in his versions to these precedents. The opening of
Oedipus’s first speech to Teiresius can provide a quick exemplification. Jebb
translates Sophocles as follows : “Teiresias, whose soul grasps all things, the
lore that may be told and the unspeakable, the secrets of heaven and the low
— thou feelest, though thou canst not see, what a plague
doth haunt our State, — from which, great prophet, we find in thee our
things of earth,
protector and only saviour” (Sophocles 13). An early draft shows Yeats
following Jebb very closely indeed: “Teiresias, whose soul grasps all things;
the knowledge that may be told, and that that is unspeakable; the secrets of
heaven and the low things of earth; you feel, though you cannot see it, that
the plague is in our State, and from that plague, Great Prophet, you shall
protect us and save us.”2) So far, Yeats has merely tinkered with the text,
modernizing the verb forms and converting the final nouns into verbs. The
final version of the same passage is shorter: “Tiresias, master of all
knowledge, whatever may be spoken, whatever is unspeakable, whatever
omens of earth and sky reveal, the plague is among us, and from that plague,
Great Prophet, protect us and save us” (Pl 374). This is still faithful enough
to be characterized as “copying.” At the same time, though, the avoidance of
archaisms is accompanied by compression and reorganization.
Why this humility before the Greek original? Why such fidelity in a
writer who frequently expressed his derision for artistic movements that
embraced mimeticism over freedom? In a BBC broadcast on 8 September
1931, Yeats explained: “I did not want to make a new translation for the
reader, but something that everybody in the house, scholar and pot-boy, would
understand as easily as he understood a political speech or an article in a
newspaper” (LAR 219). Like Yeats’s radio work, his rendering of Sophocles’s
most famous play aspired to an accessibility far removed from the kind of
elitism Yeats cultivated in, say, his Symbolist poems of the 1890s or his
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Charles I. Armstrong
Noh-inflected plays two decades later. Part of the challenge lay in creating a
version that would work on a contemporary stage. In his own words, “my
shaping of the speech will prove powerful on the stage, for I have made it
bare, hard and natural like a saga” (letter to Olivia Shakespear, 7 December
1926; CL 4952). Not only the mention of Norse saga, but also the references
to bareness and hardness demonstrate that this is not an unmediated
appropriation of the Greek play. Yeats is effectively embracing the modernist
ethos of T. E. Hulme here: even when Yeats is relatively moderate and literal,
he nonetheless cannot escape a modernity of sorts
— notwithstanding it does
not fully measure up to the more radical modernity of a Poundian “remaking.”
Later he would describe his early reworking of Jebb’s King Oedipus as
necessitating an escape from the original translator’s “half Latin, half Victorian
dignity” (LAR 244). Rebelling against the florid, second-hand discourse of a
tired Victorianism, Yeats King Oedipus is informed by the same kind of
proto-modernism James Longenbach has unearthed as stretching back much
earlier than Yeats’s first encounter with Pound.3)
Why does Yeats vary so in his practice as a translator ? The two plays
by Sophocles are both classics, and one would assume that Yeats had more
or less equal respect for both of them. It is instructive to consider how form
can be seen to follow function in these texts. Yeats had a considerable
artistic and emotional investment in the Abbey theatre, for which he not only
operated as a playwright, but also a founder, director, and spokesman. Yeats’s
decision to translate Sophocles was not simply an independent act of a
free-standing, creative artist, but also
— and perhaps to a larger degree — a
service of sorts to Ireland’s new national theatre. The resulting, internal
struggle between artist and impresario is evident in a letter Yeats wrote to
Lady Gregory on 29 December 1926 : “I am more than half through
‘Oedipus at Colonus’,” he tells the co-founder of the Abbey Theatre :
“Another week should finish the dialogue & then I need a fortnight for the
W. B. Yeats as Translator
43
rhymed chorus. I think it should play as well as ‘Oedipus the King.’ I shall
be much more content with my work for the Abbey when this play is
finished. I shall have done my part in creating a repertory, & without going
outside my professed work in life” (CL 4966).
Yeats has to perform a balancing act. On the one hand, his “professed
work in life” as a poet and playwright demands that he create original works
of art that function as independent and idiomatic works of English-language
literature. On the other hand, his desire to contribute to the “repertory” of the
Abbey, entails that an English play by Sophocles can
perspective
—
— from an institutional
be of equal value to, or even more value than, another
contribution of his own. Here one can draw a line to the kind of institutional
concerns Lauren Arrington has identified in a recent study on Yeats and the
Abbey Theatre. Arrington claims that, despite expressing strong opposition to
censorship, Yeats often performed acts of self-censorship on behalf of the
Abbey theatre, turning down or modifying productions that could imperil
funding: “Yeats was not an uncompromising champion of artistic freedom but
was willing to sacrifice the freedom of the artist when he anticipated an
opportunity to ensure the longevity of the theatrical enterprise” (Arrington 14).
One might add to her argument, then, that the work on Sophocles shows that
he was also willing to consider sacrificing his own freedom as an artist in
order to further the cause of the Abbey. Earlier in 1926, Yeats had published
“A Defence of the Abbey Theatre,” where he answers detractors who have
claimed that the Abbey has “neither produced foreign masterpieces nor
predominantly religious and political plays” (LAR 203). Against such criticism,
Yeats insists: “We have always wished to do more foreign masterpieces than
we have been able to, but they seldom succeed with an audience
— I think I
see signs of a change in that matter, but it will come slowly” (LAR 206).
For Yeats, the whole concept of the “masterpiece” has an intimate link
with ancient Greek literature, in a manner which builds upon older forms of
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Charles I. Armstrong
classicism. As late as in January 1939, Yeats claimed that “Greek drama
alone achieved perfection; it has never been done since: it may be thousands
of years before we achieve that perfection again. Shakespeare is only a mass
of magnificent fragments:”4) Of the Greek dramatists, Yeats had most
profound respect for Sophocles, characterizing King Oedipus as “the greatest
masterpiece of Greek drama” (letter to Annie Horniman, 15 August 1909; CL
1199). Sophocles’s institutional importance for the Abbey Theatre is intimately
linked with its status as a masterpiece of this kind. As Robert Welch has
pointed out, the staging of foreign classics had long been integral to Yeats’s
aspirations for an Irish theatre:
From the beginning not just at the Abbey, but at the Irish Literary Theatre,
Yeats had wanted the National Theatre to stage European and international
masterpieces, ancient and modern, as part of his aim to broaden Irish
literary culture by providing the best models and exemplars from all over
the world. This international scope would, he believed, assist in defining
and refining the Irish national theatre’s own sense of purpose. (Welch 75)
This notion of the “exemplar” functions in a more or less equivalent way to
how Hugh Lane, Lady Gregory and Yeats argued that foreign masterpieces
within the visual arts could provide inspiration and guidance for Irish artists
if displayed in galleries on Irish soil. But the stakes are not solely
institutional, as the dramatic masterpieces were also interpreted as playing a
role for Yeats’s own work for the stage. In December 1906, Lady Gregory
wrote of the Abbey Theatre: “We have already decided on doing Greek and
other masterpieces. I would choose these as a part of our schemes of
development. We have acted Moliere because a part of our comedy is
influenced by him, and I would fare some Greek plays because their
performance will help to an understanding of Yeats work” (Gregory quoted in
CL 496). By 1926, Yeats claims in “A Defence of the Abbey Theatre,” this
W. B. Yeats as Translator
45
sort of close link between home-grown work and foreign imports is no longer
necessary: “Lately we have chosen foreign masterpieces without first thinking
of our Irish plays, because an Irish school of drama has been created and
does not need the same anxious fostering” (LAR 206). The degree to which
Yeats appropriated classical elements into his poetry in volumes such as The
Tower and The Winding Stair shows, however, that his engagement with
Sophocles’s plays did play its part in a more general welcoming of classical
inspiration into his work.
According to Lady Gregory, Yeats asserted in 1927 that, with her help,
he had “made the Edipus [sic] a masterpiece of English prose.”5) Here
something more ambitious than merely fashioning a workable, new version is
being signaled. As a “masterpiece of English prose,” Yeats’s rendering would
not only stand on its own, as an independent work of art, but would also
have classic status within an English-language canon. This kind of ambition
may be more characteristic of Yeats’s more “modern” recreation of Oedipus
at Colonus. As George Steiner has argued, a “translator can modernize not
only to induce a feeling of immediacy but in order to advance his own cause
as a writer” (370). In both processes of translation, Yeats felt more
independent when he was dealing with the choruses
— as these were not
submitted to the pressures of plot and a need for a unified action. One of the
resulting choruses that Yeats felt was sufficiently a work of his own, and
therefore decided to include as specimens of his poetry, is “Colonus’ Praise,”
which appeared in The Tower (1928). David Clark has offered a particularly
close reading of how this chorus relates to the precedent of Jebb and
Masqueray’s translations (see chapter 5 of Clark). One of the divergences
from these sources especially singled out by Clark, takes place in the second
stanza. Yeats’s reference to the olive-tree as a “self-sown, self-begotten shape
that gives / Athenian intellect its mastery” (Pl 419) is largely an invention of
his own, drawing more on his own Neoplatonic bent than any textual
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Charles I. Armstrong
evidence related to Sophocles’s play. As Clark points out, this is also an
echo of Yeats’s own work, including for instance “A Prayer for My
Daughter,” where Yeats’s speaker addresses how the soul is “self-delighting, /
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting” (Poems 192).
Yeats
thus
departs
from
Sophocles
in
order
to
emphasize
self-consciousness, making more specifically an allusion to lines from his own
poetry. This should alert us to a particular kind of transcendence of the
foreignizing or mimetic norm of translation, a form of domestication
particularly evident in self-referential verse translation. Matthew Reynolds has
stressed the role of metaphor in such metapoetical instances:
Strangely often, we will discover that the metaphor or metaphors that define
an act of translation emerge out of the text that is being translated. Dryden
thinks of himself as ‘opening’ Virgil’s Aeneid into English because he
thinks of the Aeneid as showing how destiny is ‘opened’ into history.
Byron, faced with Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno, translates after the metaphor
of ‘translation as passion’ because passion is at the heart of the text he is
translating. […] This creative interaction between the source text and the
way it is translated does not always occur in the translation of poetry: not
every ‘poem-translation’ is a ‘poem of translation’. But when it does, it
—
gives rise to texts that have a particular aesthetic charge, and which
for
that reason
subject the idea of ‘translation’ to especially vigorous
—
redefinition. (Reynolds 7)
This calls for another kind of focus regarding the language of translation, and
argues for a form of domestication that is not without impulses from the
foreign source. Rather than focusing exclusively on the equivalences and
differences between the content of original and new version, Reynolds’
approach calls for a heightened awareness of self-reflective interaction with
regard to literary form.
With this in mind, I wish to turn to opening of the first chorus in King
Oedipus. It is rendered as follows by Jebb:
W. B. Yeats as Translator
47
O sweetly-speaking message of Zeus, in what spirit hast thou come from
golden Pytho unto glorious Thebes? I am on the rack, terror shakes my
soul, O thou Delian healer to whom wild cries rise, in holy fear of thee,
what thing thou wilt work for me, perchance unknown before, perchance
renewed with the revolving years: tell me, thou immortal Voice, born of
Golden Hope! (Sophocles 10)
As with all the choruses in both translations of Sophocles, Yeats insists upon
giving his version in verse:
What message comes to famous Thebes from the Golden House?
What message of disaster from that sweet-throated Zeus?
What monstrous thing our fathers saw do the seasons bring?
Or what that no man ever saw, what new monstrous thing?
Trembling in every limb I raise my loud importunate cry,
And in a sacred terror wait the Delian God’s reply. (Pl 372)
The repeated reference to monstrosity, in Yeats’s version, represents a
significant departure from the original. Brian Arkins remarks that “because
Yeats, unlike Sophocles, assumes that the message from the Delphic Oracle
will be one of disaster, he introduces his own notion of an apocalyptic
monster like that of ‘The Second Coming’” (Arkins 134). Certainly the rough
beast of the latter poem, together with a whole panoply of apocalyptical
images going back to the 1890s, is an obvious intertext here. This connection
is strengthened by the fact that Yeats’s references to monstrosity in Oedipus
at Colonus tend to cluster around birth imagery introduced by Yeats (see for
instance Curtis xl). The rough beast of “The Second Coming” is of course
slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born” (Poems 190).
I would like to suggest, however, that Yeats’s own writings on his
Sophoclean translations also represent a significant intertext at this juncture.
Although Yeats’s poetry shows a fascination with unnatural deviation from
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Charles I. Armstrong
the nature and the norms of society, his reflections on literary style repeatedly
tell a story of nature refound. In his introduction to Scribner’s planned deluxe
edition of his works, Yeats writes of trying “to make the language of poetry
coincide with that of passionate normal speech. I wanted to write in whatever
language comes most naturally when we soliloquize, as I do all day long,
upon the events of our own lives or any life where we can see ourselves for
the moment” (Later Essays 212). This emphasis on nature and normality also
suffuses Yeats’s reflections on what he was aiming to do in the Sophoclean
plays. In order to ensure that a wide audience would easily understand their
enactment on the stage, Yeats stresses in his 1931 BBC lecture on an Abbey
theatre production of King Oedipus, he had to ensure that the style of his
versions be as natural as possible: “The subject matter might be strange and
sometimes difficult, but no word might be strange or difficult, nor must I tire
the ear by putting those words in some unnatural order” (LAR 219). Later, in
a short article that appeared in the New York Times early in 1933, he spoke
of early work on the King Oedipus as having “one sole object that the words
should sound natural and fall in their natural order” (LAR 244).
Naturalness, it seems, is all. Unsurprisingly perhaps for the poet who in
“Sailing to Byzantium” wrote of never taking “My bodily form from any
natural thing” (Poems 198), there are however caveats and nuances. Yeats
distinguishes, for instance, his passionate naturalness of speech from that of
Wordsworth’s more everyday ordinariness. The heightened experience aimed
for by the Irish poet will not make do with the quotidian. On a similar note,
Jared Curtis’s close inspection of Yeats’s manuscript materials for his version
of Oedipus at Colonus demonstrates a poet not fully adhering to his publicly
professed principles. Although the first versions typically show a movement
towards a more idiomatic and informal tone, final revisions often veered off in
another direction. Curtis claims that it was the prospect of publishing a written
version of the translation that was the cause of the volte-face completing this
W. B. Yeats as Translator
49
complicated pattern: “it was Yeats’s intent to achieve a natural but also
dignified style of speech, and one better tuned to his own poetic voice, in the
published version of his text” (Curtis xxxv). Thematically, too, Yeats’s view
of Oedipus is one that hardly embraces mere nature or the given. This is
evident in A Vision, where Oedipus is interpreted as an epoch-making
individual on the basis of his solving the riddle of sphinx. A more primitive
civilization is transcended by virtue of Oedipus’s heroic individuality:
Hegel identifies Asia with Nature; he sees the whole process of civilization
as an escape from Nature: partly achieved by Greece, fully achieved by
Christianity. Oedipus-Greece-solved the riddle of the Sphinx-Nature-compelled
her to plunge from the precipice […]. I accept his definition. (A Vision
202-203)
One of the distinctive changes introduced by Yeats’s translations
shortening of the ending of both Sophoclean plays
— the
— is explicable on the
same basis: by removing the lamentations of Antigone and Oedipus, a more
heroic temper is asserted. The plays are about subduing and transcending
nature, rather than giving in to it.
The ending of Oedipus at Colonus is extensively revised at Yeats’s hands
— also emphasized in the one song
Yeats would later translate from Sophocles’s Antigone — is given a new,
in other ways, too. The theme of love
central role. Thus Yeats’s Oedipus tells his daughter that “A word, a solitary
word tells all, and that word is love. No living man could have loved as I
have loved” (Pl 439). The messenger reporting Oedipus’s miraculous death
claims that “Neither did thunderbolt descend nor storm come up out of the
sea, but some messenger carried him away or the foundations of the earth
were riven to receive him, riven not by pain but love” /Pl 440).6) Yeats was
fascinated by this transcendent moment, making Ismene say “Our beloved is
gone down under the earth” (Pl 440) and ascribing to Theseus the words
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Charles I. Armstrong
“Your father is with the Powers under the earth” (Pl 441). This vision of a
divine immersion into the underworld is arguably echoed by Yeats, when he
in letters describes his work with composing the same play. On 31 March
1927, he tells Humbert Wolfe that his correspondence is delayed since “I
have been buried in Oedipus at Colonus, getting it ready for the Abbey
Theatre” (CL 4985). Similarly, two days later
— on April 2 — he asks
forgiveness for neglecting to write earlier to Norah McGuinness: “I have been
sunk in ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ & until today could not lift my head out of it”
(CL 4987). In “The Mermaid,” also published in 1927, Yeats envisaged a
mermaid who ignorantly drew her human love under water, forgetting “in
cruel happiness / That even lovers drown” (Poems 226). The muse may be a
fearful playmate for the poet, but the ideal is a submergence which
that of Oedipus
— grants visionary transcendence rather than doom.
— like
Early on in this essay, I cited Peter Robinson’s notion that a translation
can find a form of equivalence to the original’s “slight angle to the universe.”
Rather than a simple transferal between cultures, the textual traffic between
source text and target text involves negotiations of complex cultural positions.
Thus Sophocles is not simply a representative of Greek values, any more than
Yeats is a simple and unequivocal embodiment of mainstream Irish culture in
the 1920s. The conservatism of Sophocles’ religion in King Oedipus, in effect
endorsing the prophet Tiresias’s passionate critique of a more modern rational
skepticism, clearly struck a chord with a poet disillusioned with the
matter-of-factness of a modern, scientific worldview. Arguably, neither poet
was in line with the mainstream values of their cultures in this respect.
Yeats’s marginalization in a new, Irish state dominated by the prosperous, new
Catholic middle class, also finds an analogy in Oedipus’s position as a
banished and disgraced nobleman, who nevertheless achieves a kind of revenge
over Creon and the Thebans at the end of Oedipus at Colonus.
Other parallels can be drawn. The treatment of political conflict in
W. B. Yeats as Translator
51
Oedipus at Colonus struck a chord with a poet who had recently lived in a
land riven by civil war. Oedipus’s concern with death and old age was
another theme Yeats was attracted to, even while he interpreted the Greek
figure as conforming to his ideal of a subjective hero.7) Furthermore, Oedipus
evoked for Yeats, “by a strange freak of imagination,” the “blind Gaelic poet
Raftery wandering with his blessings and his curses from road to road” (LAR
221). Read in tandem, Sophocles’s two plays enact a single trajectory where
the protagonist at first is alienated from his presumed home in Thebes, then
is cast out wandering, before finally finding a resting place and new home of
sorts in the outskirts of Athens. Yeats’s original impetus to translate King
Oedipus had come out of a concern with how censorship made it impossible
to stage the play on an English stage. Inspired by a surprising American
— a performance Yeats attended during a visit to Notre Dame, on
15 May 1899 — he wanted to show that Ireland was a receptive nation,
example
sufficiently cultured to perform such a classic play. In the brief article
entitled “A Plain Man’s Oedipus,” Yeats described with pride how antiquity
had been welcomed on an Irish stage: “At the Abbey Theatre we play both
Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, and they seem at home there”
(LAR 245). The metaphor of “home” is apposite, not least for being one
Yeats took from the very plays he had translated. According to the last of
several metaphors we have seen at play in this reading of Yeats’s renderings
of Sophocles, then, a translation can be conceived of as a search for a new
home, a new domesticity, after wandering in foreign lands. Modern translation
cannot simply stick to literal solutions, if it is to issue in credible literary
texts. Yet the venture away from the origin
modern or the unnatural
— cannot
— towards the idiomatic, the
be completely untrammeled and free.
Never quite at home, and yet always on the search for a resting place where
a kind of belonging will take place, literary translation
Yeats
— as conceived of by
— is like the travel-wearied, aged Oedipus on the road.
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Charles I. Armstrong
Notes
1) In 1990, Brian Arkins complained of “the extraordinary neglect that Yeats’s King Oedipus and
Oedipus at Colonus have suffered at the hands of Classicists and English scholars alike” (Arkins,
125-126).
2) This is the so-called “Rex 2” version, without Yeats’s subsequent emendations, as it is
reproduced on page 200 of Yeats, The Writing of ‘Sophocles’ King Oedipus.’
3) See for instance Longenbach, “Modern Poetry.”
4) Letter to Dorothy Wellesley, quoted in Arkins, 124. Yeats would later explain the contrast
between Shakespeare and the Greeks in less value-laden terms: “A Greek play, unlike a
Shakespearian play, is the exposition of one idea” (LAR 221).
5) Yeats to Lady Gregory on 11 Feb 1927, according Gregory’s journal entry, quoted in David R.
Clark and James B. McGuire, “The Writing of Sophocles’ King Oedipus,” in W. B. Yeats, The
Writing of ‘Sophocles’ King Oedipus, 38.
6) Jebb here has “the nether adamant, riven for him in love, without pain” (Sophocles 78).
7) On this topic, see Frederic D. Grab, “Yeats’s ‘King Oedipus’,” in The Journal of English and
Germanic Philology, 71.3 (July 1972): 336-354.
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Manuscript peer-review process:
receipt acknowledged: Oct. 25, 2014.
revision received: Apr. 5, 2015.
publication approved: Apr. 25, 2015.
Edited by: Young Suck Rhee