Translation Review
Number Sixty-Seven • 2004
The University of Texas at Dallas
TRANSLATION REVIEW
No. 67, 2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial: Reviewing Translations: A History To Be Written . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
Rainer Schulte
Interview with William O’Daly
Martin Blackman
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
Making Do with Less: La Fontaine in English
Robert S. Dupree
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Variations on a Theme: Legge, Waley, and Pound Translate Ode VIII from the Chinese Shi Jing . . . . . . . .27
Robert E. Kibler
Interview with Thom Satterlee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
John DuVal
Transliteration or Translation of Biblical Proper Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41
Jože Krašovec
En Attendant le Vote des Bêtes Sauvages, by Ahmadou Kourouma: A Comparison of Two
English Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
Judith Schaefer
BOOK REVIEW
The New Covenant. Commonly Called the New Testament. Vol. 1: The Four Gospels
and Apocalypse. Newly Translated from the Greek and Informed by Semitic Sources,
tr. by Willis Barnstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72
Reviewed by Thalia Pandiri
CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
EDITORIAL: REVIEWING TRANSLATIONS:
A HISTORY TO BE WRITTEN
By Rainer Schulte
O
n October 6, 1996, The New York Times Book
Review published a special issue celebrating its 100year anniversary with reprints of 76 reviews covering the
years from 1896 to 1991. The international scene of writers was represented by seven authors: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1921); Sigmund
Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920);
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (1925); Adolf
Hitler, My Battle (1933); Franz Kafka, The Trial (1937);
Albert Camus, The Plague (1948); and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia (1991).
Charles McGrath, then editor of the Book Review,
points out that most of the reviews in this special issue
have been cut from their original lengths, and John
Gross, who was an editor of the Book Review in the
1980s, retraces the history of The New York Times Book
Review. Any reader who approaches these reviews would
have to assume that all of the books listed in this retrospective were written by English-speaking authors. There
is no indication anywhere that some of these books were
originally written in a foreign language. Not one of the
titles carries the name of a translator, and in only one of
the reviews is the translator mentioned. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan wrote the review of Rebuilding Russia (1991)
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and he compliments the
translator, Alexis Klimoff, for his “wonderfully well
translated” work. Beyond those three words of praise and
the mention of Solzhenitsyn’s translator, all other
reviews of international authors present a yawning
absence of translators.
In that respect, the practice of reviewing or not
reviewing translations has not changed much during the
last two decades. Currently, most issues of The New York
Times Book Review seemed to have solved the problem:
hardly any foreign work in translation finds its way into
the review. At a time when we have drastically failed to
understand that a language is a way of interpreting the
world, it would be of great value to use reviews of foreign literatures in translation, not only to introduce the
writer in each case, but also to raise our awareness of
how other cultures have developed interpretive perspectives that are drastically different from our own. As I was
perusing the many reviews in the retrospective of Book
Review, it occurred to me that it would be a valuable
Translation Review
scholarly activity to write a history of how international
writers have been reviewed in the United States in the
various newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals.
Such a study could shed some light on how reviews may
have furthered our understanding of the foreignness of
other cultures and whether such reviews could serve as a
meaningful tool to enter into the refined thinking and
perceptions of people from other countries.
As editor of Translation Review, I have learned that
translators are reluctant to review translations of other
translators. Many reasons can be quoted for that reluctance. Furthermore, the entire field of reviewing translations continues to be a tabula rasa. The simple questions
recur over and over again: Who is qualified to review a
translation, and what specific linguistic, semantic, cultural, and historical aspects should be dealt with in a meaningful review?
To the best of my knowledge, no comprehensive
anthology of reviews of translations has ever been envisioned as a publishable project. Such an anthology could
be the starting point for the development of strategies to
review translations. Simultaneously with this assessment,
it would be appropriate to start a study of the reviews
that are published in many international newspapers and
journals in foreign countries, such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Monde, Le magazine littéraire, to mention publications from only two
countries. I refer to both France and Germany because
they publish the greatest number of books in translation.
A critical investigation of how translations are reviewed
in foreign newspapers and journals might provide us
with some guideposts toward a revitalization and expansion of reviewing translations from foreign languages
into English.
1
INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM O’DALY
By Martin Blackman
W
illiam O’Daly is a poet, translator, teacher, and
editor who, in addition to having recently completed a historical novel set in China, has rendered some of
the finest English translations of the revered Chilean poet
and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. In an effort that
spanned fifteen years, O’Daly was the first to translate
six of the great poet’s late and posthumous works: Still
Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden, The
Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, and The Book of
Questions. He resides in the foothills of Northern
California with his wife and daughter.
Martin Blackman is a poet who became fascinated with
literary translation while he was an intern at Copper
Canyon Press and completing his MFA in Creative
Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Through
his experience at the Press, he met William O’Daly and
encountered Copper Canyon’s Neruda series.
An abridged version of this interview appears online in
the Poems Aloud section of the Copper Canyon Press
web site.
MB: How did your interest in poetry, and particularly in
Neruda, develop?
WO’D: In my senior year of high school, I was taken
with Shakespeare’s sonnets and was particularly moved
by Walt Whitman’s
“When Lilacs Last in
the Courtyard
Bloomed.” My mother bought me an
anthology of poetry
called The Joy of
Words, which I read
cover to cover a few
times. But it wasn’t
until the late spring
of 1970, when I was
a freshman at UC
Santa Barbara, that I
truly took the plunge.
The Vietnam War
and student protests
Photo by Kristine O’Daly
2
were raging, and I was in the midst of sea changes in my
political and social values, which included turning away
from the study of economics and toward poetry — the
reading and writing of it. I was enthralled by the shorter
poems of Kenneth Rexroth, and one afternoon on my
way to Economic Statistics class, I detoured into an auditorium, from which came a most beautiful voice. As I
remember, the image was something about the sea giving
the sky its blue. Rexroth was sitting regally in a corner
near the stage, orchestrating a reading of four women
poets. I never did make it to Statistics. A couple of weeks
later, I encountered Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a
Song of Despair in the UCSB bookstore. Reading it was
an eerie, wonderful homecoming — to a place I had
never been. Rexroth’s work and those four women poets,
as well as Neruda’s passionate poems, were galvanizing
experiences for me.
MB: Neruda had such a strong political aspect, when he
wasn’t writing about love or the magic of life as
expressed in nature, and you were discovering him at just
the time when there was so much hope and strife in
Chile. His democratically elected friend, President
Salvador Allende, was instituting economic reforms
against the wishes of the Chilean upper classes and the
U.S. government. Meanwhile, Neruda was serving as
ambassador to France, at Allende’s behest, all the while
pining for his beloved Chile and wishing to witness firsthand the long-awaited social revolution. Was the political
situation what ultimately inspired you to translate
Neruda?
WO’D: I didn’t start translating Neruda until a few
years later, not long before the September 11, 1973, coup
in Chile and his death twelve days later. Though I was
following the political situation there, it had little or
nothing to do with my decision to translate. I had taken
at least one seminar from Rexroth and visited him a couple of times, and he stressed that if a young man wanted
to learn to write poems, he should translate as an integral
part of the practice and discipline of poetry.
MB: Well, you certainly responded to Rexroth’s suggestion.
Translation Review
WO’D: I spoke some Spanish, so I started with several
of the early 20th-century Spanish poets, my favorite
being Lorca, his ballads, which I found nearly impossible
to translate. When Neruda’s Residence on Earth came
out in Donald Walsh’s translation in 1973, I tackled that
book, looking to improve on Walsh’s music, which I
found a little flat in places. I also tried to improve on the
wonderful job W.S. Merwin had done with Twenty Love
Poems. Ah, hubris! My skill level at the time certainly
was not up to improving on either Walsh or Merwin. And
I was not intent on becoming a translator.
MB: But you were deepening your knowledge of poetry
and language, two languages in fact, and you were consuming the masters. How did you discover the original
books that you translated?
WO’D: I found what became the first book of the series
in 1976, in Modesto, California, where I was living. Two
or three times a week, I would drive the hundred miles
south to study with Philip Levine at Cal State Fresno.
Levine spoke about translation in a vein similar to
Rexroth, about the practice of it. A very kind Spanish
professor there, José A. Elgorriaga, was also a proponent
of translation. Levine mentioned that he was working on
the Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, in collaboration with
Ernesto Trejo, a budding San Joaquin Valley poet. One
afternoon I found myself in the Spanish-language section
of the Stanislaus County Library, and I left with a book
by Neruda that I’d never heard of before, Aún. It was a
different Neruda from the one I knew, less effusive, more
crystalline and spare, at times more delicate.
MB: It’s no wonder, considering the power of the work.
The L.A. Times Book Review described it by saying,
“Neruda’s lyricism wakes us up, even in the face of
death, to the connections we have with our land, inner
and outer.”
WO’D: In 1983, after holding the manuscript twice for
a total of three years, one New York publishing house
declined to publish Aún, or Still Another Day, as I call it.
Copper Canyon Press, who had been the second bidder,
succeeded in acquiring the rights to publish it. Sam
Hamill called me to ask about other Neruda titles I might
be interested in translating after Still Another Day. I had
begun entertaining the idea of trying La rosa separada,
which later became The Separate Rose, and discovered
in libraries and catalogues four other titles out of the
fourteen final books of Neruda’s, which include Still
Another Day.
Translation Review
MB: That must have been an exciting process, the sense
of discovery and knowing you were the first to translate
those words into English. Did you go to Chile or Isla
Negra as part of the endeavor?
WO’D: When I first began work on Aún, my intention
wasn’t to translate it for publication. Even as I became
more involved in its rhythms and imagery and began to
think in terms of publishing the translation, I was aware
that Neruda was dead and that the dictator Augusto
Pinochet was in power. The coup was four or five years
old, and Santiago was by all reports “stable,” but there
were reports of people still being tortured and killed.
MB: Thousands were hung or shot for having the
“wrong” political alliances. I remember reading about the
horrible mass murder scene after that coup. It was in an
athletic stadium, of all places.
WO’D: Most of that happened during and in the immediate aftermath of the coup, though people were still
being hunted down. You may remember that the Chilean
opposition leader and former foreign minister Orlando
Letelier and his U.S. aide, Ronni Moffit, a civil rights
activist, were killed by a car bomb in 1976, on Embassy
Row in Washington, D.C., of all places. That’s why I
didn’t spend much time pondering a trip to Chile. At that
time, I would have had no business being there, and
would have only endangered myself and particularly
anyone gracious enough to host me. I’ve had the great
pleasure of meeting or hosting Chilean poets and writers
on their visits to the U.S., but I still haven’t been there. I
want to go and spend a few months, or more.
MB: Now it is not only peaceful, but I understand some
real reconciliation has taken place. Some cultural
exchange group should provide that trip for you now.
You deserve as much.
After doing many of his Asian translations, Arthur Waley
expressed no interest in going to Asia. He felt it would
destroy his sense of those lands and ancient worlds he
had gleaned through their poets. He didn’t want to spoil
the experience of his imagination, his sense of historical
landscape. Do you have any similar inhibitions about visiting Chile?
WO’D: I’m not aware of feeling the way Waley did,
and I’ve known for some time that the Chile of the late
3
sixties and the seventies is long gone. For Chile, overall,
that’s probably a good thing. But I’m also pretty sure that
it’s not the same place it was in the early to mid-twentieth century, when it earned the epithet “Land of the
Poets.” All the same, poetry appears to be very much
alive there, and I would love to visit Neruda’s old haunts,
particularly Isla Negra, and also Tierra del Fuego, Easter
Island, the Maipo Valley; as you see, the itinerary is
coming together!
MB: How would you describe your “relationship” with
the poet?
WO’D: He puts up with me and never has a harsh word
to say. But, of course, he died a few years before I found
Aún (Still Another Day), so my relationship with him
exists in my head. I’ve heard that he was generous with
his translators whom he corresponded with and met,
most notably Alastair Reid. He used to say, don’t just
translate me, improve me. How genuine he was being is
anyone’s guess, but on occasion a translator can interpret
such a statement too literally. Mr. Reid isn’t one to make
that mistake, and I’ve always admired and am grateful
for his Neruda work, the quality and scope of it. As a
translator, I respond to the original poem, to my experience of that poem, using my senses, drawing on my
imagination, my skills and as much knowledge of the
poet and his times as is available to me — that is, the
body of the poet’s work, his personal, cultural, social,
and political milieu, and the traditions on which he
draws. No amount of information is too much, and any
shard might inform the translation of a poem or passage.
My intent is to render the original poem as clearly as I
can, while coming as close as possible by staying out of
the way. It’s a practice not unlike tai chi. In the literary
sense, it’s a search for equivalents, close approximations,
or at worst, effective substitutions, from the level of diction, to the imagery, to the musical properties of the original. I’ve also thought of myself as a fellow musician,
one who covers a particular recording composed by don
Pablo and on which he plays lead guitar.
MB: It must be disappointing in one way and satisfying
in another when you have to replace one culture’s colloquialism or idiom with that of another. Can you give an
example of where a phrase common to Chileans or
Spanish-speaking people just wouldn’t work in English
and you had to do something so different from the original, but still capture the spirit and music of Neruda’s
intention as best you could to bridge the cultural lan-
4
guage gap?
WO’D: Neruda can be difficult to translate, and often is,
but the difficulty is rarely due to the presence of regional
colloquialisms or highly idiomatic language. The language of his poetry is very much Castilian, the mother
tongue of the Spanish-speaking literary world. Chile has
always been the most European of South American countries, and generally one finds far more colloquial language in Mexican or Cuban poets, for instance.
On the other hand, the first clause of the first line of the
first book, Aún, gave me fits:
Hoy es el día más, el que traía
una desesperada claridad que murió.
In producing the first draft, that literal “crib” or “trot,” I
rolled my eyes, stuck my tongue way into my cheek and
wrote “Today is the day that is the mostest, ….” “Más” is
afforded much flexibility, in terms of shades of meaning
and syntax, in the language, and here Neruda was
exploiting that flexibility to the utmost, in a way that
sounds quite natural to the Spanish speakers I’ve asked
about it. After completing the first three or four full
drafts of the book, I arrived at
Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
In the context of the book, today is a special day, the day
the poet will say his goodbyes, but today is like any
other day, and in some sense all days are today and today
is all days. This perspective comes to fruition when we
finally arrive at The Book of Questions, in which Neruda
claims this perspective in no uncertain terms.
How many weeks are in a day
and how many years in a month?
or
Yesterday, yesterday I asked my eyes,
when will we see each other again?
MB: What was it like to climb into Neruda’s consciousness?
WO’D: After I became serious about translating him, I
had the feeling of participating in something much larger
Translation Review
than myself. It was absorbing, if not a bit intimidating. I
was roughly 33 when Still Another Day came out.
Neruda was 65 when he published Aún, his career as a
published poet was going on fifty years, he had been a
Chilean consul in Singapore, Burma, and Ceylon, among
other countries, had been forced into political exile from
Chile, had traveled the world, and had been a
spokesman, in his poetry and otherwise, for many of the
Chilean people, particularly the disadvantaged. They
called him poeta del pueblo, Poet of the People, and
other affectionate terms. On the other hand, I was a kid
from LA, had been fortunate enough to study with some
wonderful poets and critics, had worked as a literary
magazine editor and a teacher, and had cofounded a literary press. I spoke only for myself, had never experienced
the scents of the southern Chilean winter, of the chestnut
trees or the araucarias of Tierra del Fuego, nor had I tasted the red wine of the Maipo Valley. But more significantly, Neruda wrote Aún as a farewell to the Chilean
people. He had been diagnosed with cancer, and his final
fourteen books compose that farewell. The six that I’ve
translated deal roundly, but only occasionally in a direct
way, with preparing himself to die. They are courageous
books, and I allowed myself to be drawn deep into that
consciousness. As a young man, I found it encompassing,
revelatory, and humbling.
MB: Were there particular books or poems in which you
felt more fully able to engage him than others from
among the books you translated?
WO’D: It would be tricky for me to say which I felt or
now feel closest to. I chose those six books because I
was able to engage each one, on its own terms, and
thought that they were the finest of the final fourteen
and, as a cycle or suite of books, worked well together to
circumscribe and reprise a huge amount of aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic territory. In some cases, Neruda was
doing things that he had wanted to do for some time or
had explored, to a limited degree, in other books.
Knowing his life was winding down provided him with
the impetus, the authentic emotional, intellectual, and
spiritual constellation required to fulfill those promises to
himself.
I suppose The Sea and the Bells was the most difficult.
MB: That’s interesting, because at least one prominent
review claimed it was the most accessible. Maybe that is
a testimony to your fine work, but why do you think you
Translation Review
found it particularly difficult? Was the range of allusions,
between personal feelings and vast landscapes and
seascapes, what made it more challenging?
WO’D: It came to me unfinished in the sense that
Neruda had titled only a third of the poems before he
died. Who knows whether he would have further revised
the poems, had he lived longer. I found myself wondering, but another factor was that I translated the book during a period when life was difficult for me and changing
rapidly. For much of the process I was broke, living in an
inhospitable environment, and doing hard physical work
to get by. That said, the book is one of the more popular
in the series.
MB: Do you think that your own struggle, your adversity, contributed to your success with it, perhaps because
Neruda’s poems were the singularly outstanding artistic
and intellectually stimulating element in your life at the
time?
WO’D: What you say about artistic and intellectual
stimulation was true for that period, but I’m not at all
sure that the struggles I was having at the time were all
that helpful. I think most would agree, personal struggle
creates the potential for empathy and can teach us about
the ways of the world, if we are willing and ready to
learn. They strengthen a person’s character. And character, Ezra Pound reminds us, has a direct bearing on the
nature and the quality of a person’s poetry. I believe
that’s true of one’s translations as well. It’s doubtful that
the violent sounds and drunken screams coming through
the walls of my room, the loud knocks on my door while
I was trying to work, or the fatigue I felt at night were of
much assistance then. My circumstances improved in the
months before I finished The Sea and the Bells, allowing
me to concentrate better and to spend longer hours on the
book.
At least from a nuts-and-bolts perspective, The Yellow
Heart was the most intriguing to work on, for its purposeful hyperbole and off-the-wall imagery, humorous
narratives, and for the many levels the poems exist on.
MB: I read the “Suburbs” poem from The Yellow Heart
over and over again on a day when I was seeking a work
position that required fitting into a narrow mold. When I
read it, in a moment between disappointment and
despair, it struck me so clearly, so deeply, it brought me
to tears. I read it over and over again, because I felt
5
Neruda understood my feelings about avoiding that
which is soul-deadening. He did it with the utmost clarity
and poetic language.
WO’D: I’m aware of no book like it, and one can say
that about The Book of Questions as well. That said, the
gifted Australian poet Margie Cronin sent me an interesting and occasionally brilliant manuscript of poems that
she composed in loose imitation and homage to The
Book of Questions and Neruda, and I’ve seen many
pages of couplets written in the same vein by people who
were inspired by the book. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a
group of questions that he included in his review of
Neruda’s questions; Loretta Livingston and Dancers
incorporated excerpts in their production “Balances
Too”; and independent filmmaker Antero Alli based one
of his feature-length works on the book. Yet, in my experience, Neruda’s questions are unsurpassed in their delicate ironies and compression, their limpidity, their utter
lack of intrusive self-consciousness, their humor, and
their ease. The poems take shape in the intuitive mind
and in the heart, as the questions accumulate significance
and meaning that remain just beyond our grasp.
MB: Many people find The Book of Questions intriguing. I see the poems in it as inferred aphorisms based on
juxtapositions designed to present a broad representation
of what is beautiful in life. It possesses a consistent style
of nagging, unanswerable questions about existence
through specific details that insist on us looking at life in
terms of its “bigness.” Why do we like this volume so
much?
WO’D: It may be because the book approaches the conditions of, for lack of a better term, the purest poetry.
The poems are constellations of a worldly adult’s version
of childlike questions, endowed with both shrewdness
and wonder — a beguiling weave of rational and irrational elements that openly defies reduction or paraphrase by even the staunchest literary analyst, philologist, psychologist, or deconstructionist. Instead, they
send us inward, searching, as they point inexorably to the
outer world. They’re rooted in the personal, and sometimes in literary allusion or in history, but all evoke a
sense of the koan, of mystery and intimacy.
MB: When you listen to recordings of Neruda reading
his poems, how would you characterize the musicality of
his language?
6
WO’D: Neruda’s voice is often chant-like, in an understated way. One can hear a pensive melancholy or wistfulness, perhaps in part as a product of the rainy skies
and the blend of Spanish and Mapuche languages he
experienced as he grew up in southern Chile. Then again,
when he’s writing in a cataloguing or anaphoric style, as
one finds in The Heights of Macchu Picchu and elsewhere in Canto General, his mythological constructions
or his anger at the exploitation of indigenous tribes and
later of Chilean workers by their own government and
multinational corporations create rolling rhythms that
build and build. He could be matter of fact, he could be
delicate or tender, his voice stepping lightly over the
stones.
Actually, I know of no greater or more natural musician,
in the canon of Spanish-language poetry, than Neruda.
His own voice and the ways in which he articulates his
poems, the patterns of sound, integrate beautifully with
the softnesses and natural movements of the Spanish language. The brilliance of his deceptively simple music in
the Elemental Odes is often overlooked, and I don’t
believe that it can be well translated, not into English or
perhaps any other language. The lines often contain only
a few words and sometimes a single word, yet those
words are usually multisyllabic, such that an interesting
tension exists between the lines’ brevity and the sounds
they modulate or harness. When one translates the odes
into English, the equivalents are often only a single syllable, maybe two, so that an inevitable oversimplification
occurs and the loss of music is more profound than
usual. Yet the odes remain quite moving in the best
English translations.
In The Sea and the Bells, the untitled original poem that
begins “Esta campana rota / quiere sin embargo cantar”
(“This broken bell / still wants to sing”) captures the
sound of a bell tolling. I was able to recreate much of
that tolling, as it builds through the poem. But this is not
always possible. Unfortunately, I know of no recordings
of Neruda reading any of the poems that I’ve translated,
though I would be surprised if some don’t exist, somewhere.
MB: It would be wonderful to find and hear them! How
can a reader hear Neruda’s music when reading the
words?
WO’D: Reading the translations aloud is, by far, the
best way. Reading poetry is a skill we develop by read-
Translation Review
ing a lot of it aloud, closely observing the duration, the
rhythmical and melodic properties, of each line relative
to those around it and to the whole, paying attention to
the way the poem builds. The silences are just as important as the sounds the poem makes. Many poets say that
they compose by reading the poem aloud, sometimes
over and over, and some don’t call a poem finished until
they read it publicly. In that spontaneous moment without “clothes,” the “sheet music” is least susceptible to the
inner ear’s manipulation, to private obfuscations or illusions. That’s when the poem finds its wings or thuds
back to earth. I certainly feel this way and have found it
to be true in relation to my own work.
MB: Did you attempt to capture this music as you went
from one language to the other?
WO’D: Yes, I certainly did attempt to capture Neruda’s
music, per the tolling of bells or whatever sounds and
resonances the original poems express. With the second
book, I learned to read the originals into a tape recorder
and play them back, so that I could hear them. I did the
same with my translations. The process consisted of finding an equivalent or corresponding music in English, one
that evokes a similar emotional set.
MB: Obviously, the readership thinks so. Your translations of Neruda are the most popular series Copper
Canyon Press has published, and it’s a distinction that
has existed for over a decade. But what level of satisfaction do you have with it? They say the artist’s work is
never done. Do you feel you’ve fully evolved a similar
“emotional set” in English, or do you still wrestle with
some of it?
WO’D: Recently, while preparing the second editions of
the last four books, I struggled here and there but wound
up making only a few slight changes. At the moment, I
can’t remember what they were, aside from two typos.
Overwhelmingly, where I still wanted to get closer, say,
in order to bring across a slippery nuance, the larger cost
of making the change wasn’t worth it. Sometimes the
cost would have been the loss of more significant qualities or meanings embodied in the original, and sometimes the cost would have been more to the “high-energy
(musical) construct,” to use Charles Olson’s term, that is
the poem in English.
MB: What is your take on Neruda’s perception of man’s
place in nature and his mystical yearnings?
Translation Review
WO’D: For Neruda, nature is often what happens all
around us, what grows and flourishes apart from us,
because we separate ourselves from it with our selfimportance and delusions, rapacity and greed, arrogance
and wrong-headed views of ourselves as being, by God’s
design, the ultimate beneficiaries of all that nature has to
offer. In The Separate Rose, a book that takes place on
Easter Island, he writes:
Antigua Rapa Nui, patria sin voz,
perdónanos a nosotros los parlanchines del mundo
hemos venido de todas partes a escupir en tu lava,
llegamos llenos de conflictos, de divergencias,
de sangre,
de llanto y digestiones, de guerras y duraznos,
en pequenas hilaras de inamistad, de sonrisas
hipócritas, reunidos por los dados del cielo
sobre la mesa de tu silencio.
Ancient Rapa Nui, motherland without a voice,
forgive us, we ceaseless talkers of the world
come from all corners and spit in your lava,
we arrive full of conflicts, arguments, blood,
weeping and indigestion, wars and peach trees
in small rows of soured friendships, of hypocritical
smiles, brought together by the sky’s dice
upon the table of your silence.
Our mutability, when compared to stone or sky, is a
given, an essential part of what we are. But our separation from nature is of our own doing, a result of neglecting responsibilities that come with being a consuming,
manipulative force. Out of fear, we deny our part in
nature; we seek to conquer or convert the world around
us, imposing our will and too typically fleeing into religious faith as an escape rather than using it as a place
from which to engage, with true humility, questions and
mystery. When we act out of compassion or love, and
seek nothing specific in return, or act in what I would
characterize as the Zen Buddhist sense of doing nothing,
we reclaim our integral place in the landscape.
I would not characterize Neruda as yearning so much for
the mystical, as understood in terms of an intuitive
understanding of God or ultimate reality. He was no
Rumi or William Blake, Evelyn Underhill or Thomas
Merton; he did not attempt to explicitly explore his spirituality. He sought social justice, compassion and love,
7
knowledge and sensual awareness, historical memory,
and a conscious embrace of our contradictions, small
successes and failures as elements of our humanity. Early
on, he was influenced by his countryman Vicente
Huidobro’s creacionismo movement, which advocated
the creation of realities that were strictly poetic. Then it
was the surrealism of André Bréton, and later he turned
toward the mechanisms of myth-making to write The
Heights of Macchu Picchu and other sections of Canto
General, rather than toward the academically acceptable
mythologies of the Greek and Roman worlds. This latter
tendency comes to full flower, I believe, in The Separate
Rose.
MB: I want to ask about how a poem in translation feels
different to you from the original. I would qualify that by
saying that I know scholars of literary translation have
gone back and forth about this, but generally, the knowledgeable and experienced translators feel they’ve captured some essence of the original meaning but have a
sense of flow in the target language that is poetic for that
language. What is your take on that based on your experience?
WO’D: A translator needs to get closer than capturing
some essence of the original meaning, or he is composing something like a version, a la Stephen Berg’s
expressly labeled versions of Anna Akhmatova. And yes,
it’s necessary to create a sense of flow in the target language that approximates the flow of the original and that
is poetry. If one doesn’t compose a viable poem in the
target language, while recreating as closely as possible
the experience of the original — of which denotative and
connotative meanings are a major part — what has he
“brought across”? The words, punctuation, line breaks.
Computers can do that for us, with the added advantage
of occasionally hilarious results.
When I conceive of the nature of an original and a translation, and the relationship between them, I sometimes
see two circles overlapping in the manner of a Morris
Graves painting. Even if we need to view them as overlapping more fully than Graves’ circles tend to, the original and the translation are inevitably two different, independent entities, which share a deeply intimate connection, one that ultimately defies description or analysis:
they are twins, of uncertain or dubious parentage. In his
Memoirs, Neruda says, “I don’t believe in originality…
It is just one more fetish made up in our time… an
electoral fraud.” But now we’re back to politics. …
8
MB: Did translating Neruda refine your Spanish, and do
you continue to translate?
WO’D: It certainly did. I heard Spanish spoken as a boy
while standing quietly in my grandparents’ kitchen, as
they were talking about something they didn’t want me
to comprehend. Before that, I heard the language uttered
by my father, crisp phrases intended for reckless drivers
on LA freeways. Naturally, those experiences sparked
my interest in the language, so I studied it in school. But
Neruda’s vocabulary and phrasing differed markedly
from my grandparents’ and my father’s, and while my
Spanish grammar improved some, my vocabulary
expanded greatly, in a more lyrical direction… I still
don’t speak as well as I’d like, so I’m hoping that spending time in Chile, and in Mexico, too, will change that.
The only substantive translating I’ve done since The
Book of Questions has been from the Chinese of the
T’ang and Sung dynasties, of a few poems and fragments
of poems for a historical novel that the Chinese writer
Han-ping Chin and I coauthored and recently completed.
Han-ping and I collaborated on those translations. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of rendering from the
Chinese. Han-ping provided the literal “crib,” and I took
it from there, asking follow-up questions, often about
cultural connotations and secondary meanings. In the
case of plum blossoms, though, there appear to be as
many connotations, depending on context and era, as the
Inuit languages have words for snow.
MB: I know you were a published poet before you
began translating Neruda. Did you continue to write
poems while translating?
WO’D: Yes, I did, but finding the time, and more so the
creative, psychic, intellectual, and emotional space, to
fully work on my own poems and the translations proved
a challenge at times.
MB: How did your translation work affect your own
poetry?
WO’D: Overall, it was excellent for the quality my
poetry. I gained greater facility and range during the
process, a larger perspective on the world, and it sharpened my eye and ear. For a few years there, however,
getting well into Neruda’s process of dealing with his
impending death, in his poems, had odd, insidious
Translation Review
effects, not always so helpful in doing my own work. To
some degree, internally, in my creative life, I was
enmeshed in a life well beyond my years and direct
experience, the life of someone in a position that I hoped
not to find myself in until I reached 100, and not then if
it could be helped. To circumvent the problem, and in
collusion with other factors, I began to overthink and
overwrite my poetry. I pulled out of it when I finally saw
what was happening. I stopped writing for a while, then
returned after working consciously, and even in my
dreams, to use Neruda’s influence to help free me from
him. The project had become a practice unto itself.
Now that the historical novel is done, I’m back for the
first time in a long while to working primarily and
almost exclusively on my own poems. No collaborations
at present.
MB: You mentioned using Neruda’s influence “even in
your dreams.” Could you recall a dream to explain that
dynamic of your soul brother or soul father in more
detail?
WO’D: The word “use” probably implies more volition
than I can rightfully claim, but one dream has remained
particularly vivid. Just before I began work on The Sea
and the Bells, I dreamt that I was lying in bed, facing the
open closet, when from among the hanging clothes
stepped a boy with dark, slicked-down hair, a white button-down shirt, and black woolen trousers. He reached
out to hand me a glass of water, bright and clear, and I
extended my hand to take it. The boy’s face was
Neruda’s; then the face morphed into mine as a boy, and
began to alternate slowly between them. I don’t recall
touching the glass of water, just both of us extending our
hands and being there. I’ve come to see that one thing
the glass represents is not Neruda’s work or even our
“collaboration,” if you will, but el poeta chileano giving
me the gift of my own work, my voice. I could live up to
the gift first by accepting it with a ready heart, then by
doing whatever was needed to keep my mind and spirit
worthy of the work, that is, the practice of the work.
MB: What is your sense of the importance of Neruda to
Chileans and to Spanish speakers around the world?
WO’D: My sense of it is that he is still el poeta del
pueblo, and although less so than a couple of decades
ago, his poems are memorized and sung. Young suitors
still give their beloveds or each other copies of Twenty
Translation Review
Love Poems, and he is still a major figure in Chile and
throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He’s still the
father figure that elder and younger Chilean poets honor
and must overcome if they are to be accepted on their
own terms, in their own light.
When I first went to work at Microsoft’s International
Group, two Italian interns came to my office one day and
asked if I were the William O’Daly who translated
Neruda. I was shocked. I said that I was, and they just
stared for a few moments, then asked why I was working
there and where was my yacht? Neruda has sold more
books than any other 20th-century Spanish-language
poet, and I believe that he is the most translated modern
poet in the world.
MB: And for English speakers, how significant has
Neruda’s poetry been? What role does it play?
WO’D: It’s been significant in many ways, from being
one of the great poetries of love, longing, and the natural
world, to being an influence on a few generations of
English-speaking poets, particularly U.S. poets in the
1970s and 1980s and an inspiration and a truthful refuge
for norteamericanos who are aghast and ashamed at our
government’s policies toward Latin America, historically,
particularly toward Chile. And much in between. I don’t
see his influence in the most current North American
poetry, not like I used to, but I do believe that the vertical
personal pronoun (“I”) that pervades our poetry could
use yet another infusion of the scope and inclusiveness,
outwardly and inwardly, that one finds in Neruda.
MB: I am sure you are right about that, with all the
solipsistic meanderings that one sees so often now passing for poetry.
You could have written a translation without printing the
original Spanish, but there is something very special
about bilingual editions. Perhaps some people read just
the English or Spanish, but I can’t look at these bilingual
editions and not get into the originals. The bilingual editions also help me appreciate the effort of the literary
translator. But they also encourage cross-cultural understanding in a world dangerously short on such understanding. How do you see the bilingual editions serving
the reading public?
WO’D: First, let me point out that a translator’s purpose
is to make accessible poetry composed in a foreign lan-
9
guage, and by extension his publisher’s mission is to
make it available. I know of no better way to accomplish
those ends than by providing, whenever possible, bilingual editions. The effect they have on people who read
them, on those who to some degree engage both languages, cannot be easily known except on an individual
basis, if then. Still, I have heard testimonials from many
readers who say that having the Spanish on the facing
page sheds light on both languages and on the “experience of the poem” as it lives and breathes in each,
together and separately. Living with a poem composed in
different languages also teaches us something about the
nature of poetry itself. So, yes, I would say that bilingual
editions inevitably support cross-cultural understanding
and would suggest that such understanding usually
results in attitudes of greater tolerance and more vibrant
exchange — which helps to balance our tendency toward
provincialism and self-absorption. When we learn something genuine about another people or culture, we’re
given an opportunity to gain perspective on ourselves.
The clearer and truer our knowledge of ourselves, the
better prepared we are, intellectually and emotionally, to
reach out and contribute something positive to the world,
to our families and friends. To extend that glass of purest
water….
O’Daly, William, translator. The Sea and the Bells, by
Pablo Neruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon
Press, 1988. Introduction; bilingual. Revised second edition, 2002. Original title: El mar y las campanas.
O’Daly, William, translator. Winter Garden, by Pablo
Neruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,
1986. Introduction; bilingual. Revised second edition,
2002. Original title: El jardín de invierno.
O’Daly, William, translator. The Book of Questions, by
Pablo Neruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon
Press, 1991. Introduction; bilingual. Revised second edition, 2001. Original title: El libro de las preguntas.
O’Daly, William, translator. The Separate Rose, by Pablo
Neruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,
1985. Introduction; bilingual. Original title: La rosa separada.
O’Daly, William, translator. Still Another Day, by Pablo
Neruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,
1984. Introduction; bilingual. Original title: Aún.
Bibliography
O’Daly, William, translator. The Yellow Heart, by Pablo
Neruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,
1990. Introduction; bilingual. Revised second edition,
2002. Original title: El corazón amarillo.
10
Translation Review
MAKING DO WITH LESS: LA FONTAINE IN ENGLISH
By Robert S. Dupree
I
Translating La Fontaine must be addictive. Many years
ago, while teaching in France, at a colleague’s request I
worked up a version of one of the fables to serve as a
model for his class. The first led to more, and before
long I had completed a little more than one third of the
whole collection in twelve books. I soon discovered that
I was far from alone. Before I could interest a publisher
in what I had embarked upon, the late Norman Specter’s
complete fables came out in a posthumously published
bilingual edition, and in the same year, Norman
Shapiro’s first volume of selections appeared. In this
crowded field, already occupied by the versions of
Marianne Moore, Francis Duke, and James Michie,
among others, I had little chance of interesting a commercial publisher, so I halted my project. Nevertheless,
the exercise taught me a great deal about verse-to-verse
translation, an activity I have indulged in since my
undergraduate days. It can be a great pleasure or a great
trial. Practiced for its own sake, poetic translation offers
the entertainment of a sophisticated and challenging
word game. Though reminiscent of a crossword puzzle, a
translation exercise is different at one key point: there is
no guarantee that a word or phrase exists to fit the blank
spaces.
Over the years, I had evolved a set of ad hoc principles for this kind of craft, and the attempt to render a
large number of poems by the same author gave them a
sort of critical mass. The first is self-evident: verse-toverse translation implies replicating the metrical and
rhyming patterns of the source, or at least their near
equivalents. It should result in a poem that renders not
only the meaning of the original but also as much as possible of its style and idiom. Furthermore, the end product
should be a poem in its own right, capable of standing
independently of the source, yet without attempting to
conceal their relationship. Formal patterns, even more
than verbal fidelity, are essential components of this
implied indebtedness.
In the case of a writer like La Fontaine, one can
argue that the style is the man in a more than usual
sense, because he presents himself as a translator in a
long tradition of translators. Indeed, one might note that
Translation Review
the fable tradition is one of incessant translation and
recasting: the oldest surviving examples come from
Babylonia in the sixth century BC, and they must themselves have been preceded by ancient prototypes. The socalled Aesopian fables are themselves a series of derivations and imitations, preserved in collections from the
fourth century on and usually written in prose rather than
verse. Roman imitators, principal among them Phaedrus,
were key to their transmission to the West; and it is in
Latin that they begin to appear predominantly in verse. It
is also the Latin tradition that makes of the fable a
favorite school text, perhaps inevitably so given their
didactic character. In addition to these sources, there is
an oriental strain that goes back to India and China and
was transmitted through Arabic sources to the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance. This vast international tradition is what La Fontaine refers to as Aesop, although his
principal debt is to Phaedrus and to Phaedrus’ sixteenthcentury translators. Like Shakespeare, La Fontaine seldom invents fresh material; his contribution resides almost
entirely in what he makes of what he has inherited.
To be original in such an ancient literary form, one
must develop a distinctive style. This is what makes La
Fontaine’s versions stand out. It is for this that he has
become renowned as the most noteworthy fabulist in
European literature, a reputation that reaches beyond
even his ranking among the great French classical writers
of the seventeenth century. Corneille, Racine, Boileau —
the English-speaking world knows them mostly by reputation. But it is familiar with La Fontaine because he
manages to penetrate linguistic, historical, and cultural
barriers. The Latin fabulists sharpened the satirical tone
of the fable; La Fontaine added to it urbanity and a certain philosophical touch. It is wit, above all, that characterizes his style. Not far behind, however, is his use of
verse; he is an obvious master of French metrics.
His distinction as a metricist is, in fact, an inseparable aspect of his achievement, because it is the meter that
gives the wit its focus. Meter, in the hands of a skillful
writer, concentrates rather than dilates, pulls words into a
convergence and, through rhythm, gives their meaning
extra dimensions, affective or ironic. Meter always leads
language somewhere that it doesn’t especially want to
go, but properly used, makes of this tension between the
11
natural rhythm of the phrase and the imposed rhythm of
verse a source of extraverbal complexity. That is the element one must seek to preserve in translating; it is, of
course, the most difficult to render successfully. In my
opinion, a proper version of La Fontaine requires a strict
adherence to metrics. The most brilliant attempt at recreating La Fontaine’s fables in another language will fail to
reproduce his peculiar virtues as a writer if it ignores this
principle. The result may be excellent in its own right, a
valuable contribution to the ongoing tradition of the
fable, but it will not give us La Fontaine’s true wit to
advantage dressed.
The most prominent feature of La Fontaine’s verse is
his use of lines of variable length. In all other respects,
he follows the strict rules of metrics such as they had
evolved by the second half of the seventeenth century.
The fable was far less esteemed than the more prestigious genres of epic and tragedy. Fabulists, therefore,
could enjoy some leeway in performance and make use
of certain devices inherited from the by now discredited
“baroque” poetry of the earlier half of the century. What
saved the fable from being neglected entirely was the
moral lesson it was supposed to inculcate. This sententiousness does not appeal much to readers any longer,
and it is more often imaginative catalyst than didactic
goal for fabulists of any era, whatever they may claim to
be doing. But because the fable was a less serious genre
than, say, Racine’s tragedy or even Boileau’s formal
verse satire, La Fontaine had an opportunity to innovate.
He managed to use the simple device of line variation in
a way that made a classical style possible for a minor literary genre in which the high language of epic and tragic
art was deemed out of place. How did he contrive to do
so?
The language of French classicism is direct and
clear, marked by an elegant simplicity. No extraneous
elements are allowed, and in a writer like Jean Racine,
the vocabulary itself shrinks to a kind of verbal minimalism. The key to La Fontaine’s success is variable verse
length. It allows him to avoid the kind of padding that is
the first temptation for every poet seeking to fill out a
line. When this poet has said all he needs to say, he
stops. The line ends there. The result is economy, speed,
naturalness, and clarity. Nevertheless, this freedom to let
the verse be shaped by the meaning is not the only benefit of variation. The length of the line can also swell or
shrink without warning; the rhyming pattern, confined to
couplets in the more serious genres, can, in the same
manner, be varied to avoid appearing forced. It is this
tension between the strict rules of French classical verse
12
and the apparent waywardness of the lyrical ode that
gives La Fontaine’s verse its playful seriousness and provides a fertile ground for his wit. Unlike the couplets of
the classical alexandrine, his varied line lengths and
rhyming patterns work in counterpoint to his phrasing,
now acting to isolate and emphasize a statement, now to
nuance it, now to give it an ironic twist, now to make it
pause midway through enjambment. To my way of thinking, the greatest error in translating La Fontaine is to
neglect his rigorous freedom, a paradoxical combination
of strict adherence to the rules of French versification
and a naturalness of phrase that give scope for his wit.
Archaisms for the sake of rhyme, unidiomatic or oldfashioned idioms used to fill out a rhythm, too obvious
an attempt to be clever or “poetic” — all are fatal to a
close approximation of his style.
Versification in French and English
A translator must recognize from the start that French
and English are characterized by quite different rhythms.
Furthermore, these differences have an impact on their
respective metrical systems. French is less staccato than
English, and French verse tends to move in a more fluid
fashion. French syllables, pronounced in groupings
formed by liaison (the smooth blending of the end of one
word with the beginning of the next) are also pronounced
more evenly and distinctly than their English equivalents.
For that reason, French metric is governed strictly by the
number of syllables in the line, because there is none of
the slurring or weakening of syllables that one encounters in the stress-governed pronunciation of English, in
which syllable-counting, though sometimes attempted by
poets such as Marianne Moore, is not readily perceptible
to the ear.
English and French are both marked by a large number of monosyllables, but their effects on rhythm are
very different in the two languages. One of the most
admired lines in all of French literature (from Racine’s
Phèdre) is made up entirely of monosyllables:
Le jour n’est pas plus pur que le fond de mon coeur.
(The day is not more pure than the depths of my
heart)
I have rendered this line word-for-word in English, but
the translation, while faithful, has none of the appeal of
the original. That is perhaps because almost none of the
vowels in my English version are repeated, whereas in
French the phrase is modulated by assonance and by the
Translation Review
rising and sinking pattern of the vowel sequence, which
mimics the meaning. (The middle of the tongue rises in
the course of movement from “ou” to “u” in the first half
of the line and then lowers progressively from the nasal
“on” to the deeper “oeu” of the last word in the second
half, echoing the progression from the elevation of sunlight to the hidden depths of the heart.) Of course, comparable effects might be obtained in English with a less
brutal one-for-one rendition, but there remains an important difference in rhythm between the two lines.
Using the same example, let us look at the way a
classical French hexameter or “alexandrine” verse is
divided by its caesura. There is an obligatory main pause
after the sixth syllable, splitting the line precisely in two,
and each hemistich or half-line is further divided by a
secondary pause:
Le jour | n’est pas plus pur || que le fond | de mon coeur.
French sentences are pronounced in a series of rising
contours; each phrase that makes up a clause moves
higher in pitch until the climax of the sentence is reached
— the key word that completes its meaning — and then
the pitch plunges in the final phrase. The standard
alexandrine consists of four stresses. Thus, the stresses
fall on “jour,” “pur,” “fond,” and “coeur.” Each of these
words is marked by a pitch higher than that of its preceding syllables, except for the last, which is lower than all
the rest. Within each group, there is a smooth rhythm
that leads to a phrasal climax, and succeeding phrases
seem to lead evenly to the most emphatic word in the
sentence before the last phrase drops to signal that the
statement has reached completion. The English sentence,
however, consists of a series of falling rather than rising
pitches, the result of a tendency to place the stress on the
first syllable of a word rather than, as French does, on
the last.
My English version of Racine’s line is a hexameter
as well, and one can sense right away that in English,
which has more frequently placed stresses, a twelve-syllable line with a central pause tends to be heard as two
successive trimeters. For that reason, the hexameter is
usually avoided by all but a small number of poets,
because it tends to break in half. Sir Philip Sidney’s initial sonnet in his “Astrophil and Stella” sequence succeeds in avoiding this effect by constantly varying the
caesura so that it seldom falls in the middle of the line:
Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pity on my pain... .
Translation Review
Incidentally, my limping word-for-word rendering of
Racine’s verse tends not to end up in halves, as it would
were its rhythms uniform, but in an awkward pentameter:
The day | is not | more pure | than the depths | of my
heart.
That is, one hears three iambs followed by two anapests
as a total of five stresses, and the whole line as a total of
five rather than six feet.
In the French alexandrine, the pauses within the halflines do not divide their respective sections equally. In
my Racinian example, the first hemistich is split in a 2/4
ratio, the second in a 3/3 ratio. All the rhythmic variety
of the alexandrine resides in these half-lines, although
when a whole sentence stretches over several verses or
couplets, then the melodic contours of the language offer
further, larger-scale variation. Without these two possibilities, classical French verse would soon turn monotonous, but the opportunity for variation is severely
restricted even so.
The standard verse length in French is the hexameter,
with four stresses; that in English is the pentameter, with
five stresses. The consequence is that the French line is
always equally divided, whereas the English line is
always unequally divided, by its caesura. Because it has
an uneven number of stresses, the English line can never
sound equally split in two, even if the main pause should
fall after the fifth syllable. The greater number of stresses
in the English iambic pentameter may have something to
do with our treating it as equivalent in weight and dignity to the alexandrine in French, but it is worth noting that
both Italian and Spanish tend to use an eleven-syllable
line with a stress on the tenth syllable as their standards,
thus conforming more to the English pattern. Italian and
Spanish, both of which give each syllable full weight, as
in French, are nevertheless closer to English in stress patterns. French has a peculiar rhythm that accounts for its
longer line, and each language has its own very different
intonation, so that the means for achieving variety is also
different in each verse system.
Whereas French poets work with the hemistich as
unit, English poets work in terms of the foot. Variation in
English is achieved not only by varying the placement of
the caesura but also, on a smaller scale, by dropping an
unstressed syllable in the initial iambic foot, adding an
unstressed syllable to the beginning of an iambic foot, or
inverting the order of stressed and unstressed syllables.
As a result, the so-called iambic pentameter line can vary
from as few as nine to as many as twelve (or possibly
13
more) syllables. Standard English verse is like an accordion. To vary line length in French is to vary the number
of syllables; to do so in English is to vary the number of
stresses. Still, one must acknowledge that syllable-counting and stress-counting play central roles in both languages. The real problem that arises in rendering French
alexandrines into English pentameter resides in the simple fact that the standard French line divides exactly in
half, whereas the English line does not.
The consequence for a translator of La Fontaine is
that variations of line length have different effects in the
two languages. Because twelve syllables of French (leaving aside for a moment questions of stress and the accordion-like English line) are perceived as being equivalent
to ten syllables of English, one must always be prepared
to lose two syllables per line when translating. Therefore,
a French decasyllabic becomes the equivalent of an
English tetrameter, and French octosyllable becomes
English trimeter. The English translator has to make do
with fewer syllables, a problem when a version in another language often requires more words than the original
to render the same meaning. When one turns to the number of stresses per line, the situation is reversed. Here, at
least, is compensation for the loss of two syllables,
because one gains an additional stress for each line of
English. At the same time, a new problem arises. What is
even in French becomes odd in English. The four stresses of the alexandrine are one less than the English pentameter’s five. The French decasyllabic line, which tends
to contain three stresses, contrasts with the English
tetrameter, which has four, and so on. One is always
moving from a balanced to an unbalanced system and
vice versa. Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that
the translator who wishes to be consistent in handling La
Fontaine’s characteristic varying line-lengths will have to
forgo certain features in the original and seek to find
other ways of replicating the relationship of meter and
meaning.
The Prevalence of Rhymes
Equally if not more problematic is the question of rhyme.
Anyone who has ever tried to do a verse translation of a
Petrarchan sonnet knows how difficult it can be to find
two sets of four rhyming words for the octave. Italian
and French abound in rhymes; by comparison, English is
impoverished. In French, this very abundance has been
the occasion for yet another form of restraint: the classical alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. There
is no equivalent at all for this system in English, nor
14
could there be without imposing impossible restrictions
on the rhyme-starved poet. A word ending in mute “e” is
considered feminine (even if it is grammatically masculine). Otherwise, it is masculine. At one time in the history of the French language, when this letter was actually
pronounced, the difference between them was audible. A
masculine rhyme was one that ended in a stressed syllable, a feminine rhyme one that ended in a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable. Whether as succeeding
couplets or as pairs of interlaced rhymes, these two types
must alternate. Nor is this the only rhyming convention
that distinguishes French practice. A word ending in “z”
or “s” or “x” can rhyme only with another that terminates with a letter from the same group. Although there
is no rule that prescribes their sequence in the manner
required of masculine and feminine rhymes, they too can
be either masculine or feminine and must alternate in the
same way, although, thankfully, plural masculine rhymes
are not required to alternate exclusively with plural feminine rhymes. To seek to replicate this structure in English
would be absurd, and it can be serenely ignored by the
translator.
Wit and Humor
Finally, there is the question of that most volatile of elements, wit. Some jokes translate, some do not. Some do
not even travel far from their birthplace, even though
remaining in the same language. The translator wants his
La Fontaine to sound as witty in English as in French,
but what to do about wit that is too language-specific to
be conveyed in other terms? Here, there can be no general solution, but suffice it to say that if La Fontaine is to
keep his wit intact in English, it should be as a
Frenchman. One should be careful about modernizing or
naturalizing when dealing with phenomena that are doubly remote both historically and culturally. If the fox in
the fable is said to be a Gascon or a Norman, it is better
not to try and make him into a Texan or a Scot. If the
original requires a footnote, then the translation will too.
Anachronisms in translation tend to be jarring, even
when they seem appropriate; in the end, the goal is
somehow to capture the tenor or tone of the original, to
render humor when it is present but not to turn it into
quaintness or cleverness for its own sake, just as one
should avoid padding out a line or creating an awkward
phrase for the sake of preserving a rhyme.
These, then, were the guiding principles that I felt
should govern my efforts at translating the fables. I soon
discovered that I was not able to follow them in every
Translation Review
case, but they did prove helpful in providing some consistency to my attempts. In seeking appropriate English
equivalents, one has to define the conventions of transport: what can be carried over and what cannot? What is
reasonable and convincing and what is not? In the case
of La Fontaine’s variable lines, some unanticipated questions soon arose. Does the French poet use a longer or
shorter line to regulate the articulation of his phrasing, or
does it serve to break the monotony of equal segments
by establishing a separate rhythm, one independent of
pauses mandated by meaning that acts as counterweight
or in counterpoint to the movement of the sentence?
Simply adhering to the same ratios of syllable or stress
counts as the original’s from line to line, the most
straightforward way of reproducing these variations, will
not ensure that they have the same effect in English as
they had in French. With each new line, often one is
dealing not only with a new hand of cards but with a different deck.
The Original Text
Broad generalizations such as these tend to be tedious or,
worse, confusing without specific instances to illustrate
them. I shall turn to two popular fables that reveal the
kinds of problems one encounters in verse translation
and that have been rendered into English by various
hands. The products of poets whose work has been highly praised, these examples are most worthy of study, and
my aim is less to rate them than to discover how and
why they succeed or fail. Then I shall present my own
attempts, not as competing versions but as the occasion
to recount some of the problems I encountered in trying
to turn La Fontaine into English. First, let us turn to the
original French version of “La Cigale et la Fourmi” (I
have provided a literal translation in prose to establish
the basic meaning of the text):
La Cigale, ayant chanté
Tout 1’été,
Se trouva fort depourvue
Quand la bise fut venue:
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau.
Elle alla crier famine
Chez la Fourmi sa voisine,
La priant de lui prêter
Quelque grain pour subsister
Jusqu’à la saison nouvelle.
Translation Review
“Je vous paierai, lui dit-elle,
Avant 1’oût, foi d’animal, intérêt et principal.”
La Fourmi n’est pas prêteuse;
C’est là son moindre défaut.
“Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud?“
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.
— “Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous deplaise.”
“Vous chantiez? j ’en suis fort aise.
Eh bien! dansez maintenant.”
[The Cicada, having sung all summer, found herself quite
destitute when the north wind had arrived: not a single
little piece of fly or worm. She went to warn of starvation to her neighbor the Ant, begging her to lend her a bit
of grain to live on until the new season. “I will pay you,”
she told her, “before August [i.e., harvest-time], animal’s
honor, interest and principal.” The Ant does not believe
in lending; that is her least fault. “What were you doing
during the warm time?” she said to this borrower. “Night
and day to every comer I was singing, if you do not
mind.” “You were singing? I’m so delighted. Well, then,
dance now!”]
As my prose pony reveals, a great deal of the fable’s
charm is lost without the meter.
Before examining the various English versions, I
would like to point out several features of the original
that offer potential problems for the translator. First, the
meter, unusual even for this poet, consists of lines of
seven syllables (except for verse two, which has only
three). These are vers impairs, that is, verses with an
uneven number of syllables, considered irregular in
French prosody. Not quite octosyllabic, yet more than
hexasyllabic lines, they produce a peculiar effect because
of the shifting caesura, which falls most frequently after
the third syllable, sometimes after the fourth, more rarely
after the second. The second verse is simply a truncated
version of the normal line, but it suggests, as a result of
its brevity, that the summer does not last long or that it is
soon cut short. Here, the variation in length serves a
clear purpose that is easy to reproduce. Why did the poet
choose to cast this fable in such a short and odd sustained verse line? Did he intend to suggest, by reducing
the octosyllable even further by a syllable, something of
the minute dimensions of his protagonists? Is the uneven
position of the caesura meant to mirror the unequal positions of the two insects in relation to their preparation for
winter? All one can say for sure is that this, the first of
15
the fables, announces itself as very different in manner
from the dignified balance and length of the classical
alexandrine.
This difference is also marked by the change from
rhyming couplets to enclosed rhymes in the last eight
lines and, of course, the amputated second verse. When
the fables are published individually or in a selection, the
meaning of these two disruptions is obscured. The opening dedication to the Crown Prince is in alexandrines and
imitates the beginning of the Aeneid in mock-heroic
fashion. This first of all the fables, with its unusual meter
and its two irregularities, is a sign of the technique to be
deployed more daringly in the fables to come. The mixture in the dedicatory poem of seriousness toward the
Prince and irony toward the subject matter of the fables
is given its formal equivalent in this initial poem.
Although the unfortunate insect in this fable is
often called a grasshopper or even a locust or cricket, the
Greek prototype identifies her as a cicada, as does La
Fontaine. Is there a difference? Probably not a significant
one, but in the interest of fidelity, one should respect the
poet’s original designation, in my opinion. Cicadas do
not look anything like grasshoppers, much less crickets,
though they are close to locusts. A vermisseau is a small
worm or vermicule, but the latter word is much too unfamiliar for English speakers to be a reasonable option.
Cicadas do not eat flies, worms, or grains of wheat, but
no one would confuse an animal fable with entomology.
None of these matters pose any particular problems in
English. La bise is the cold north wind; it is a common
enough word in French, so any word or phrase that conveys the basic idea is satisfactory. L’oût (more properly,
août), August, is the month of harvest; since the ant has
asked to borrow a bit of grain, that would be the appropriate time before which to pay it back with interest.
The trickiest phrase in the fable is doubtless foi
d’animal, “on my honor as an animal,” and it is a significant element in the meaning of the poem, as we shall
see. The humor behind it resides in the notion of trustworthiness as evidenced by one’s status, especially as a
member of the upper class. “Gentleman’s honor,” we
would say. The problem is not in translating the phrase
but in preserving its parodic humor. The words prêteuse
and emprunteuse, adjectives describing one who lends or
borrows readily, have no equivalent in English, and the
fact that the first can also mean “generous” seems to
invoke a sense of “generous to a fault,” given the next
line, which points out that the ant doubtless has faults but
overgenerosity is not one of them. Other than these small
16
matters, the poem offers no very great challenges; it has
been translated often, as a piece of its widespread familiarity deserves to be.
The poem itself is no simple reproduction of an
ancient moral tale. It contains the elements of a novel or
short story in short compass: the scene and time of action
are established in its opening lines. Cicada’s and Ant’s
characters are established in subtle fashion through their
dialogue, and the narrator uses both direct quotation and
free indirect discourse to convey their characteristic
modes of speech. The Cicada, as befits a singer, speaks
in a voice prone to dramatic effects: she proclaims her
coming tragedy, appeals to her integrity, and speaks like
a down-and-out diva who has seen better times and will
be back on her feet in time to reimburse her creditor. She
knows when to look for the harvest and how to reckon
the cost of a loan. She prides herself on her openness and
generosity, ready to share her gift with all.
The Ant is ironic, skeptical, and self-confident, with
no patience for freeloaders. She is severe, unforgiving,
and seemingly unconcerned about her lack of generosity.
Her final words are marked by sardonic cruelty.
Although one might argue that nature is red in tooth and
claw, that cicadas do not outlive the winter anyway,
whether or not they are well fed, this is clearly the
human world, where a gentleman’s word is supposed to
be his honor. The practices of borrowing and lending,
sympathy and sharing, are positive means of social cohesiveness. The Ant views lending as a sign of weakness;
the Cicada as a neighborly duty toward a temporarily
dispossessed fellow creature. After all, the Ant stands to
profit from this loan once the bad times are over. An
insect like herself, the Cicada assures her neighbor that
she has the best of intentions; cooperation benefits both
parties. Unfortunately, the Ant knows a bad deal when
she sees it. A penny saved is a penny not loaned.
Yet despite the tradition that sees the Ant as an
admirable, prudent provider for her own future, in contrast to the profligate and thoughtless Cicada, the tone of
the fable is ambivalent. The detached, occasionally
amused voice of the narrator cannot conceal a certain
anxiety. From the poet’s point of view, the Cicada is as
much a hapless victim as a poor planner. After all,
cicadas and poets are both singers, and both offer the gift
of their talents to society in hopes of gaining not only a
hearing but patronage and support as well. La Fontaine
himself was fully aware of the precariousness of the
artist’s existence and the callousness of the insensitive
patron. The poet’s gift to the world is seemingly free of
Translation Review
any commercial taint, but all gifts presuppose something
in return, at the least some means of sustenance, some
form of payment to the piper so that he can continue piping. The curt and dismissive Ant is emblematic of all
those who would deny any real value to the aesthetic;
because Cicada’s activity strikes her as unproductive and
impractical, she sees no reason to subsidize, even for one
season, such a worthless endeavor.
The key phrase in the fable, then, is “foi d’animal,”
the conventional bond that maintains society through
mutual trust. You can have confidence in me because we
hold to the same values and belong to the same class,
whose behavior is prescribed and predictable. The
Cicada belongs to a world of beings who recognize one
another through signs or signals. The Ant experiences
whatever solidarity she knows through common labor,
participation in a tightly efficient and regimented organization that punishes slackers by casting them into the
outer cold and darkness. The Cicada is a displaced,
would-be aristocrat whose attempt to appeal to a sense of
honor is met by a cold world that has caught her off
guard. She is doubly exiled, from nature and from her
fellows, by a hostile environment and an unresponsive
audience. It is not nature but the domestic realm that is
the center of values in the fable. Both Ant and Cicada are
females in the poem, both by dint of their grammatical
gender and their personalities. Even upper-class women
were mainly domestic managers during the seventeenth
century. Some few were allowed to play roles outside
this domain, but by and large, the woman who entertained or, worse, made a living by acting or singing was
often regarded as a fallen creature. The Ant knows her
place; it is as custodian of the household. The Cicada, in
her view, is a woman of the streets who offers herself to
all comers and remains totally at the mercy of others.
Where should our sympathies lie? La Fontaine is
careful not to dictate them to us; if there is a moral to
this fable, it is not the traditional one. The Ant’s cautious
domesticity (“economy” is Greek for “proper order of
the household”) keeps her from ever indulging in such a
questionable activity as the lending of money for interest.
To her the Cicada’s offer of repayment is an insult rather
than a cry of desperation. She may be frugal, but she is
no usurer. That is the least of her faults. The Cicada has a
touching faith in the charity of others, in their capacity
for understanding and forgiveness. She deserves some
compensation for her song, which has given pleasure to
so many. Yet she proposes a transaction that depends on
the expectation of gain rather than sympathy for the
downtrodden. The fable offers shifting points of view that
Translation Review
cannot be easily resolved into a definitive perspective.
II
Some Recent Versions: A Brief Anthology
La Fontaine’s manner is simple and direct, despite the
ambiguities of his fable. The seven-syllable line imposes
a considerable economy on his language, as well as a
certain speed of pace and delivery. By allowing so little
space for maneuvering from line to line, the meter underlines the tension between fullness and emptiness that
structures the poem. If the Cicada is so irresponsible,
how can her speech be sincere? If the Ant is so down-toearth and practical, how can she be so sarcastic? Tone
and style are everything in making this fable interesting.
Let us compare the various attempts to capture them in
English.
The oldest example I would like to offer is from
Marianne Moore’s 1954 translation of the complete
fables:
Until fall, a grasshopper
Chose to chirr;
With starvation as foe
When northeasters would blow,
And not even a gnat’s residue
Or caterpillar’s to chew,
She chirred a recurrent chant
Of want beside an ant,
Begging it to rescue her
With some seeds it could spare
Till the following year’s fell.
“By August you shall have them all,
Interest and principal.”
Share one’s seeds? Now what is worse
For any ant to do?
Ours asked, “When fair, what brought you through?”
— “I sang for those who might pass by chance —
Night and day. Please do not be repelled.”
— “Sang? A delight when someone has excelled.
A singer! Excellent. Now dance.”
As much as I admire Moore’s poetry, I am at a loss to
figure out what her strategy is in this fable. The meter
does not seem to follow her standard practice of syllablecounting, which might at least have been appropriate for
a poem translated from the French. There does not seem
to be any identifiable motivation for the variations in
17
length, and the choice of words, to say nothing of a tendency toward verbosity, is often bizarre. The result does
not strike me as anything like the original at all, and the
tone, inconsistent and somewhat awkward, is so far
removed from La Fontaine’s that a word-for-word prose
rendering retains more of it than this version does. Her
translation strikes me as neither good La Fontaine nor
good Marianne Moore.
In the rhymed versions that came after Moore’s,
one is aware of a certain inevitable duplication, the consequence of a poverty of choice among English rhymes.
This sameness is particularly striking in the opening
lines. Francis Duke’s, for instance, uses an opening
rhyme that seems to fall naturally into place and therefore is adopted by almost all his successors:
Locust, having sung her song
All summer long,
Saw her larder running low
As the bise began to blow.
Finding not the slightest smidge
Left of wormlet or of midge,
To her neighbor Ant she cried
Of starvation, and applied
For a loan that should consist
Just of grist, to subsist
Till the springtime still ahead.
“Come the crop I’ll pay,” she said,
“On my word as animal,
Interest and principal.”
Not the lending type is Ant,
No fault mars her less than that.
“In the hot what were you at?”
Shot she at the applicant.
“Night and day, at every chance,
I sang songs; is that so bad?”
“Sang songs, eh? I am so glad!
Well, then, now’s your time to dance.”
Duke, like almost everyone else, uses English tetrameter
as the equivalent of the seven-syllable lines of the original; but it is trochaic rather than iambic in rhythm, and
that allows him to keep almost every verse to seven syllables in English, thus matching the French very closely
indeed. However, the second verse has, of necessity, four
syllables for La Fontaine’s three. A serious lapse — or so
it seems to me — is in verse ten, which in its internal
rhyming and consonantal echoes (-st) is doubtless meant
18
to suggest the grittiness of the situation but in effect
strikes me as awkward and a bit overdone. This verse has
only six syllables, and I wonder if the rather heavy
caesura in the middle of the line is not the result of a
misprint. The choice of “smidge” and “midge” in verses
five and six is an ingenious touch, though I find “bise” in
verse four a bit odd: why use the French word when this
is supposed to be an English translation? Cigale is rendered here — uniquely, I should add — as “locust,” and
in a note, the translator justifies his choice in metrical
terms: its trochaic rhythm “fits snugly into the lightlydancing meter,” as he points out. He also notes, quite
rightly, that the French word is a common one, while the
English “cicada” sounds perhaps a bit more recherché to
an American ear.
Richard Wilbur, a poet who learned some of his
own craft from Moore and is one of America’s outstanding translators, has also produced a much more elegant
poem than hers:
Grasshopper, having sung her song
All summer long,
Was sadly unprovided-for
When the cold winds began to roar:
Not one least bite of grub or fly
had she remembered to put by.
Therefore she hastened to descant
On famine, to her neighbor Ant,
Begging the loan of a few grains
Of wheat to ease her hunger-pains
Until the winter should be gone.
“You shall be paid,” said she, “upon
My honor as an animal,
Both interest and principal.”
The Ant was not disposed to lend;
That liberal vice was not for her.
“What did you do all summer, friend?”
She asked the would-be borrower.
“So please your worship,” answered she,
“I sang and sang both night and day.”
“You sang? Indeed, that pleases me.
Then dance the winter-time away.”
Wilbur’s poem is in iambic tetrameter; it departs from the
rhyme scheme of the original slightly in lines 15–18 and
paraphrases the original phrasing rather broadly at certain
points. I have my doubts about the use of “friend” in line
17. Even if the word, which is not suggested in the text, is
Translation Review
taken here as ironic, the Ant addresses the Cicada formally as “vous” throughout the French, and it seems slightly
out of key to me as a result, though not fatally so. Wilbur
translates “vermisseau” as “grub,” a rather good equivalent, though one concealing a possible pun (in its slang
meaning of “food”); certainly this kind of enrichment is
not at all out of place, but tonally the word belongs to a
level of diction at odds with that of the poem as a whole
and could appear slightly awkward. If the pun was intended, it is, nevertheless, amusing. Wilbur also takes an interesting tack in rendering the tricky phrase in line 16 (“son
moindre defaut”) as “that liberal vice,” which catches its
paradox with a clever oxymoron that has a slight political
shading. However, he loses the period of loan payback —
before August — somewhere between lines 12 and 14.
The somewhat poetic “descant/ On famine” in lines 7–8
introduces an enjambment (another is in lines 12–13) that
is not very characteristic of La Fontaine but helps keep the
meter from too much rhythmic regularity. I’m not sure,
however, about “descant” as a rendering of crier. It seems
a little too elegant to be an apt translation of the more strident French word, but it does continue the song imagery
from the opening lines.
Wilbur’s version, originally a contribution to a bestiary, was first collected in a 1976 volume of his poetry.
James Michie’s, published in his 1979 selection from the
fables, adopts in part the free-form strategy that was the
basis for Marianne Moore a quarter-century earlier, landing his adaptation somewhere between the more metrically regular poems of Duke and Wilbur, on the one
hand, and that of Moore on the other. Again, I find this
tactic a bit peculiar, but I suppose that it may be justified
if one bears in mind that an equivalent of La Fontaine’s
metrical freedom in the seventeenth century requires
rather more drastic departures from the norm in the
twentieth.
The cicada, having chirped her song
All summer long,
Found herself bitterly deprived
When the north wind arrived —
Not a mouthful of worm or fly.
Whereupon in her want
She rushed round to her neighbour the ant
And begged her to supply
Some crumbs on loan to keep body and soul together
Till next spring. ‘On my word as an animal
I swear,’ she said, ‘to repay
With interest before the harvest ends.’
Translation Review
Of the ant’s few faults the minimal
Is that she never lends.
‘What were you doing during the hot weather?’
She asked the importunate insect.
‘With all respect,
I was singing night and day
For the pleasure of anyone whom chance
Sent my way.’
‘Singing, did you say?
I’m delighted to hear it.
Now you can dance!’
Michie keeps La Fontaine’s cicada instead of making her
a grasshopper, and his translation hews fairly close to the
words of the original, more closely in fact than Wilbur
and far more closely than Moore. However, unlike
Wilbur, he chooses to vary the line lengths despite the
regularity of the French source, as though reconceiving
this text to make it match the technique of some of the
others. Michie also departs from the rhyme scheme at
several places, treating it more freely than does La
Fontaine in this particular fable. It might be said that the
translator has chosen to adapt his model’s characteristic
tactics elsewhere to a fable that barely makes use of
them. As I mentioned above, this first fable seems to hint
at the greater departures to follow, but it does so sparingly. The meter itself falls somewhere between iambic
rhythms and free verse. Even so, Michie’s version is not
unlike La Fontaine’s work in general, even if not very
representative of this fable in particular. However, I
regret the reduction of “intérêt et principal” to “with
interest,” which strikes me as less witty, and “importunate insect” for “cette emprunteuse” represents a reading
between the lines that misses the opposition between
borrower and lender.
Norman Spector managed to finish his translation
of all the fables before his death in 1984, and they were
published, in a single volume with facing French text,
four years later.
Cicada, having sung her song
All summer long,
Found herself without a crumb
When winter winds did come.
Not a scrap was there to find
Of fly or earthworm, any kind.
Hungry, she ran off to cry
To neighbor Ant, and specify:
19
Asking for a loan of grist,
A seed or two so she’d subsist
Just until the coming spring.
She said, “I’ll pay you everything
Before fall, my word as animal,
Interest and principal.”
Well, no hasty lender is the Ant;
It’s her finest virtue by a lot.
“And what did you do when it was hot?”
She then asked this mendicant.
“To all comers, night and day,
I sang, I hope you don’t mind.”
“You sang? Why my joy is unconfined.
Now dance the winter away.”
Among Specter’s virtues is his attempt to be both literal
and metrically faithful to the original. As a poet, however, he is somewhat deficient. The meter seems unsure at
places. For no particular reason, the tetrameter shrinks to
trimeter at line four and limps at line 20, shrinking once
again to trimeter in the concluding verse. There is obvious padding at places (“did come,” “of fly or earthworm,
any kind”) and the somewhat complex wit of “son moindre défaut” is lost in “It’s her finest virtue by a lot.”
In the same year that Specter’s posthumous volume
was published, Norman Shapiro offered his own version
of fifty of the fables, among them his rendition of “La
Cigale et la Fourmi”:
The cricket, having sung her song
All summer long,
Found — when the winter winds blew free —
Her cupboard bare as bare could be;
Nothing to greet her hungering eye:
No merest crumb of worm or fly.
She went next door to cry her plight
To neighbor ant, hoping she might
Take pity on her, and befriend her,
Eke out a bit of grain to lend her,
And see her through next spring: “What say you?
On insect’s honor, I’ll repay you
Well before fall. With interest, too!”
Our ant — no willing lender she!
Least of her faults! replied: “I see!
Tell me, my friend, what did you do
While it was warm?” “Well ... Night and day,
I sang my song for all to hear.”
20
“You sang, you say? How nice, my dear!
Now go and dance your life away!”
Shapiro’s insect is now a cricket, an odd transformation
that I find neither a virtue nor a fault. Unlike Spector, he
has a sure command of meter and also chooses the
tetrameter line as the equivalent of La Fontaine’s sevensyllable vers impairs. It may seem impudent of me to
question translations that have received such awards and
praise, including that of Richard Wilbur himself, but
there are some aspects of this version that bother me.
Though the French cicada speaks of principal and interest, there is little evidence in the original that she has a
cupboard nor that she expects the ant to “Take pity on
her, and befriend her,” interpretations or, rather, interpolations that belong to the translator. “On insect’s honor”
and “Least of all her faults” are good solutions for the
slight problem spots discussed earlier, and “With interest,
too!” keeps the humor of the original. Again, for some
reason, the cicada has become “my friend” in line 16. On
the whole, despite my quibbles, this is one of the most
successful of all the published versions.
Christopher Wood also did a selected fables for the
Oxford World Classics series, published in 1995.
Cicada sang her song
all summer long,
but found her fortunes fail
in Autumn’s gale.
No smallest nip nor nub;
no midge; no grub!
She sang the song of the poor
to the Ant next door,
begging to be supplied
with sundry crumbs to tide
her over until Spring.
“I’ll repay everything
by August; true animal!
interest and principal.”
The Ant (her least defect) unbending
(with ants, there’s never any lending)
said: “What did you do
all summer through?”
“Night and day, I sang the same
if I may say, to all who came.”
Translation Review
“You sang, you say?
That makes my day.
Now, dance away.”
Wood’s version is quite different from those of his precursors. Most notably, he tends to use much shorter lines
(although verses 15–16 and 19–20 are tetrameter) and
varies their length even more frequently than Michie. He
also divides the whole into five different stanzas, each
corresponding to a transition in the logical stages of the
poem. I find the phrasing in lines 15–16 a bit confusing
— what does “least defect” refer to? — and the extension to all ants of what was considered a particular quality of this individual one might be questioned. Still, the
translation is marked by some witty phrases that successfully preserve the tone and humor of the original.
Formally, however, the poem has been recast in a way
that eliminates its subtle restraint and economy of means.
An Unpublished Version
The time has come for me to unveil my own effort.
Before doing so, however, I must first describe the circumstances that shaped my attempts. I began my own
project in 1987 without referring to any previous versions, not even Marianne Moore’s, which I had never
read. My reasons were twofold: first, I was concerned
that I might unconsciously echo lines or strategies from
the other versions and so decided to avoid them; second,
since I was in France, I did not have ready access to
them anyway. Part of the way through working on Book
One, I suddenly realized that I had been metrically
inconsistent. Having worked out a scheme of equivalences such as was described earlier, I realized that “The
Cicada and the Ant” had to be in trimeter rather than in
tetrameter, because I was using English tetrameter to
translate French decasyllabic lines. Even at that, to be
utterly consistent, I would have had to create a line based
on two and a half stresses. How does one obtain a half
stress? After some reflection I convinced myself that
there was no palpable way in English to register the difference between an eight-syllable and a seven-syllable
line in French. The trimeter would have to serve double
duty as a representation of both. Since the first fable is
unique in using this meter, it seemed pointless to do otherwise, especially since I could match vers impairs in
French with an odd number of stresses in the English.
However, like everyone else, I had already adopted
tetrameter for my version. Now I was faced with the
prospect of trying to eliminate one foot from each line.
Could it be done at all while still maintaining some
Translation Review
fidelity to the original? Here is the result:
Having let song pour from her
all summer,
Cicada felt deprived
When cold north winds arrived:
Not one tiny bite
Of fly or worm in sight.
She called on Ant nearby
To heed her famished cry,
Begging some loan of grist
On which she might subsist
Till days turned warm once more.
“My bond as bug,” she swore,
“By August I’ll pay in full
Interest and principal.”
Ant’s no great creditor;
That’s her least flaw, it’s true.
“Last summer, what did you do?”
She asked this borrower.
“I sang — don’t take it ill —
To all comers, day and night.”
“You sang! What a delight!
Well, then, now dance your fill.”
Far from suffering from the reduction, my earlier version
was considerably improved by the economy forced on
me by the shortened meter. The translation gained in
speed, directness, and clarity. There was no place for any
padding when only seven syllables at most were available in a given line. Determined to keep as close as possible to the literal meaning and to add or subtract as little
as I could from the original text, while writing in a natural idiom, I spent days on my revision. The text, which
seemed easy to translate into tetrameter, became
fiendishly resistant when pared down to fit the shorter
lines. When I had finished, I turned at last to examine the
other translations, in which I was not surprised to find
anticipations of several of my rhyming attempts. Because
the choices are usually very restricted, translators are
bound to converge on the same sets of words, even if
unaware that others have tried them previously.
I am in no position to pass on the quality of my
own work, but I can point out some of the features of it
that strike me as satisfactory, along with others that I
might wish to change if any alternatives should occur to
me in the future. The song/long rhyme is virtually
inevitable as a solution for the first two lines, but though
21
I used it in my original tetrameter version, and it has
been adopted for the majority of the other versions, I
found it difficult to use if I were to follow my rules of
metrical equivalence. In one try, I invented a compound
adverb, “summerlong,” by analogy with “daylong,” in
order keep the second line down to only three syllables,
like the French (two would have been even better). What
I wanted there was a precise match for “tout l’été,” that
is, “all summer,” which, given its feminine ending, could
be considered as one foot and two syllables if one counted only as far as the tonic accent. I then tried “Cicada,
having sung her/ song all summer” but dropped it
because “sung her” and “summer” were half-rhymes at
best and, in any case, “song” added another stress and
syllable to line 2. My final attempt — “from her/ summer” — may appear less than satisfactory, but in ordinary pronunciation it is a true two-syllable rhyme, so I
hoped that it would sound acceptable.
I wanted to keep the name of the insect in the initial
position; but the constraints of the rhyme, along with
only three stresses for the first line and merely one for
the second, forced me to substitute a more periodic solution, opening with a participial phrase instead. I was able
to salvage some elements from the tetrameter version,
among them “my bond as bug” for “foi d’animal,” a
phrase that I hoped conveyed some of the humor of the
original phrase that struck me as muted even in “animal’s
honor” or other similar renditions. Finally, I added “your
fill” to the last line in an attempt to clarify what the Ant
is saying:, which is, in effect, “If you’re hungry and cold,
you can dance to distract your stomach and warm you
up.” (In one draft I had written, “Now it’s time to
dance,” which is perhaps more literally exact.) I hoped
that the economy, incisiveness, and energy of the original
were somehow evident in my revised attempts.
Obviously, any success or lack of it in comparison with
the other translator’s efforts is not mine to judge.
Another Specimen
Almost as familiar as this opening fable is the even more
economical piece from Book Three, “Le Renard et les
Raisins,” or “The Fox and the Grapes.” The original is as
follows:
Certain Renard gascon, d’autres disent normand,
Mourant presque de faim, vit au haut d’une treille
Des Raisins mûrs apparemment,
Et courverts d’une peau vermeille.
Le galand en eût fait volontiers un repas;
22
Mais comme il n’y pouvait atteindre:
“Ils sont trop verts, dit-il, et bons pour les goujats.”
Fit-il mieux que de se plaindre?
[Some Gascon fox (others say Norman), almost starving
to death, saw at the top of a trellis some grapes, evidently ripe and covered with purple skins. The rascal would
have willing made a meal of them; but since he could not
reach them, he said, “They’re too green, good only for
boors.” Would he have done better if he’d complained?]
Gascons were said to be characterized by boasting,
Normans by prudence. The Fox seems to be exercising
both tendencies at once, hence the uncertainty of “others” about his nature. The poet calls him a “galand,” that
is, a rogue, rascal, or crafty fellow. Most recent editions
use this older spelling in the text to differentiate the word
from “galant,” a courteous gentleman, a well-bred lover,
a gallant. La Fontaine uses the adjective ironically to
qualify the fox in other places, just as “sly” is often
attached to the same animal in English. Both spellings
derive from Middle French “galer,” to enjoy, to rejoice,
but its homonym, meaning “to scratch” (English “gall”),
may have given rise to the more pejorative shading. A
similar noun in Middle French, “gallier,” meaning a
joker or ne’er-do-well, can be traced to the same origin.
Apparently this range of meanings is operative in the
poem — the fox is a bon vivant in aspirations but a cunning trickster in practice. The same ambiguity that makes
him at once a Gascon and a Norman makes him a
“galant” in both senses.
Foxes, as all readers of the Bible know, are attracted to grapes. This one, however, is concerned with more
than his hunger. Like a self-advertising Gascon, he tends
to overstate his virtues, but like a prudent Norman, he
does not care to invest any more energy than necessary
to get what he wants. One of the best known in the
Aesopian tradition, the fable has given rise to the phrase
“sour grapes” in English, but La Fontaine gives it a new
twist. The fox wants above all not to be identified with
the “goujats” of the world, that is, the lowliest and least
cultivated of the low. A goujat was the servant of a military man and, by extension, gross in manners and person,
a boor. He would rather go hungry than look like a fool.
As a trickster, the Fox does have some self-respect; he is
at least superior in some sense to his victims. From the
point of view of the speaker, the fox has to use his wits
to overcome his natural disadvantages and a reputation
for knavery that evidently precedes him. Can we believe
Translation Review
or trust him? There is little about him that strikes one as
admirable. He has some ambition but does not seem to
be very intent on following it through. Nevertheless, the
last line of the poem suggests that he is right to accept
his limitations, even if he has to resort to willing selfdeception to do so.
Though it is clear that these particular grapes have
reached perfection, it is also given that they are not
meant for the likes of foxes. They are the best because,
high on the trellis, they receive the most moisture and
sun. They are out of reach in two senses: the fox is too
low in social rank to deserve them, and he is not agile
enough to scale the vine. To desire them would be to lose
face, to admit to himself that he was one of the rabble
he, as a trickster, holds in disdain. His rationalization
may be transparent, but it is also an index to his awkward position between the highest and lowest elements
of society. The narrator, aware of the fox’s slippery character, suggests that learning not to desire what one cannot, in the nature of things, ever expect to possess is the
beginning of wisdom. He does not judge the fox directly.
Though the fox would like to be a gallant — spirited,
brave, dashing, and courageous in the face of defeat —
he is really a gall, one of life’s irritants. Yet in one sense,
he is gallant, at least in his own terms. He knows how to
admit defeat when to be foolhardy would gain him nothing.
There is a neat complementarity between this fable
and that of the Cicada. Both seem to point toward the
kind of dilemma faced by aristocrats whose power has
been eroded and by poets who enjoy the company and
favor of the court but know they will never be among the
socially great. Even so, the poet has one advantage that
eludes the Fox. Instead of having to engage in a gesture
of deliberate self-deception as an alternative to frustrated
complaint, he can write a fable of ambiguous tenor. He
can reside poetically between the extremes of Cicada and
Ant, upper and lower classes, galant and goujat. Like the
Ant and the Fox, he must go unfed on many a day, but
he has learned how to make the best of his uncertain situation. If he sings for the pleasure of others, like the Ant,
he also deceives through his “lying fables” like the Fox.
The fables are the lie that mankind tells itself in order to
arrive at a higher truth. It is better to know one’s place in
the scheme of the universe than to deny one’s essential
nature. By depicting men’s actions in terms of animals,
the poet can demonstrate how to achieve the self-renunciation of the Fox without having to practice deliberate
self-deception. One deception — the elevation of fictional animals to human status — drives out another, the
notion that man can ever truly defeat his own needs by
Translation Review
rising above his humanity. Through fictions we learn to
know ourselves.
A Brief Anthology Continued
With the exception of Richard Wilbur, all the translators
have also published versions of this second example.
Marianne Moore’s “Fox” is, I think, more successful
than was her “Grasshopper,” but she still elaborates
unnecessarily.
A fox of Gascon, though some say of Norman descent,
When starved till faint gazed up at a trellis to which
grapes were tied —
Matured till they glowed with a purplish tint
As though there were gems inside.
Now grapes were what our adventurer on strained
haunches chanced to crave,
But because he could not reach the vine
He said, “These grapes are sour; I’ll leave them for some
knave.”
Better, I think, than an embittered whine.
Why, one wonders, “As though there were gems inside”?
Foxes do not care much for gems. Why inform us that
the “grapes were tied” to the trellis, except for the sake
of rhyme? The detail “on strained haunches” is certainly
more concrete and animal-like than anything in La
Fontaine, but even though “our adventurer” is a neat
solution for the problem of rendering “le galand,” the
line as a whole extends with editorial comment
(“chanced to crave”) what was more effectively succinct
in the original. “Embittered whine” is an apt rendering
for “se plaindre,” even if a bit overdetermined.
Francis Duke’s version is closer to the French, even
to the point of rendering the alexandrines by English
hexameters, but the metric is not altogether consistent,
and once again the effect is to dilate what should be
compact.
A Gascon — or some say a Norman — Fox, near dead
Of hunger, came upon a grapevine in the sun
That on a trellis overhead
Bore grapes of warm vermillion.
The Goodman might have found a banquet very pleasant,
But he couldn’t stretch that high,
And so he said: “Those grapes are sour, fit food for a
peasant.”
Better than to howl, say I.
23
“Goodman” is an interesting translation for “galand,” but
it sounds a bit too middle-class for either “rascal” or
“gentleman.” It also suggests an archaic tone that is not
present in La Fontaine’s very contemporary idiom — at
least in this instance. “Peasant” for “goujat’” is a passable translation but not an entirely accurate one. What
makes the servant of a soldier so uncouth is precisely his
inability to stay long enough in one place to develop a
sense of what is good to eat and what is not. A paysan
would certainly dine more knowingly than a goujat. I
suppose that foxes do “howl” when they complain, but
the word seems a bit much when applied to humans. I
must admit that the word at least reminds us that the Fox
is a fox.
Michie is more metrically consistent in his translation of this fable than in the other, but he makes no
attempt to follow the rather subtle alternation of twelvesyllable and eight-syllable lines in the original, though he
does suggest it once. He renders all but two verses as
iambic pentameter, concluding with a line of trimeter. As
a consequence, he ends up with ten lines as opposed to
La Fontaine’s eight.
“They’re too green,” he said, “and just suitable for
clods.”
Didn’t he do better than to complain?
I find “clods” for “goujats” interesting for its opposition
to “gods” (not in the original, of course), establishing
two extreme polarities, but the tone of it does not seem
quite right to me. Furthermore, La Fontaine indicates that
the grapes would be very good indeed to eat, but he is
not inclined to make them into a meal for the Olympians.
Turning to Shapiro, we find at last a metrical stability
that matches the original.
Starving, a fox from Gascony ... Some say
He was a Norman ... Anyway,
He spies a bunch of grapes high on a vine,
With skin the shade of deep red wine,
Ripe for the tastiest of dining,
But out of reach, hard though he perseveres.
“Bah! Fit for boors! Still green!” he sneers.
Wasn’t that better than to stand there whining?
A starving fox — a Gascon, Normans claim,
But Gascons say a Norman — saw a cluster
Of luscious-looking grapes of purplish luster
Dangling above him on a trellis-frame.
He would have dearly liked them for his lunch,
But when he tried and failed to reach the bunch:
“Ah well, it’s more than likely they’re not sweet —
Good only for green fools to eat!”
Wasn’t he wise to say they were unripe
Rather than whine and gripe?
“Green fools” is an original way to translate “goujats,”
and the doublet “whine and gripe” does manage to capture the two meanings of “se plaindre.”
Spector remains even closer to the French than
Michie or Duke (to say nothing of Moore), but even
though he attempts to reproduce the line lengths of the
original, his uncertain metric skills make hash of La
Fontaine’s precision:
A certain Gascon Fox, a Norman one others say,
Famished, saw on a trellis, up high to his chagrin,
Grapes, clearly ripe that day,
And all covered with a purple skin.
The rogue would have had a meal for the gods,
But, having tried to reach them in vain,
24
The addition of “Anyway” is, I think, a good touch
(though not very much like La Fontaine’s brand of wit),
since it gives the opening lines that humor which the
explanation (in a footnote) of “Gascon” and “Norman”
tends to dissipate. On the negative side, I would still
have liked just a bit more verbal economy to match that
of the French.
Finally, Wood offers something just a bit different,
though similar in some respects to his “Cigale”:
A Gascon Fox (though others claim
it was from Normandy he came)
was almost dead from hunger. High
above him on a pergola, his eye
was taken by some grapes which, ruby-red,
appeared quite ripe. He would have loved to try
them, but he couldn’t reach them. Said
the Fox, “They are too green, although
undiscriminating folk might like a go.”
— Somewhat better than a cry of woe?
The enjambment dominates so many lines here that it
establishes the norm; one might say that this version
reads like rhymed William Carlos Williams, which is
Translation Review
perhaps an admirable display of virtuosity in modem
poetry but seems to me out of place in a translation that
is as close to a word-for-word rendering as any we have
seen so far. I wonder about the next-to-last verse, however: “undiscriminating folk” is tonally remote from “goujats,” and “might like a go” is hardly equivalent to “bons
pour.”
Another Unpublished Example
The same criteria that governed my decisions, for better
or for worse, in “La Cigale” were in play as I came to
“Le Renard et les Raisins.” But whereas the first offered
considerable challenges, the second fell into place almost
spontaneously. For whatever reason, the right English
words and rhyming pairs seemed to be at hand from the
start. After only one or two changes to a rapidly composed draft, I was able to fashion a version that I am still
reluctant to alter sixteen years later. Perhaps that is
because this fable is both shorter and less demanding
metrically than the first.
A Gascon fox — a Norman, others say —
Starving, saw high upon a trellis vine
Some grapes in ripe display
With skins incarnadine.
The rascal would have liked them for his meal
Were they easier to get.
“Too green,” he said, “not fit for the genteel.”
Would he’ve done better to fret?
I did not attempt to give English equivalents for
“Gascon” or “Norman” (e.g., “Texan” or “Scottish,”
among other possibilities). Some historical and cultural
specificities need to be maintained, but the target language need not require all the resources of its cultural
associations to allow for intelligibility. This is, after all, a
French fox, and to their credit, all of the translators
respected that fact. If the original needs a footnote, then
the translation probably will as well, unless the translator
is unusually lucky.
I felt satisfied with this version because it seemed
to capture what I thought I experienced in La Fontaine:
directness, succinctness, sly wit, careful craftsmanship.
For the most part, I don’t think that my efforts require
much comment. The adjective “apparemment” should
not be translated as “apparently” but as “visibly” or
“manifestly.” To avoid any hint that they only looked but
were not ripe, I wanted to make clear that they were
mature without any doubt. The skins are vermeil, “ver-
Translation Review
million-red.” Since their lusciousness is the very point, I
wanted to make that especially evident and close the
slightly unusual “incarnadine” because it struck me, with
its Shakespearean associations, as offering just the right
elevation of tone to make the assertion of their excellence convincing. These are really good grapes.
The other phrase that requires some comment is the
fox’s one-line speech about the grapes. None of the possible translations of “goujats” sounded exactly right to
me, so I adopted an old translator’s trick, which is to render something by choosing the negative of its opposite.
After all, the emphasis here is on the way the fox would
like to think of himself. I felt — perhaps mistakenly —
that the word “genteel” strikes just the right tone for a
fox like this one, not to the manor born but aware of how
the upper class bear themselves. It also allowed me to
suggest — I fear too subtly — the shadings of meaning
in “galand,” which are otherwise lost in “rascal.” I can
imagine an objection arising that this is not a literal
translation, and I must agree. However, it satisfies me
because it has that ring of not quite being what one
aspires to be and in that sense is faithful to the original.
I trust that I have not seemed unnecessarily negative in evaluating translations that have, deservedly in
my opinion, won praise, awards, and book prizes from
the literary world at large. I have doubtless been blind to
many of their merits and judged according to my own
preconceptions as an interested party in this enterprise.
Certainly, I revel in the fact that La Fontaine has been
kept alive for the modem reading public by so many distinguished poetic reincarnations of his original fables.
After all, even the versions I find least successful, those
of Marianne Moore, are the products of a very fine poet
and worth reading in relation to her own poetry with its
frequent appeal to the animal world as an image of our
own. The criteria each translator sought to satisfy are not
necessarily mine, but that does not make them invalid in
my eyes, simply different. It is all right to transform La
Fontaine into a twentieth-century poet if that is the effect
one is aiming for. Because one is sure to lose something
— often quite a lot — of the original in trying to capture
it in another language, it is often necessary to compensate for that loss by bringing new dimensions to the text.
An interesting translation can indeed reveal aspects of
the original that were not evident, and since La Fontaine
wrote in a French that was, for him and his readers, thoroughly contemporary, it is not unreasonable to update
and reshape the sensibility embodied in his writings.
Indeed, new translations of the classics are almost obligatory for each new generation of readers. Yet there are
25
limits, and I, like everyone who engages in these
attempts, want to have it both ways. I want my La
Fontaine to sound like us without losing his own personality, historical and Gallic. Perhaps nothing can bring us
closer to the original than a multitude of perspectives,
each revealing something that the others missed and all,
in the aggregate, participating in the reality of the text
they attempt to render intelligible.
Bibliography
Duke, Francis, trans. The Best Fables of La Fontaine.
Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1965.
Michie, James, trans. La Fontaine: Selected Fables. New
York: Viking Press, 1979.
Moore, Marianne, trans. The Fables of La Fontaine. New
York: Viking Press, 1954.
Shapiro, Norman, trans. Fifty Fables of La Fontaine.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Spector, Norman, trans. The Complete Fables of Jean de
la Fontaine. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1988.
Wilbur, Richard. “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” in New
and Collected Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1988, p. 85.
Wood, Christopher, trans. Selected fables: Jean de La
Fontaine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Poetry from Princeton
After Every War
Knowing the East
Twentieth-Century Women Poets
Translations from the German by
Paul Claudel
Translated by James Lawler
Eavan Boland
Here the renowned Irish poet Eavan
Boland presents her translations of
the work of nine German-speaking
women poets who lived in Europe
in the decades before and after
World War II. Some are Jewish,
some are not, but each experienced
the horror and devastation of the
war. In their poems they provide
personal glimpses into its effects,
focusing on the small and seemingly
commonplace occasions in their lives.
Facing Pages: Nicholas Jenkins, series editor
University Press
26
Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation
Paper $17.95 ISBN 0-691-11902-3
Cloth $35.00 ISBN 0-691-11868-X
Due October
Cloth $19.95 ISBN 0-691-11745-4
Due November
PRINCETON
Paul Claudel served as a diplomat to both China and Japan. He
had a lifelong fascination with
both countries and their cultures.
Knowing the East, a collection of
prose poems, was first published
in France in 1907. It is available
now in an artful new translation
by poet and scholar James
Lawler, who provides notes on
the 61 poems along with a brief
biography of Claudel.
•
800-777-4726 • READ EXCERPTS ONLINE
WWW.PUP.PRINCETON.EDU
Translation Review
VARIATIONS ON A THEME: LEGGE, WALEY, AND POUND
TRANSLATE ODE VIII FROM THE CHINESE SHI JING
By Robert E. Kibler
T
he Chinese Shi Jing, or Book of Odes is composed of
three hundred five odes assembled during the Chou
Dynasty (1122–1255 BC) from songs sung by the various peoples who lived in the land of the Chou and in its
several tributary states. The songs are all very old, and as
Arthur Waley notes, together compose the ancient “folksongs, songs of nobility, ritual hymns, and ballads on significant events” of ancient China.1 Most of them concern
life as lived during the Chou dynasty. The oldest ritual
hymns, referred to as the ya, may date from as early as
the eleventh century BC, whereas the anthology as a
whole, including the feng, or folksongs, and sung, or
odes sung at sacred rites, probably reached their present
anthologized form sometime around 600 BC.2 Interest in
the odes has been continual through time, both from
those who saw them as part of their own cultural heritage
and those others who would translate that heritage into
their own words for their own people.
The Odes were purportedly first anthologized around
600 BC by Chen, the music master of the Chou court. In
the fifth century BC, Confucius was said to have expurgated the anthology, trimming the vast collection of 3000
songs down to its present number of 305.3 As such, the
Odes form the backbone of Confucian philosophical and
moral instruction and have long served as a part of
Chinese attempts to define human excellence by means
of past behaviors and traditions. Thus, in the Analects,
Confucius expresses elation because his star pupil, Tz’u,4
has recognized the value of happiness and social propriety. Now, Confucius says, he “can begin to talk about the
Odes”5 with Tz’u, because such recognition suggests that
Tz’u is in possession of the intellectual and social maturity requisite to studying the Odes — and “the man who
has not studied the Odes,” Confucius notes elsewhere,
“is like one who stands with his face right against the
wall.”6
Not surprisingly, a work so closely associated with
cultural traditions and moral instruction developed both
antagonists and defenders over time. The T’sin Dynasty
(255–206 BC), for example, sought to erase the Odes,
along with virtually all of the other classical books of
China, in a bid to make China undergo a new beginning.7
To do this, they had a state-mandated mass burning of all
the old books in 213 BC.8 Yet, so beloved were the Odes
Translation Review
that many scholars had memorized them.9 The only way
for the T’sin to eliminate the Odes was to eliminate the
scholars — something the dynasty was perfectly willing
to do, for many reasons. But as fate and the Chinese people would have it, the dynasty itself was snuffed out
instead. With the rise of the Han Dynasty (206–25 AD)
out of the ashes of the T’sin, four complete versions of
the Odes soon surfaced. One of these, called the Text of
Maou, was presented at the Han court in 129 BC and has
served as the text preferred by Chinese scholars to this
day.10 Maou’s text organizes the various odes according
to lessons learned from the states, minor and major odes,
odes of the temple and altar, and the sacrificial odes.11
The durability of the Maou text is partly the result of
scholars having passed on their belief in it as the best
text and partly because those same scholars have
painstakingly kept records of their work with it from the
time of its presentation at the Han court to this day.12
Despite this line of scholarly transmission, however,
even Chinese scholars have a difficult time understanding and translating the Odes as found in Maou — or in
any text. Many words have undergone radical orthographic and usage changes, and no one today knows precisely how the ancient and classical Chinese pronounced
words. The Chinese four-tone system, for example, was
not introduced until the fifth or sixth century AD. Earlier
pronunciation depended on either a three-tone system,
for which there is some evidence, or simply resulted
from phrasing modulations ranging from slow to rapid,
high to low, repressed to expressive.13 Further difficulties
arise because Maou’s text was reconstructed as a result
of memory and recitation. Given the sound similarity of
so many Chinese characters, it was perhaps inevitable
“that the same sounds, when taken down by different
writers, should in many cases be represented by different
characters.”14
Be that as it may, beginning with what many scholars refer to as the Jesuit priest Lacharme’s “undigestible”
translation of the Odes into the Latin Liber Carminum in
1733,15 westerners have diligently sought to increase their
understanding of ancient China by means of translating
the Odes. These translators have often groped tenuously
and carefully toward the Chinese past, drawing upon previous translations in such a way as to create a textual line
27
of transmission from China to 18th-century Europe and
from then to the western world of the present day. The
names of those who have in some fashion succeeded in
translating the Odes come up time and again in discussions of things Chinese: Lacharme (trans. 1733, published 1830) and Covreur (1896) — both French;
Karlgren the Swede (1950), Legge (1861), and Waley
(1937) — the Brits; and the American, Pound (1954).16
There are of course several others, but of these whom I
have mentioned, three will serve as particularly good
points of comparison and contrast in their rendering of
the Odes into English: James Legge, the missionary;
Arthur Waley, the scholar; and Ezra Pound, the poet.
Working with the texts of their predecessors, all three
came to the Odes with different intentions and abilities,
and as we shall see, those intentions and abilities have
very much controlled the character and quality of their
translations.
Of the three, Legge is the earliest to have translated
the Odes and the most learned one of the three to do so.
He is also the only one to have visited or lived in China.
Legge was a Scotsman, born in Aberdeenshire in 1815.
In youth, he excelled at Latin and won the most prestigious First Bursary scholarship to King’s College Oxford
in 1831 and the Huttonian prize for the University’s most
brilliant student four years later.17 He was also, however,
a Presbyterian dissenter, who, like his father, supported
the Independent Church, so although the Latin Chair at
King’s College seemed his sure destiny, he instead joined
the London Missionary Society in 1836, married, and set
sail with his new wife for Malacca and then on to Hong
Kong.18 Believing that preaching was best left to the
Chinese, Legge and his fellow missionaries spent their
time teaching at the China Mission, learning Chinese,
and translating it for publication.19 Through many years,
he translated virtually all of the Chinese classics and
included original Chinese texts and immensely learned
notes with those translations. By the time he died in
1897, it was said of Legge by another great Sinologist,
Herbert A. Giles, that he had made “the greatest contribution ever … to the study of Chinese, and will be
remembered and studied ages after.”20 His work is plain
and straightforward, and although somewhat dated in
style, it remains part of the canon of essential texts for
those with a serious interest in Chinese.21
Waley and Pound were contemporaries who knew
and worked with one another, although Waley was clearly more the scholar and less the poet, and Pound was just
the opposite. Each man was born in the 1880s and
received an exemplary education. After graduation in the
28
Classics from Cambridge, Waley took a job working for
Lawrence Binyon in the Oriental subdepartment at the
British Museum in 1913.22 Just before Waley’s arrival
there, Mary Fenollosa, widow of art historian Ernest
Fenollosa, had asked Binyon, then Keeper of the museum’s Eastern Art Collection, for help in turning her late
husband’s massive collection of notes and manuscripts
into a finished product. Although Waley had no direct
hand in this project — which was to result in the 1912
publication of Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art — he
was nevertheless working for Binyon in the Oriental subdepartment, so as Jonathan Spence suggests, Waley most
assuredly “breathed in a good deal” of the “sinified
working air.”23 He immediately began learning both
Chinese and Japanese in his spare time.24
Pound was also living as a dashing young American
poet in London about the same time as Waley and had
likewise developed an interest in things Chinese.25 As
fate would have it, Mary Fenollosa read some of Pound’s
poems in the “Contemporania” section of the April 1913
version of Poetry Magazine,26 and impressed, sought out
the young poet as the one who, she believed, could best
continue her late husband’s translations from the Chinese
and Japanese. She was “distrustful of academic experts”
and wanted her husband’s intellectual legacy to go to
someone unconventional.27 Those of Fenollosa’s notes
and manuscripts that did not go to Binyon and his staff at
the Museum went to Pound in 1913.28
At least in part, then, Fenollosa seems to have been
the inspiration for both Waley and Pound to undertake
translation projects from the Chinese, and the fact that
they were both associates of Binyon’s caused them to
lunch together at the Vienna Café 29 and consult one
another regularly — although it appears that Pound was
primarily in need of consulting Waley, and not the other
way round.30 Nevertheless, Pound produced the first volume based in their joint interest in translation, publishing
Cathay in 1915 from his work with the Fenollosa materials. A few weeks after Cathay’s publication, Waley
stopped by Pound’s flat to have a look at Fenollosa’s
legacy to Pound,31 and both Cathay and the Fenollosa
material were to have an identifiable influence on his
first work in Chinese translation, A Hundred and Seventy
Chinese Poems, appearing in 1917. To be sure, a rivalry
seems to have developed between the two as time
passed, but both remained productive and durable translators all of their working days,32 and both eventually
undertook translations of the Odes in the later middle
phase of their long careers. Waley’s edition came out in
1937, and Pound’s in 1954. Both editions show the influ-
Translation Review
ence of Legge’s earlier work.
Of Waley’s skills as a translator of Chinese, Jonathan
Spence wrote that there are many Westerners whose
knowledge of Chinese is superior to Waley’s, but they
are not poets. At the same time, there are many better
poets than Waley, but they do not know Chinese so
well.33 An advertisement for his first volume of Chinese
translations, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems
(1919), in a 1919 edition of the Dial, further asserted that
his work “should be for our generation, at least, the standard anthology.”34 To Pound’s skills as a poet, his various
poems will attest. He was also the shaper of a new poetic
movement, a master of meter and of sound in many languages, and in some fashion, as T.S. Eliot noted in 1918,
the “inventor of Chinese poetry in our time.”35 As a translator of Chinese, however, it must be said that he never
actually knew the language. Nor could he so much as
look up Chinese characters in a dictionary.36 Yet he had
committed to memory many of the basic Chinese radicals and believed that he had an intuitive and artistic
understanding of Chinese that allowed him to actually
see the meanings within the scripted characters.37 This
belief in an ability to intuitively read the characters has
some foundational merit in the Chinese. At least in the
old Chinese scripts, for example, the radical for a horse
looks like a horse, the one for a man
like a man.
The vast majority of Chinese radicals, however, long ago
became abstract unrecognizable versions of the things
they signified, and indeed, many more Chinese characters developed as phonetic components of signification
rather than as ideographic descriptions of things themselves.38 Of the three translators, then, Pound was the
most dependent on the translation work of others.
To compare the work of our three translators, I have
chosen a simple ode from among the oldest in the anthology. It appears as Ode VIII in Legge and Pound’s versions, and as Waley’s Ode #99. Dembo and Lai Ming
note that it is one of the kuo feng folksongs or airs of the
15 states.39 The ode appears in the first Chou Nan section
of the Shi Jing, written in the earliest days of the Chou
dynasty. As such, it is a “genuine” ode, illustrative of a
“moral purity.” Later odes sometimes allude to a corrupt
state, wherein those in possession of moral purity often
end in despair.40 And indeed, this link to morality is consistent with at least one longstanding story associated
with the Odes. It has been written that the kuo feng were
gathered from the various 15 states for presentation to
the Chou emperor so that he could check the mores and
temper of his subjects.41 They were also thought to have
Translation Review
the power whereby superiors transformed their inferiors,
and inferiors in turn satirized their superiors.42 Although
such a dual role suggests the political character of some
of the kuo feng, Ode VIII seems to be from that group of
simple lyrics referred to by Confucian scholars as fu, or
narrative, composed of images meaning nothing beyond
their appearance.43
Ode VIII is a fertility poem, celebrating the gathering
of wild plantain, or ribgrass, from the meadows. As
Waley and Legge note, when women were going to have
babies, they ate plantain because it was believed that
doing so would ease their delivery. Likewise, the plant
has a long and global history as a curative and medicinal
herb. It was called the “plant of healing” by the
Highlanders of Scotland and was known as one of the
nine sacred herbs among the Saxons. Pliny thought it a
cure for hydrophobia.44 It is a dark green, slender plant
that grows very tall and throws its angular and furrowed
flower stalks in long spikes high up in the air. According
to the ode, women gathered plantain by filling their
aprons with the seeds and then tucking their full aprons
into their girdles.
Like so many odes of the kuo feng type, Ode VIII
expresses impersonal sentiments and events common to
all. There is no attempt in them at any individuality of
expression.45 Structurally, the ode is written in three stanzas of four lines each — the most standard pattern for
Chinese poetry until the time of the seventh century AD
T’ang poets46 — and contains only a few characters that
repeat in chanting pattern. Many of those characters also
share some of the same radicals. Consequently, not only
do sonic repetitions dominate in the ode, so too do eyerhymes — words that look, at least in part, the same.
These repetitions are evident in the following charts:
(next page)
29
(1871)
30
Translation Review
On the left-hand side of the chart, reading from top
to bottom, Legge, Waley, and Pound’s versions of Ode
VIII appear. Legge’s version also contains the Chinese
characters of the ode, to be read right to left, top to bottom. The three stanzas are marked at their beginning
points with the Chinese numbers for 1
,2
, and 3
, positioned above a small-sized version of the character for “stanza.” In the ode, save for the character tsai
“to gather,” two complete characters make up each
Chinese word, so that stanzas 2 and 3 on the chart, which
for the most part have four characters running top to bottom, nevertheless present two words arranged vertically
in each column, two Chinese characters to the word.
Scanning the Chinese characters from right to left, then
reading two characters to the word, top to bottom, the
number of repeating eye-rhymes becomes obvious.
Indeed, every stanza contains two lines whose first, second, and third words repeat. Even the fourth word of
each line repeats the bottom character. Only the top character of every fourth line varies.
On the top of the right hand side of the chart is a
pronunciation guide for the Chinese characters, rendered
left to right instead of in the Chinese right to left pattern
and broken down to the level of each word. Seen in its
sonic form, the ode clearly substantiates to the ear the
heavy emphasis on repetition asserted by its visual form
before the eye. Indeed, in sound as in form, only the first
half of the fourth word in every line contains a variation.
Below this pronunciation guide and on the same side of
the chart is a horizontal breakdown of each repeating
word contained in Ode VIII, along with its definition and
a confirmation of its pronunciation. Although a closer
look at the radicals composing these words will figure
later in our analysis of the three translations, the singular
Chinese character tsai, meaning “to gather,” is broken
down in the chart to its two radicals, illustrating the way
in which some Chinese characters signify visually. The
upper radical of tsai, for example, typically represents an
animal claw or nail and combines with the lower radical
for wood or lumber to suggest the act of gathering. The
“claw” figuratively gathers “the wood” in a way suggestive of a wild or uncultivated sort of action. And indeed,
plantain grew wild in the meadows and wastelands, so
the gatherers were not working next to their huts or
houses. Other visual cues to meaning appear in the ode
and, as we shall see, are especially dramatic in the varying fourth characters, which are set horizontally at the
bottom of the word chart along with their own definitions and pronunciations.
Translation Review
Seen collectively, then, the assembly of charts suggests some fundamental qualities of Ode VIII that serve
as pivotal challenges to our three translators’ various
interpretations. Each translator is roughly able to deliver
the information contained in the ode, but at the same
time, each in his own way perforce contends with its
rhythmic character and with the key words and phrases
that essentially deliver that rhythm to our understanding.
Each, for example, must account in some sensible way
for the waves of repeating eye-rhymes, compounded by
the repeating waves of sound occurring in each stanza.
These incessant waves of repetitions suggest an absorbing — even hypnotic — communal action. So, too, each
translator has to contend with the other action words that
provide the alteration of sight and sound patterns occurring at the end of each stanza — words that modify the
overall sight and sound of the ode in much the same way
that the gathering, plucking, rubbing, and tucking that
takes place in its imagined fields and fens shifts the character of the work done.
Turning to Legge’s handling of the ode, it becomes
immediately clear that he seeks to capture some sense of
its communal rhythm. His translation contains a collective “we” in each line and continues to gather and gather,
pluck, rub, and tuck from beginning to end, often setting
these action words in stock phrases appearing in the
same location of each stanza, thereby creating an English
version of the eye-rhymes evident in the original. His use
of an adverbial “now” also conveys some sense of immediacy and life as expressed in the original through its
varying fourth-line spirit-of-action word zhi
meaning
“to go or arrive.” Moreover, Legge chooses his verbs
well, suggestive of the way in which some Chinese characters visualize the action they symbolize. He uses the
phrase “pluck the ears,” for example, as the English
equivalent of a Chinese character that shows just that
action:
shows an abstract radical form of a person
whose hand is stretched out toward and plucking at what
visually appears to be a field of corn
, or at least
four sheafy bundles. Likewise, the same character used
for plucking shows up again in the Chinese ideogram
meaning “to rub” or “stroke”
.
Yet overall, Legge’s work lacks vim, and the ode
very much wants it. His “now” tells us that we are to
imagine a present action, for example, but does so by
telling us of the present rather than by showing it. He
also neglects the fun that is pervasive in the ode. Indeed,
in his footnotes to the ode, Legge suggests that the
31
ideogram for pou yen,
, is essentially untranslatable
gobbledygook and so unjustly writes off the third character of every stanza, or 25% of the ode. (Legge XX). Yet
pou yen is composed of a variety of elements that collectively suggest that it means something like “to lightly
express,” or to express with a sort of effervescence. The
lower character of the ideogram shows a mouth with
words coming out of it —
— and is the Chinese
radical meaning “to speak” or “to express.” Above it is a
wonderful assemblage of radicals that together convey a
sense of mirth. Taken as the sum of its parts,
water,
plus
small, plus
“barely,” plus
“grass”
expresses a mood as light, fluent, and subtle as is the
whispering wind over water and grass. Perhaps the disciplined Presbyterian minister just could not bring himself
to accept the idea of a light mood associated with work.
Waley also seeks to convey the communal and rhythmic nature of the ode’s action through repetition of word
and phrase. “Thick grows the plantain,” for example, is
followed by another stock phrase, “Here we go” or
“hold” or “have.” In these ways, not only is the communal nature of the ode’s action conveyed, but that action is
also confirmed by a nod to the eye rhymes of the original, because each stock phrase appears in the same place
within each stanza, creating a mass decking of visual
similarity. Such stock phrases also capture the sense of
immediacy of action relayed in the original through such
phrases as
“gather and gather” and both tsai zhi
,
“gathering now,” and you zhi , “here we are now.” Yet
at the same time, if Legge’s version appears to be a fairly
literal one, albeit bereft of the all-important and spirited
pou yen , Waley’s appears to be a fairly literal version
of the ode that turns spirit into the rote phrasing of the
pedant.
Waley repeats Legge’s attempts to recreate the communal rhythm of the original by translating line by line,
in keeping with the ancient Chinese pattern of three stanzas of four lines each. He also follows Legge’s attempt to
keep the eye and sound rhymes found in the original
alive in his translation. In these ways, Waley is apparently a good student of the ode. Nevertheless, he makes
small changes to the ode in what must be a poetic
attempt to awaken it in some fashion. It is in these
attempts to awaken the ode, however, that Waley’s
pedantry shows, for he instead depletes the verbal life
and spirit of the ode through his emphasis on adverbs,
static intransitive verbs, and superfluous detail. “Thick
32
grows the plantain,” for example, empties the energy
from the original through its substitution of the still
image of thick-standing plants for the votive act of gathering birthing seeds from those plants. His replacement
of action verbs such as Legge’s “pluck” and “rub” and
“place” with “here we hold,” and “here we are,” and
“here we have” further depletes the ode’s energy by
again making intransitive what was clearly meant in the
original to be full of rhythmic movement. What is more,
additions such as when his gatherers have seeds
“between the fingers,” or elsewhere, “handfuls” of seeds,
again curtail movement in the ode because a focus on
what is small and specific misses the essentially large
and general sweep of a work intent on expressing communal rather than individual action.
Pound the poet makes some interesting changes to
the ode. Unlike Legge the missionary and Waley the
scholar, Pound strays from the traditional four-line pattern for each of the three stanzas of the original and
instead delivers two per stanza. This seems a good strategy for generating a more upbeat tempo than either Legge
or Waley achieves in his translations, and Pound clearly
seeks to embed a sense of effervescent life into his version. Indeed, even his attempt to convey the communal
rhythms of the original is imbued with musical effervescence. Instead of the freighted repetitions of Legge and
Waley’s stock phrases, Pound’s “pluck, pluck, pluck” followed by “pluck, pick, pluck, then pluck again” serves as
a swift variation on an insistent rhythm. The immediate
result is a lightening of mood, while at the same time
Pound’s nod to the sonic and eye-rhymes of the original
convey the necessary sense of communal action. A lightened mood is further established through the use of the
interjection “Oh” to presumably deliver some of what in
the Chinese comes across through pou yen
and
through all of the spirit of immediacy embodied in every
fourth line of the original through the various compounds
including zhi
.
What is more, Pound shows a sensibility to the ode
that is less in evidence in either Legge or Waley’s versions. Whether it comes from his poetic intuition at work
or from his reading of Legge and Waley’s footnotes, only
Pound’s “Here be seeds for sturdy men” conveys any
sense of the purpose behind the women gathering plantain. Yet this information is essential to the modern,
postindustrial reader, and it is not altogether an intrusion
on the poem to have inserted it. In sum, then, Pound’s
version brings the communal rhythm, the effervescent
spirit, and the essential purpose of the original to life
Translation Review
through his translation in a way superior to what Legge
and Waley produce. His ode lives in a way that theirs do
not, and from what we have seen of the ode through
charting and explication, it very much wants to live.
Indeed, had Pound sought further warrant for a spirited
interpretation of the ode, he might have seen the Chinese
character
for “luck” situated amid the Chinese compound for those girdles into which women were tucking
seeds.
Yet for all of its life, Pound’s version has problems.
It is perhaps a little too irreverent. The heavy rhythms of
the original produce in sound, text, and sense an essential
majesty of motion that is lost in all of Pound’s end
rhymes and assorted pickings and pluckings. In his bid
for more spirit and fun, Pound may have gone too far
toward turning an ode embodying the ritualized communal activity of women gathering medicinal birthing seeds
into very little more than a ditty, complete with what
amounts to a cryptic cornpone maxim in the final stanza:
“Pluck the leaf and fill the flap/Skirts were made to hide
the lap.” This final line fails to deliver the original’s
basic information, while being at the same time, a little
too silly. At least Legge and Waley retain the dignity of
the ode in translation, and no matter what their translation crimes, clearly transfer the ode’s narrative sense to
us.
All of which is to perhaps confirm what Burton
Watson suggests is the problem of interpretive variations
encountered by every reader of translations47 and of what
Achilles Fang asserts is the necessity for all translators of
the Odes “to take courage in their hands,” because
“translators are interpreters among other things.”48 In
short, this brief comparison and contrast of Legge,
Waley, and Pound interpretations of Ode VIII suggests
not only the ways in which each translator succeeds and
the ways in which each falls short but also the sort of
problems all of them had to grapple with in their
attempts to render the poetic expression of one world to
another. It is a problem seemingly without beginnings or
ends, and as such, exists as part of the perpetual means
by which each of us tries to gain a greater understanding
of one another, separated as we are by time, circumstance, sensibility, and space. In conclusion, then, it
seems that there is really only one solution to the translation problem faced by Legge, Waley, Pound, and countless others through time. One must grab the bull by the
horns, hunker down in a chair with a series of other
translations, pray to the various muses perhaps, and offer
yet another version. Here is mine:
Translation Review
Gathering gathering plantain,
Oh yes, we gather it right now,
Gathering, gathering, yes now,
So that we have it for birthing time.
We gather and we gather, yes!
Plucking and picking from the stems.
Oh we gather and we gather!
Rubbing out seeds with nimble touch.
Gathering and gathering plantain,
Placing the seeds in lucky skirts.
Oh, gathering and gathering,
Tucking our skirts in lucky belts
(2004)
I believe that I have solved several of the problems
that Legge, Waley, and Pound failed to overcome in their
various translations of Ode VIII, and at the same time,
have suggested what needs to be done by those who disagree with any or all of us. If you happen to be one of
those intrepid folk, then I hope that at this point, you
know what to do. Good luck!
Author’s Note
Special thanks to Eileen Young, late of the Taiwanese
Symphony Orchestra, and now a student of mine at
Minot State University, for her help in tracking down and
parsing all of the Chinese characters cited in this essay.
In addition, all characters are identified from the revised
American Edition of Matthew’s Chinese English
Dictionary, republished by the Harvard University Press
in 2000.
Notes
Lai Ming, A History of Chinese Literature (New York:
John Day Co., 1964) p. 27. Lai Ming notes that there
were three different categories of odes from ancient
times: the feng, or folksongs or wind songs, which constituted 160 of the roughly 300 odes; ya, or verses sung
at court, of which there are 105 odes; and sung, or verses
of songs sung at rituals. Furthermore, according to L.S.
Dembo, in his The Confucian Odes of Ezra Pound: A
Critical Appraisal (Berkeley: University California
Press, 1963), p. 10–14, Confucius arranged the odes in
keeping with the natural order of the universe, so began
with the interrelationships of men and women, culminating in the family. The feng songs were of this type, and
the earliest of these are referred to as Chou Nan, or songs
of the Chou. They are often considered “genuine” or
1
33
“pure” because they are simple lyrics, or fu, that tell the
story of people and work. In this sense, they embody a
“moral purity” lost in other narrative types of odes,
which use metaphorical (pi) or allusive (hsing) styles to
convey complex meaning.
2
Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese
Classic of Poetry (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1937)
p. xiii. Waley notes that most of the odes probably
reached their present anthologized form circa 600 BC.
3
James Legge. The She King (Taipei: SMC Pub, [1871]
1991) p. 3. This is probably not true — several literary
and philosophical works produced before the time of
Confucius quote so predominantly from the 305 songs
that it is difficult to think that 2800 rarely quoted odes
existed alongside of these 305.
4
Lai Ming, page 28. Lai Ming notes that Tz’u is the son
of Confucius.
5
Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969) p. 22.
6
James Legge, Confucius, from the “Analects” (New
York: Dover Press, [1893] 1971) p. 323.
7
Wing-Tsit Chan, Sourcebook, p. 251. Wing-Tsit Chan
notes that the Ch’in Dynasty (221–206 BC) promoted the
Legalist School of Chinese philosophy, and although its
violence and ruthlessness have guaranteed that there has
never been another Legalist School in nearly two thousand years, the Legalists nevertheless had a positive side.
They were the only Chinese philosophers who took
charge of the state and were “consistently and vigorously
anti-ancient … . [The Legalists] looked to the present
rather than the past, and to changing circumstances rather
than to any prescribed condition.”
8
James Legge, She King, p. 8.
9
L.S. Dembo, The Confucion Odes of Ezra Pound: A
Critical Appraisal (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1963) p. 38. Dembo suggests that “virtually any
educated Chinese” could recite an ode “at a moment’s
notice.”
10
Legge, She King, p. 11.
11
Burton Watson, Early Chinese Literature (New York:
Columbia UP, 1962) p. 203. Watson notes that after the
Ch’in’s famous burning of the books, three revived versions of the Odes eventually received official recognition
of the early Han, but that all three of these, which exist
only in fragments today, were replaced by the fourth socalled Mao text. The Mao text continues to be the standard version of the Odes.
12
Legge, She King, p. 12.
13
Legge, She King, p. 101
14
Legge, She King, p. 12
34
Legge, She King, p. v. Legge notes that M. Callery correctly characterized Lacharme’s translation as “la production la plus indigeste et la plus ennuyeuse dont la
sinologie ait a rougir.”
16
Pere Lacharme, Liber Carminum, 1733 (published
1830).
Couvreur’s Cheu King, 1896.
Legge’s The She King or Book of Poetry, 1861.
Bernard Karlgren, Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes,
1942.
Arthur Waley’s Odes, 1937.
Ezra Pound’s She-ching, 1954.
17
James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Volume I (Taipei:
SMC Publishing, [1893] 1991) p. 3
18
Legge, The Chinese Classics, p. 7.
19
Legge, The Confucian Analects, The Great Learning,
The Doctrine of the Mean (Taipei, SMC Pub, 1893) p. 7.
Legge was assigned to the Anglo-Chinese College located at Malacca in 1839 but in 1843 moved the mission to
Hong Kong in order to be closer to the mainland.
20
Legge, The Chinese Classics, p. 21
21
Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian
Translations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997) p. 47.
22
Jonathan Spence, Chinese Roundabout: Essays in
History and Culture (New York: Norton Pub, 1992) p.
331.
23
Spence, Roundabout, 331.
24
Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The
Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham: Duke
UP, 1995) p. 131.
25
Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, pp. 9–14. Zhaoming Qian
notes that Pound was “getting orient from all quarters”
from roughly 1909 onward, when he and his bride-to-be,
Dorothy Shakespear, attended Lawrence Binyon’s March
1909 lecture on “Oriental and European Art,” at the
British Museum. Binyon was Assistant Keeper in charge
of the museum’s Far Eastern paintings and color prints.
26
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University
California Press, 1971) p. 197.
27
Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of
Ezra Pound (New York: Dell Pub, 1990) p. 220.
28
Carpenter, p. 268.
29
Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 131.
30
Carpenter, p. 269. Carpenter notes that Waley’s linguistic skill far exceeded Pound’s, and in the introduction to
his 1916 translations of Japanese Noh dramas, Pound
thanked Waley for his orthographic help. Nevertheless,
Waley too had taught himself Japanese and Chinese in
his spare time while working for Binyon at the British
15
Translation Review
Museum.
31
Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 131.
32
Carpenter, pp. 269–70. Carpenter notes that Waley was
privately contemptuous of Pound’s understanding of the
Chinese language, and for his part, when Daniel Corey
mentioned Waley’s name to him, Pound let out a “fusillade of expletives.”
33
Spence, Roundabout, p. 330.
34
Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 130.
35
Carpenter, p. 270.
36
Carpenter, p. 270.
37
Dembo, page 2. Dembo notes that Pound believed in
using intuition and a certain empathetic state of mind in
order to create a cultural synthesis through translation.
38
Dembo, p. 24. Dembo notes that literally thousands of
Chinese characters are constructed of phonological, not
pictorial, elements. Readers of Chinese through time
would also have seen even the pictorial elements of the
language in the abstract, so often would have no visual
idea of what word they were beholding in Chinese char-
acters.
39
Dembo, p. 7; Lai Ming, p. 27.
40
Dembo, Odes, p. 62.
41
Watson, p. 202.
42
Dembo, Odes, p. 10.
43
Dembo, Odes, p. 14.
44
Waley, p. 91. Legge, p. 15, further notes that the plant
in question is probably the common English ribgrass and
that the Chinese still consider it to be helpful in “difficult
labours.”
45
Dembo, Odes, p. 36.
46
Legge, She King, p. 102.
47
Watson, p. 205.
48
Dembo, p. x
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Translation Review
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35
INTERVIEW WITH THOM SATTERLEE
By John DuVal
DuVal: You decided somewhere in your career, working
for your MFA in translation at the University of
Arkansas, that you would work on translations of poems
by Henrik Nordbrandt, and you decided that you were
not going to do just a selection from various collections
of Nordbrandt but rather a single book. And what was
that single book?
Satterlee: The title of the book in Danish is Ormene ved
himlens port. The English title is The Worms at Heaven’s
Gate, which is actually a title of a Wallace Stevens
poem. Henrik Nordbrandt is a big Wallace Stevens fan.
The reason I decided to translate an entire book was in
part because I had already translated a selection from different books for my Master’s thesis. But I also felt that
with this particular book, I shouldn’t skip poems.
Ormene is a collection of elegies to Nordbrandt’s girlfriend, who died suddenly at a young age. As a whole,
the book moves along a certain trajectory of grief, and I
wanted to include that arc. To translate the book otherwise would have been like picking and choosing cantos
in The Inferno or translating only some of the sonnets in
the Sonnets to Orpheus. To use the language I learned in
the Translation Workshop in Fayetteville, I wanted to be
faithful to my author. I was convinced that the poems
worked together to describe a whole experience. And —
I think this is interesting — as a translator, you don’t
have the opportunity to compensate wholeness with part
of a book in the way that you might, say, in an individual
poem, compensate for a poetic feature by including it at
a later point than the original poet did.
Now, having said that, I have to admit that when it finally came to publishing a book of translations, I decided to
select some of the best individual poems from Ormene
and include them with poems from several of
Nordbrandt’s other collections. I still think that the best
experience of Ormene is through reading every poem in
the order that Nordbrandt arranged them, but I wanted
the book to have room for other work of his, too.
D: How many poems did you include from the different
books?
S: The Hangman’s Lament, which Green Integer published in October, 2003, has Nordbrandt poems from, I
think, six different books, 50 to 60 pages of translation.
The book is bilingual, with an introduction that I wrote.
However, a major portion of Henrik Nordbrandt’s poetry
had already been translated by Alexander Taylor, the
director of Curbstone Press. I continued where Taylor
left off, because he had shifted his focus to Latin
American literature. I started translating Nordbrandt in
about 1992. I just went though the books and found the
poems that I thought would work the best in English,
many of those for my Master’s thesis at SUNY
Brockport.
D: Did you come to Nordbrandt on your own, or was it
through the translations by Alexander Taylor?
S: Well, I think the first Nordbrandt poem I saw was in
translation — it was by Alexander Taylor. I was in my
second year of a two-year Master’s in English/Creative
Writing at Brockport. I wasn’t sure whether I was going
to do a collection of my own poems. It was at that time
that I became interested in translation, so I got a collection of contemporary Danish poetry, and it happened to
have some Nordbrandt poems. His just jumped off the
page.
D: Were you reading them in Danish?
S: No, I was reading them in English. I read them in
English first, because this was not a bilingual edition.
John DuVal (l) and Thom Satterlee
36
Translation Review
D: It jumped off the page in translations.
the poem.
S: Yes, in the translations.
D: How many poems by Nordbrandt have you
translated?
D: And were they all by Alexander Taylor or was there
anybody else?
S: Well, on some of them, Nordbrandt had collaborated
with him.
D: So, the English words of the other translator inspired
you to such an extent that you wanted to do your own
translations!
S: That’s right. So, I then found some of his books in
Danish that hadn’t been translated. That was in around
1993 and 1994.
D: Now, how much Danish have you had?
S: Not that much. Well, I had some formal Danish. I was
in Denmark for a year as an exchange student in high
school and then in college to meet my foreign language
requirement. I took a class at the University of Buffalo.
D: How did you proceed from here?
S: For my Master’s thesis, I went through all the volumes that Nordbrandt had published, and he publishes a
lot; he is very prolific poet. I took the poems that I wanted to translate and incorporated those into the thesis.
When I was at Fayetteville to study for the MFA, just
before I started working on my thesis, Worms at
Heaven’s Gate, I had a chance to spend part of a summer
in Copenhagen. The book had just come out when I was
in Copenhagen, and so I spent several nights with a
Danish poet who helped me in translating it. His name is
Asger Schnack. He also helped Alexander Taylor — in
fact, it was Alexander who suggested that I look up
Asger. For two or three nights, we met at his home and
went over these poems. Some of the poems baffled both
of us. I remember Asger shaking his head and saying, “I
don’t know, this is what it says, but I don’t know — I
have no idea.” I can’t tell you how helpful that admission
was! It told me that there are points in the poems that are
unclear to native speakers too — even a native speaker
who is himself an accomplished poet. Because the native
speaker had difficulties with the text, I decided to leave
what was unclear in Danish also unclear in English,
rather than kind of stamping down my own meaning for
Translation Review
S: I translated about 60 for my thesis, and I have translated probably another 100 to 150 beyond that, some of
them after The Hangman’s Lament came out. This past
Christmas, I was in Denmark and found myself translating some new Henrik Nordbrandt poems. I had gone
there to celebrate Christmas with the host family I stayed
with twenty years ago, but then I found a new collection
of Nordbrandt’s and couldn’t help myself. So, during
part of my visit I sat at the dining room table with my
former host mother and we went through my translations.
She’s not a poet, as Asger Schnack is, but she speaks a
refined, subtle Danish. Her friends say that she speaks
“the Queen’s Danish.” The most helpful part of our
exchange came at moments when I thought Nordbrandt
was expressing himself in an unusual way, and my host
mother was able to tell me that in fact he was using a
common phrase. Then she could fill in the context.
Without her help I’m sure I would have misrepresented
the poem. But I wouldn’t have misrepresented it on purpose: I wouldn’t have known that I didn’t know what I
didn’t know. It’s a sign that I’m maturing as a translator,
I think, this fact that I’m less likely to trust myself. As a
practice, I show my translations to a native speaker of
Danish. I have to because of my language status: nonnative. I’ve learned to doubt any translation that I do
entirely on my own. Maybe the best non-native translators are born (or born-again) skeptics. They’ve learned
not to leave their own work unquestioned.
D: Have you done any writing outside of your translation
work?
S: I enjoy working on translations, on poems, on stories,
and even on academic writing. Before I began in the
MFA program, you started me on my first article to
write: “A Case for Smilla,” about the translation of Peter
Høeg’s novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow.
D: For Translation Review.
S: For Translation Review. And I like that kind of writing, too. So, I have all these different kinds of writing
that I enjoy doing, and I’m beginning to learn that there’s
a limited amount of time to do them. And there’s the
added difficulty of moving from one to the other. Donald
37
Hall has a little book called Life Work in which he talks
about his regular day of work. He’ll start with poems,
then go to a book review, then he has a essay on baseball, then a children’s book, and essays, and he’s moving
between these genres — all in the course of one day —
as soon as he gets tired of one, when he says the poetry
juices are running low, then he just moves to the next. I
thought that was a great idea and tried it for a while, but
I found that it’s almost as though you move from your
poetry mind to your fiction mind and your fiction mind
into your essay mind and I find it hard to make that transition all within the same day.
D: Have you ever met Nordbrandt?
S: Never.
D: Have you written to him?
S: Yes.
D: Has he written back?
S: Yes, but only a kind of business letter granting his
permission to submit poems to journals, that’s about it. I
know him mostly through interviews that he’s given. But
I think I’d like to meet him, I don’t know.
ask this question of poet to translator.
S: Right. I’m pretty sure that being a poet has helped me
as a translator. I wouldn’t be satisfied with a translated
poem that is faithful to the meaning but not to the poetic
aspects of a poem, so I had that going for me as a translator. I think that being a translator has helped me as a
poet, because in translation, you read so closely, and I
think that Nordbrandt is a great poet, and so I’ve had a
kind of apprenticeship as I’ve worked through each
poem. I’ve seen the choices that he made in his poems,
and that’s given me the opportunity to work closely with
someone who is mature in his writing. When I write my
own poems, I can tell the difference between the mature
poet I’m translating and the maturing poet that I am.
Sometimes it’s definitely there in how much deeper his
vision is in his poems, how much more he has seen, how
much more he is doing technically, so I can push myself
more in my own poetry. I don’t know whether that would
happen at the same level if I were reading contemporary
American poetry, or even contemporary world poetry.
Somehow, the translation brings me so much closer to a
poem, somewhat like the experience of memorizing a
poem or typing out someone else’s poem — it’s a different experience than reading, thinking about, or writing an
essay about the poem. I think that being a translator
causes me to be a better reader and a better student of
Nordbrandt’s poems.
D: What do you mean I think?
S: I don’t know how much of this I would put in the
interview, but I’ve heard that he’s rather difficult to deal
with. So, I haven’t pushed really hard to meet him,
although I wouldn’t mind it. Maybe if I pull together
another book of translations of his poems, we could meet
and discuss revisions. I could imagine meeting him in
that kind of a context, but I’d be a real bore if he wanted
to go out for swinging nightlife in Copenhagen.
D: Do you think that maybe this gives you confidence
when you’re writing Nordbrandt’s thoughts, that maybe
you can write your own thoughts in English? Is that a
possibility? Maybe not.
D: Or Istanbul.
S: I don’t know, confidence has been important. When I
came to the program at Arkansas, I still wanted something to happen that would make me more confident in
myself as a writer and a translator. I can remember at the
time referring to it as a significant nod of approval from
somewhere or someone.
S: Yes, he lives in Turkey.
D: What kind of poetry do you write?
D: He’s five years younger than I am.
S: Until a few years ago, almost all of my poetry was in
open form. As an undergraduate and graduate student, I
wrote mostly lyrics, personal lyrics, and a tendency
toward narrative. I was always having to fight against my
poems being too chatty-sounding.
S: How did you figure that?
D: He was born in ’45. I wanted to ask you whether
being a translator has helped you as a poet or whether
being a poet has helped you as a translator. You’ve probably thought about this a lot; I’m not the first person to
38
D: Well, Nordbrandt’s sort of a chatty poet, isn’t he?
Translation Review
S: Yes, I wonder whether we have the same affinity.
Now I’m writing … different little projects, I’m starting
to see my poems as projects that I want to work on,
groups of poems, sequences of poems, rather than unrelated poems. For the last four years, I have been working
on poems set in and around 1380, having to do loosely
with the life of John Wyclif. It’s an interesting period,
and I’m enjoying writing the poems because there’s the
Peasant’s Revolt, there’s all this stuff with the church
calling John Wyclif a heretic, there’s the translation of
the Bible. A little bit before that, there’s the Black Death
— the plague — so, I’ve been fascinated by that period
in history and have been playing around with poems in
both traditional and invented forms. Sometimes I even
try to see how much I can get away with in using Middle
English in poems.
D: Wyclif’s Middle English, or are you making up your
own through all of this?
S: Making up my own, but drawing from the same
vocabulary that he would have used, that Chaucer would
have used.
D: That Ezra Pound might have used.
S: Right; in fact, that’s where I got the idea. There were
some Pound translations, I remember we talked about
this term patina in a workshop, and I remember thinking,
“oh, that’s interesting how he’s just sprinkling a few of
these old-fashioned or archaic words into his translation,” and I thought, well, in my poems, I might try that
and see how much I can get away with. Let me see
where I can place those words so that they’re easiest for
a reader to catch (even a reader who is not familiar with
Middle English).
D: You mean to understand?
S: To understand, yes.
D: Without being annoyed.
S: Exactly, I don’t want to write frustrating poems that
won’t be read. But that’s one project. I’ve been writing
poems about my childhood hero, the Brazilian soccer
player Pelé. I’ve written about a dozen or more of those.
So, I’m moving, I think, toward seeing my own poetry in
larger projects.
Translation Review
D: Are you quoting from Wyclif or from the Wyclif
Bible?
S: Sometimes, in a couple of them, I have Wyclif’s sermons and some other Wyclif material that is in the
Middle English — a lot of what he wrote was in Latin,
and then it’s translated into modern English. I use that,
too. And I’ll often use epigraphs from Wyclif’s biographers or critics. I’m also trying to find sources, some of
the people who wrote against Wyclif, to get that side of it
too.
Besides the poems, I’m hoping to write some prose. On
the shelf behind my desk in my office, I have a large
stack of papers that I want to work into an article. Since I
left the MFA program, I’ve taught largely freshman composition classes, and I’ve tried to use some — it’s not
translation theory, it’s sort of translation orientation, in
the way that I’ve structured those classes to have translation as a theme in the classes. And I’ve done it in four or
five different ways at the University of Miami and now
at Taylor University, and I’ve kept student work from
that, and I want to write an article in which I talk pretty
practically about what went on in those classes and what
came out of those classes, because, I think it was 1982 or
so, there’s a Translation Review issue in which Dennis
Kratz says it’s important, if we’re going to encourage an
interest in translation in schools, that we have some concrete orientation of what one can do in class. He has a
whole article about one semester he did in using translation, but I don’t think anyone else has contributed that
kind of practical material.
D: What do you teach at Taylor University?
S: At the moment, I’m teaching one section of freshman
composition and a section of poetry writing and a section
of fiction writing. I think to serve my students well, I
should be practicing all of those kinds of writing, and I
don’t see it as a burden at all. I see it as great. I’m going
to try writing fiction and see how that goes and learn
what I can.
D: You talked about someday writing a novella about
Yeats and Pound and Frost when they were all in London
at the same time.
S: Oh yes, thanks for reminding me of that. I haven’t
thought about that in a couple of years at least. That
would be a fun project. I remember when I was looking
39
into that Frost quote, “poetry is what gets lost in translation” and I was finding myself learning about Frost biography and Pound … I started to have this theory of my
own, actually I think it’s from something you said, that
maybe Frost had one drink too many at a party and he
said that.
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D: And for our listening audience, he said the big sentence.
S: So, I can imagine writing a novella or at least a short
story that tries to answer the place and the time when
Frost first said those words and have fun with using
those historical figures, bringing Pound and Frost together on the page. They didn’t get along really well, so I
have my conflict, their egos.
D: Important ingredients in fiction. Was that article of
yours about Frost written for Delos? I think that is one of
the great articles written about translation. You just pursue it, and you pursue it, and pursue it — this fascinating
question of did Frost really say that not altogether complimentary thing about translation? And you think he
did?
S: I think that he did, but we may never know exactly
how he worded it. In the article, I argued that it was
important to know how he worded it and that the meaning is obscured when we have Frost quoted by different
people in five or six different ways.
D: You think five or six different versions?
S: Right, although they’re pretty similar. I listed them in
the article.
D: But it’s always the same interpretation. In the article,
did you trace back to Pound having said something pretty much the same, only with a positive feeling, and
Dante, right? Dante’s wasn’t so positive, though, I don’t
think.
S: Yes, and several other people. No, Dante’s was a little
less positive, and I traced it back I think … I think it
goes as far back as …
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40
Translation Review
TRANSLITERATION OR TRANSLATION OF
BIBLICAL PROPER NAMES
By Jože Krašovec
E
ven the earliest translators of the Bible believed that
equivalents had to be found for all the words that
appeared in the original text. Notable exceptions have
been proper names as well as Hebrew common nouns for
which no adequate translations could be found (Amen,
ephod, Gehenna, Hallelujah, manna, Pesah, Sabbath,
etc.). From the beginning, Bible translators decided to
transliterate almost all proper names, only occasionally
translating them according to their etymological meaning
or cultural determinants. For very special reasons, the
main Hebrew name for God yhwh (Yahweh) was replaced
by the general designation Lord. The method of early
translators became an unwritten law for translators of
later versions of the Bible.
There has not, however, been consistency in transliterating rather than translating proper names in earlier or
later translations of the Bible. A given name may be
transliterated in one translation unit, but translated elsewhere, following no recognizable underlying rule or system. The forms of biblical names in various versions of
Bible translations throughout history mirror more or less
the personal preferences of the translators in rendering
proper names or their reliance on preceding versions.
Biblical proper names are transliterated according to
the relevant rules of target languages and cultural traditions. In general, the transliteration technique is phonetic,
depending on the translators’ knowledge of the original
language and their use of the basic text (Vorlage). Translators did not apply transliteration techniques consistently in the sense of using modern scientific transliteration
rules. Differences between the structure of the original
language and various forms of proper names in the original or in previous translations explain why the forms of
biblical names are consistent only in cases when a particular letter of the alphabet does not allow several possibilities; in cases of more than one possibility, the transliteration forms can vary. Several names have different forms
of the same transliteration.1
This presentation discusses some well-known
appellatives, designations, and names, which are rendered both in transliteration and translation forms: the
Tetragrammaton yhwh (Yahweh) (Gen 2:4; 3:1; etc),
meaning the personal name of the God of Israel; designations of the netherworld Abaddon (Job 26:6; 28:22;
Translation Review
31:12; Ps 88:12; Prov 15:11; 27:20; Rev 9:11) and Sheol
(Gen 37:35; Ps 6:5; Job 26:6; Prov 15:11; 27:20; etc);
designations of giants Nephilim (Gen 6:4; Num 13:33)
and Rephaim (Gen 14:5; 15:20; etc.); designations or
names of the monstrous beings Behemoth (Job 40:15)
and Leviathan (Isa 27:1; Pss 74:14; 104:26; Job 3:8;
40:25); the symbolic names of Hosea’s children in Hosea
1: Jezreel (Hos 1:4), (Lo-) Ruhama (Hos 1:6) and (Lo-)
Ammi (Hos 1:9); the name of Isaiah’s second son Mahershalal-hash-baz (Isa 8:1, 3), having a striking symbolic
meaning in the context of Isaiah’s pronouncement of the
destruction of Damascus and Samaria; names of peoples
Philistines (Gen 10:14; Ex 13:17; etc.) and Goiim (Gen
14:1, 9); lands Aram-naharaim (Gen 24:10) and Paddanaram (Gen 25:20); toponyms Moreh (Gen 12:6; Deut
11:30; Judg 7:1) and Moriah (Gen 22:2; 2 Chr 3:1); the
cave Machpelah (Gen 23:9, 17, 19; 25:9; 49:30; 50:13);
and the plain Shephelah (Deut 1:7; Josh 9:1; 10:40; 11:2,
16 ; 12:8; 15:33; Judg 1:9; etc.). In addition to these
examples of alternative methods of rendering names, the
way of transliterating the mountain Harmagedon (Rev
16:16), mentioned as the place of the last divine judgment, is noteworthy. Nearly ninety anthroponyms and
toponyms, which are etymologically explained in the
Bible itself, will be treated in a separate section.
Substitutes for the Divine Personal Name yhwh or Its
Transliteration
In the Hebrew Bible, the specific personal name for
the God of Israel is given by the four consonants, the
“Tetragrammaton” yhwh, appearing 6007 times. It is
almost certain that the name was originally pronounced
Yahweh. In some early period of Judaism, the Tetragrammaton yhwh came to be regarded as too sacred to be pronounced. The long-established practice when reading the
Hebrew Scriptures in the synagogue was to read the
word ’æ dōnāy, “Lord,” for this symbol. The Masoretes
added vowel sounds to the consonantal Hebrew text and
attached to yhwh vowel signs indicating that the Hebrew
word ’æ dōnāy, “Lord,” or ’ělōhîm, “God,” should be
read in its place.
A survey of Bible translations throughout the centuries reveals that translators have always been in search
41
of the best solutions for rendering the Tetragrammaton
yhwh. On the one hand, they were bound to the Jewish
tradition of extraordinary reverence for this Divine
Name, and on the other hand they were obliged to overcome a limited range of possibilities when yhwh appears
in construct expressions of divine names and appellatives. The basic dilemma has been: should the Name be
transliterated or replaced by another word? A similar
dilemma is whether names with a supposed etymological
meaning and unusual simple or compound names with a
marked symbolic meaning in relation to created beings
should be transliterated or translated. The translators of
LXX used the Greek word Kýrios, “Lord,” and translators of VL and Vg used the Latin word Dominus. “Lord,”
for the Name. In the late medieval period, the form that
came to be used was Jehovah, which is a combination of
the consonants of the Divine Name and the vowels
attached to it by the Masoretes for the substitute Adonai.
The Jewish tradition of avoiding saying the Tetragrammaton yhwh out loud and the translation method of
the ancient Greek and Latin translators strongly influenced later Christian translators of the Bible. While the
name Yahweh was in all centuries used primarily in general religious and theological literature, Bible translations
normally replaced the name Yahweh with the word Lord,
in combination with other divine names and appellatives,
sometimes with the word God, very often written and
printed in capital letters LORD/GOD. This is true for
most Renaissance and recent standard versions. All the
more striking are some versions rendering the Divine
Name in various transliterated forms: Jehovah (ASV,
DBY), Jehova (ELO), Yahvé (FBJ), Jehová (R60), Jehovah (RVA), Éternel (DRB), Eterno (LND).
Substitutes or Transliteration in Construct Expressions of Divine Names and Appellatives
The Hebrew Bible contains a number of construct
expressions, which are compounds of double proper
names or designations of God, sometimes extended with
additional appellatives.The established practice of replacing the Tetragrammaton yhwh with the word Lord or God
and other circumstances have obliged translators to
search for such construct expressions, which more or less
change the wording of the original.
First to be mentioned is the phrase ’æ dōnāy yhwh
øəbā’ôt (Isa 3:15; 10:23, 24; 22:12; etc.). The word
’æ dōnāy is the most common Hebrew designation of the
Lord; the Tetragrammaton yhwh is normally replaced by
the word LORD/Lord; the word in plural, øəbā’ôt, is usu-
42
ally rendered by the word “hosts,” and sometimes it is
transliterated. The way the whole phrase is rendered and
its orthography clearly reveal the degree of originality of
translators or of their reliance on other versions: yəā
’ělōhîm øəbā’ôt “LORD God of hosts” (TgIsa); Kýrios
sabaoth (LXX); Kýrios ho Theòs tôn dynámeōn (MGK);
Dominus Deus exercituum (Vg); Lord, euen the Lord of
hoasts (Isa 3:15), the Lord God of hostes (Isa 10:24), the
Lord God of hosts (Isa 22:12) (GNV); the Lord GOD of
hosts (KJV, NKJ, RSV, NRS); the Lord, Jehovah of hosts
(ASV, DBY); the Lord Yahweh Sabaoth (NJB); the Lord,
the LORD Almighty (NIB, NIV, NLT); der H(E)err
HERR Zebaoth (LUB, LUO, LUT); der Herr, ER der
Umscharte (BUR); Gott, der Herr der Heere (EIN); le
Seigneur(,) le (D)dieu des armées (BLS); le Seigneur,
l’Éternel des armées (DRB, LSG, NEG); le Seigneur, le
Dieu de l’univers (BFC); Yahvé Sabaot (FBJ); le
Seigneur Yahvé Sabaot (FBJ); le Seigneur DIEU, le toutpuissant (TOB); il Signore, il Signor degli eserciti (DIO);
il Signore, l’Eterno degli eserciti (LND); il Signore, il
SIGNORE degli eserciti (NRV); el Señor, Jehová de los
ejércitos (R60); el Señor Jehovah de los Ejércitos (RVA);
el Señor, DIOS de los ejércitos (LBA); o Senhor DEUS
dos Exércitos (ACF, BRP); o SENHOR, o Deus dos
Exércitos (ARC); o Senhor, o SENHOR dos Exércitos
(ARA); Pán, Hospodin zástupů (BKR); Pan, Bóg
Zastępów (BTP); Herra, Herra Sebaot (FIN); Uram,
Seregeknek Ura (HUN); etc. Some of these renderings
were accepted by other later versions. DAL adopted from
LUB the combination of translation and transliteration:
Gospud GOSPUD Zebaoth, whereas later Slovenian versions preferred translation of all the words: Gospód Bóg
vojsknih trûm (JAP); Godpod Bog vojskinih trum
(WOL); Gospod, Bog nad vojskami (SSP).
Another type of compound names for God is construct expressions, ’ēl ’ělōhê yiśrā’ēl (Gen 33:20) and
hā’ādōn yhwh ’ělōhê yiśrā’ēl (Ex 34:23). The expression
in Gen 33:20 concludes the narrative about Abraham’s
itinerary to Shechem. There he bought “the plot of land
on which he had pitched his tent. There he erected an
altar and called it El-Elohe-Israel (wayyiqrā’ lô ’ēl ’ělōhê
yiśrā’ēl).” As a name the expression could be interpreted
as “El is the God of Israel,” or “El, the God of Israel.”
TgO avoids giving a divine name to the altar and renders
the sentence: “He erected an altar there, and worshipped
on it before God, the God of Israel.” Other Targums have
a similar paraphrase, shifting the attention to Abraham’s
worshipping before God, the God of Israel. TgN also
partly changes the construct divine name: yyy ’lh’ dyśr’l
“Yahweh, God of Israel.” In LXX, giving a divine name
Translation Review
to the altar is avoided by disregarding the pronoun lô and
by omitting one of two words for God. The Greek rendering is kaì epekalésato tòn Theòn Israél, “and he called
on the God of Israel.” Vg has the rendering: Et erecto ibi
altari invocabit super illud Fortissimum Deum Israhel.
Among the Renaissance translations, GNV and LUB follow the Vg. GNV renders the divine name given to the
altar by: … and called it, The mightie God of Israel;
LUB has: … und rieff an den Namen des starcken Gottes
Israel. LUB’s rendering is followed by DAL: … inu je
klizal na ime tiga mozhniga Israeloviga Boga. BKR has
the rendering: Bůh silný, Bůh Izraelský. It is obvious that
Luther was influenced by other passages having the collocation: “he invoked (called) the name of the LORD”
(Gen 4:26; 12:8; 13:4; 21:33; 26:25). The majority of
other Renaissance and later translations transliterate the
entire construct name: Elelohe-Israel (KJV); Eleloheisrael (RSV); El Elohe Israel (NIV); etc. Some of them
transliterate only the first word for God: El, the God of
Israel (BBE, NAB); El, Dieu d’Israël (FBJ, TOB); El,
Izraelov Bog (SSP); etc. Those who translate the name
entirely and properly have the form: Gott, der Gott
Israels (ELO, ELB, EIN); Deus, o Deus de Israel (ACF,
BRP, ARC, ARA); Boga, Boga Izraela (BTP); etc. The
version BUR has the form: Gottheit Gott Ji∫sraels.
Renderings of the expression hā’ādōn yhwh ’ělōhê
yiśrā’ēl (Ex 34:23) manifest more variations: ribbôn
‘olmā’ yəyā ’ělāhā’ dəyiśrā’el, “the Master of the Universe, the Lord God of Israel” (TgO; cf. TgPsJ); TgN has
added in the middle the Tetragrammaton; Kýrios toû
Theoû Israēl (LXX); Kýrios, Kýrios toû Theoû toû Israēl
(MGK); Dominus Dei Israhel (Vg); the Lord Iehouah
God of Israel (GNV); the Lord GOD, the God of Israel
(KJV); the Lord Jehovah, the God of Israel (DBY, ASV);
the LORD God, the God of Israel (RSV, NRS); the Sovereign LORD, the God of Israel (NIV, NIB, NLT, TNK);
Lord Yahweh, God of Israel (NJB); der Herrscher, der
HERR und Gott Israels (LUB, LUO); der Herrscher, der
HERR, der Gott Israels (LUT, SCH); dem Herrn IHM
dem Gott JiÍsraels (BUR); der Herr, der Gott Israels
(EIN); der Herr HERR, der Gott Israels (ELB); le
Seigneur tout-puissant, le Dieu d’Israël (BLS); le
Seigneur, l’Éternel, (le) Dieu d’Israël (DRB, LSG,
NEG); le Seigneur Yahvé, Dieu d’Israël (FBJ); le Maître,
le SEIGNEUR, Dieu d’Israël (TOB); Il Signore, l’Eterno
Signore Iddio d’Israel (DIO); il Signore, l’Eterno, il DIO
d’Israele (LND); il Signore, DIO, che è il Dio d’Israele
(NRV); il Signore, Dio d’Israele (IEP); el Señoreador
Jehová, Dios de Israel (SRV); el Jehová el Señor, Dios
de Israel (R60); el Jehová, el Señor, Dios de Israel
Translation Review
(R95); el DIOS; el Señor, Dios de Israel (LBA); o Senhor DEUS, o Deus de Israel (ACF, BRP); o Senhor
JEOVÁ, Deus de Israel (ARC); Panovnik Hospodin, Boh
Izraelský (BKR); Pan, Bog Iraela (BTP); GOSPUD, inu
Bog Israelski (DAL), vsigamogozhhni Gospód Israelski
Bog (JAP); vsegamogočni Gospod Bog Izraelov (WOL);
Gospod Bog, Izraelov Bog (SSP); etc. Other versions in
various languages follow this or other patterns.
Of interest too is the construct expression combining
the Divine Name yhwh in two variants: yāh yhwh (Isa
12:2; 26:4) and yāh yāh (Isa 38:11). The slight difference
in form is the reason for considerable differences in rendering the first and the second variants. The form attested in Isa 12:2 and 26:4 is rendered as follows: changed
into the single LORD (TgIsa); Kýrios (LXX); Kýrios ho
Theós (MGK); Dominus Deus (Vg); Lord God (GNV);
LORD JEHOVAH (KJV); Jah, Jehovah (DBY); Jehovah,
even Jehovah (ASV); YAH, the LORD (NKJ); LORD
GOD (RSV, NRS, ESV, NLT); the LORD, the LORD
(NIV); Yahweh (NJB); Yah the LORD (TNK); Gott der
HERR (LUB, LUO, LUT); Jah, Jehova (ELO); oh ER,
ER (BUR at 12:2); Er, oh ER (BUR at 26:4); Jah, der
HERR (ELB); der HERR, der HERR (SCH); Seigneur
(BLS at 12:2); le Seigneur notre Dieu (BLS at 26:4);
Jah, Jéhovah (DRB); l’Éternel, l’Éternel (LSG, NEG);
Yahvé (FBJ); le SEIGNEUR (TOB); il Signore Iddio
(DIO); l’Eterno, si, l’Eterno (LND); il SIGNORE, il
SIGNORE (NRV); JAH Jehová (SRV, R60); Jah, Jehová
(R95); Jehovah (RVA); el SEÑOR DIOS (LBA); o
SENHOR DEUS (ACF, BRP); o SENHOR Deus (ARA);
o SENHOR JEOVÁ (ARC); Bůh Hospodin (BKR);
Hospodin, jen Hospodin (CEP); GOSPUD Bug (DAL);
Gospód (Bog) (JAP); Gospod (Bog) (WOL); GOSPOD
BOG (SSP); etc.
The expression yāh yāh (Isa 38:11) is often rendered
differently in translations: a single LORD (TgIsa); ho
Theós (LXX); ho Kýrios, ho Kýrios (MGK); Dominus
Dominus (Vg); the Lord, euen the Lord (GNV); the
LORD, even the LORD (KJV); Jah, Jah (DBY); Jehovah, even Jehovah (ASV); the LORD, even the LORD
(JPS); YAH, The LORD (NKJ); the LORD (RSV, NRS);
the LORD, the LORD (NAS, NIV, NIB); Yahweh (NJB);
LORD GOD (NLT); Yah, Yah (TNK); der Herr, ja, der
Herr (LUB, LUO); der HERR (LUT); Jehova, Jehova
(ELO); oh Ihn, Ihn oh (BUR); Jah, Jah (ELB); der
HERR, der HERR (SCH); le Seigneur mon Dieu (BLS);
Jah, Jah (DRB); l’Éternel, L’Éternel (LSG, NEG); Yahvé
(FBJ); le SEIGNEUR (TOB); il Signore, il Signore
(DIO); l’Eterno, si, l’Eterno (LND); il SIGNORE, il
SIGNORE (NRV); á JAH, á JAH (SRV); a Jah, a Jah
43
(R95); al SEÑOR, al SEÑOR (LBA); Jehova (RVA); ao
SENOHOR, o SENHOR (ACF, BRP); ao SENHOR
(ARC); o SENHOR (ARA); Hospodin, Hospodin (BKR,
CEP); GOSPUD, ja GOSPUD (DAL); Gospód Bog
(JAP); Gospod Bog (WOL); GOSPOD BOG (SSP); etc.
Transliteration or Translation of Terms Denoting the
Underworld
There are two Hebrew designations for the realm of
the dead, which are transliterated in some versions as
proper names for the location of a place from which
there is no return and translated in some others as general terms: ’æ baddôn and šə’ôl. It is clear that the first
word derives from the verb ’ābad, “to destroy,” but
attempts to unravel the derivation and etymologies of the
second word have not yet been successful. The connection of both words with the realm of the dead is corroborated by the parallelism in the sequence Sheol // Abaddon
(Job 26:6; Prov 15:11; 27:20). In Prov 15:11 we find, for
instance, the statement: “Sheol and Abaddon lie open
before the LORD, how much more human hearts!” Versions in different languages clearly show how translators
understood the meaning of both designations and the
function of parallelism, which is the basic form of
Hebrew poetry. In TgProv, both words are retained, but
in LXX and MGK, both words are translated: hádes kaì
apōleia, “hell and destruction”; Vg has translation of the
same type: infernus et perditio. Almost all the Renaissance translators decided for the translation option, but
some preferred transliteration: hell and destruction
(GNV, KJV); Helle und Verderbnis (LUB); l’inferno, e’l
luogo della perditione (DIO); peklo i zatracení (BKR);
pakal inu pogublenje (DAL); etc. Some later versions are
consistent in the translation or transliteration of both designations, others combine translation of one and transliteration of the other: Sheol and Abaddon (ASV, RSV,
NRS, NAS, TNK, ESV); Hell and Destruction (NKJ);
hell and destruction (DRA, WEB, LXE, RWB); Sheol
and destruction (DBY); the nether-world and Destruction (JPS); the underworld and destruction (BBE); the
nether world and the abyss (NAB); Sheol and Perdition
(NJB); the depths of Death and Destruction (NLT);
Death and Destruction (NIB); Hölle und Abgrund
(LUO); Unterwelt und Abgrund (LUT); Scheol und
Abgrund (ELO, ELB); Gruftheit und Verlorenheit
(BUR); Totenreich und Abgrund (SCH); Totenreich und
Unterwelt (EIN); L’enfer et la perdition (BLS); le shéol
et l’abîme (DRB); le séjour des morts et l’abime (LSG,
NEG); le Séjour des morts et l’Abime (TOB); Shéol et
44
Perdition (FBJ); Sceol e Abaddon (LND); lo Sceol e
Abaddon (LND); il soggiorno dei morti e l’abisso
(NRV); inferi e abisso (IEP); Pèkèl, inu pogublénje
(JAP); pekel in pogubljenje (WOL); podzemlje in brezno
(SSP); etc.
This survey of renderings focuses on the rendering of
Prov 15:11; a comparative study of all passages would
still enlarge the list considerably, because many versions
do not translate the same word consistently from the
original. Two reasons for inconsistency could be a deliberate decision by translators to create variation, or a lack
of control. Inconsistency is a normal phenomenon in
translations that are collective works.
The name Abaddon is a subject of special interest in
Rev 9:11, a passage describing the nature of the ruler of
pernicious locusts: “They have as king over them the
angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.” The grammatical form of the name in Hebrew and in Greek is different
because the meaning attached to naming the mountain in
the languages is different. The Hebrew form ’æ baddôn is
a verbal noun based on the root ’ābad, “to destroy,” and
therefore meaning “destruction,” and in the context designating specifically the place of damnation. The Greek
form apollýōn, on the other hand, is a participle meaning
“destroyer,” thus functioning as a gloss of the scriptural
writer describing the destroying nature of the angel.
Nearly all versions throughout history transliterate the
name of the angel as it is given in Hebrew and Greek.
The only exception so far known using translation is the
Italian version IEP: “Avevano come re l’angelo dell’Abisso, il cui nome in ebraico si chiama Distruzione e
in Greco Sterminatore.”
In the book of Revelation, the name of the angel
destroyer is explicitly exposed in Hebrew and in Greek.
It therefore seems natural that the name in the two places
should not be translated but rather kept in its original
forms. The freedom of translators is much more limited
here than in places of the Hebrew Bible where the names
or designations Abaddon and Sheol seem to have a more
general meaning.
The Giants Nephilim and Rephaim
In Gen 6:4, the writer reports: “The Nephilim
(hannəpilîm) were on the earth in those days – and also
afterward – when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were
the heroes (haggibbōrîm) that were of old, warriors of
renown.” The Aramaic tradition of interpretation is not
Translation Review
unified: TgO and TgN render both terms in question by
the same word, gibbārayyā’(h), “the mighty ones, giants,
warriors,” whereas TgPsJ relates the word hannəpilîm to
the verb nāpal, “to fall,” and takes it to refer to angels
who fell from heaven. Following the tradition of naming
individuals who are not named in the Bible, TgPsJ identifies the fallen angels as Shamhazai and Azael, who
were among the leaders of the fallen angels (cf. 1 Enoch
6:3, 7; 8:1; 9:6, 7; 10:8, 11; see also b. Yoma 67b). LXX
translates the term hannəpilîm by gígantes, the word also
used in Num 13:33 for the same designation and in Gen
6:4 for the designation haggibbōrîm. Aq renders
hannəpilîm by the passive participle epipíptontes, “the
fallen ones,” and haggibbōrîm by the adjective dynatoí,
“the mighty ones.” Sym uses for both designations of
huge creatures the same term, hoi bíaioi, “the violent
ones.” LXX obviously influenced later translations. Vg
translates the first term by gigantes and the second one
by potentes. Among later versions, they often translated
both terms, but a considerable number transliterate the
first term.
The Hebrew plural form rəpā’îm, derived from the
verb rāpā’ / rāpāh, “to heal, to release,” designates in the
Hebrew Bible two categories of beings and a valley: the
dead in the underworld; a group or nation of giants or
warriors; the valley of Rephaim. The designation of the
dead is attested both in the Ras Shamra, Phoenician, and
Old Testament texts. Especially illustrative for this meaning is Ps 88:11, where the psalmist asks God:
Do you work wonders for the dead (ləmētîm)?
Do the shades (’im-rəpā’îm) rise up to praise
you?
This translation (cf. NRS, DBY, JPS, RSV, BBE,
TNK, ELO, EIN, etc.) reflects modern exegesis based on
the poetic structure of the passage and on the comparative evidence. How far has the Jewish-Christian translation tradition played a role? The paraphrase of TgPs renders the synonymous words by mêtayyā’, “the dead,” //
gûšmayya’, “the bodies.” LXX creates parallelism: toîs
nekroîs // ē iatroí, “to the dead // or shall physicians”; Vg
follows LXX and renders the parallel words by mortuis //
aut medici. Many later versions have the parallelism of
the same word: the dead // the dead (GNV, KJV, NKJ,
NIV, NLT, R60, R95, ACF, ARC, DAL, etc.). LUB
repeats the meaning of the first term: unter den Todten //
werden die Verstorbene (cf. LUT); some others have: the
dead // physicians (DRA, LXE); des morts // les
médecins (BLS). We also find the parallelism the dead //
Translation Review
the departed spirits (NAU). BUR introduce the parallelism an den Toten // Gespenster.
The same parallelism between the two synonyms
occurs in Isa 26:14 (cf. v. 19):
The dead (mētîm) do not live;
shades (rəpā’îm) do not rise …
The translation tradition is quite similar: TgIsa introduces the parallelism mētîn, “the dead” // gəbārēhôn
“their mighty ones”; LXX keeps the parallelism nekroí //
iatroí (cf. LXE), but Vg has morientes // gigantes (cf.
DRA). Other later versions did not follow either LXX or
Vg; the parallelism in use is about the same as at Ps
88:11. The Vg rendering reflects the second meaning of
the word rəpā’îm, attested at Gen 14:5; 15:20; Deut 2:10,
20; 3:11, 13; Josh 2:4; 13:12; 17:15). At Gen 14:5-6, the
narrator reports about the pre-Israelite peoples of Palestine: “In the fourteenth year Chedorlaomer and the kings
who were with him came and subdued the Raphaim in
Ashteroth-karnaim, the Zusim in Ham, the Emim in
Shaveh-kiriathaim, and the Horites in the hill country of
Seir as far as El-paran on the edge of the wilderness.”
According to Deut 2:11, the Emim, as tall as the Anakim,
had once lived in Moab: “Like the Anakim, they are usually reckoned as Rephaim, though the Moabites call them
Emim.” According to Deut 2:20, the Ammonites called
the Rephaim by the name Zamzumim. The book of
Joshua refers to a tradition that Og, king of Bashan, was
“one of the last of the Rephaim, who lived at Ashtaroth
and at Edrei” (12:4; cf. Deut 3:11; Josh 13:12).
Israelite popular tradition, ascribing gigantic stature
to the Rephaim, is strongly reflected in early Bible translations. Aramaic tradition is consistent in translating the
term rəpā’îm by gibbārayyā’, “the mighty ones, giants,
warriors,” at all places. LXX and Vg, on the other hand,
are not consistent. In LXX, there is translation by
gígantes at Gen 14:5; Josh 12:4; 13:12 and transliteration
by Raphaïn at Gen 15:20; Deut 2:11, 20; 3:11, 13. Vg,
on the other hand, has translation by gigantes at Deut
2:11, 20; 3:11, 13 and transliteration by Rafaim at Gen
14:5; 15:20; Josh 12:4; 13:12; 17:15. There is a similar
inconsistency in later translations: at Gen 14:5, the great
majority have transliteration of the term rəpā’îm. Only a
few versions have translation: the giants (LXE); die
Ri(e)sen (LUB, LUO); i giganti (LND); gjigantët (ALB).
At Gen 15:20, all have transliteration except LUB. At
Deut 2:11, a great majority have transliteration, but the
phrase “they are usually reckoned as Rephaim” suggested to some translators a translation by “giants” (cf. LUB,
45
BLS). At Deut 2:20; 3:11, 13; Josh 12:4; 13:12; 17:15,
transliteration also greatly prevails, but some translators
preferred translation by “giants.” This is true for the
Renaissance versions, such as GNV, KJV, and LUB.
BUR deserves special attention because at Gen 14:5 and
15:20, it has transliteration by Refaer, but at all other
passages, the term is translated by Gespenstische. Concerning those who transliterate the word, it is noteworthy
that a considerable number of translations have transliteration of rəpā’îm in minuscule, thus indicating that the
word is understood as a designation rather than the name
of a people.
The designation of the broad valley near Jerusalem
according to Rephaim (Josh 15:8; 18:16; 2 Sam 5:18, 22;
23:13; Isa 17:5; 1 Chr 11:15; 14:9) is again connected
with surprises. At all places, TgJ has the fixed phrase
mêšar gibbārayyā’ “the plain of the giants / the mighty
men, the warriors”; LXX has several variants: ek mérous
gês Rhaphaïn, “by the side of the land of Raphain” (Josh
15:8); a complete transliteration: Emekraphaïn (Josh
18:16); a more or less complete translation: eis tèn koiláda tôn titánōn, “in the valley of the Titans” (2 Sam 5:18);
en tê koiládi tôn titánōn, “in the valley of Titans” (2 Sam
5:22); en tê koiládi tôn Rhaphaeím, “in the valley of
Raphaeim” (2 Sam 23:13); en tê koiládi tôn gigántōn, “in
the valley of the giants” (1 Chr 11:15; 14:9); en pháraggi
stereâ, “in a rich valley” (Isa 17:5). Vg has: vallis
Rafaim (Josh 15:8; 18:16); in valle Rephaim (2 Sam
5:18, 22; 1 Chr 11:15; 14:19; Isa 17:5); in valle Gigantum (2 Sam 23:13). Later European translations are
almost unanimously consistent in rendering the expression ‘ēmeq rəpā’îm by “the valley of Rephaim.” The
very few exceptions are all the more notable: the valley
of the gi(y)ants only at Josh 15:8; 18:16; elsewhere, the
valley of Rephaim (GNV, KJV, BLS, WEB, RWB); the
valley of the giants at 2 Sam 23:13 (DRA); valle de los
gigantes at Josh 15:8 (SRV); la campiña de los gigantes
at Josh 18:16 (SRV); valle dei giganti at Josh 18:16; 2
Sam 23:13 (LND); das Tal (des Tals) der Gespenstischen
at Josh 15:8; 18:16; and der (im) Gespenstergrund
(BUR).
The Monstrous Animals Behemoth and Leviathan
The context and parallel passages do not make it clear
which monstrous animals are designated by the names
Behemoth (Job 40:15) and Leviathan (Isa 27:1; Pss
74:14; 104:26; Job 3:8; 40:25). The first name appears in
the context of God’s lesson that he is too great to be
understood by Job or any other human being: “Look at
46
Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grass
like an ox.” Translations offer varied ways of imaging
this: TgJob reads the name of the beast as pl. of the word
bəhēmāh, “beast” and renders it by the pl. bə‘îrayyā’ ,
“grazing animals, cattle”; in LXX the name is translated
with the pl. thēría, “the wild beasts”; Aq and Theo render
it by contr. pl. ktēnē, “flocks and herds, beasts”; Vg has
the transliterated form Behemoth. Most later versions follow the original and Vg by transliterating the name of the
beast. There are, however, some notable exceptions in
translation: Great Beast (BBE); mighty hippopotamus
(NLT); das Flußpferd (SCH); das Urtier (BUR); das
Nilpferd (EIN); l’hippopotame (LSG, BFC, NEG); le
Bestial (TOB); l’ippopotamo (NRV); hipopótamo
(ARA); Reuzendier (LEI), nijlpaard (NBG); Nilhesten
(D31).
The name Leviathan is mentioned in various roles in
the Bible: In the apocalyptic announcement of final judgment at Isa 27:1, it serves as a symbol for Tyre; God
“will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the
twisting serpent”; at Ps 74:14, the psalmist professes that
God worked salvation in the earth by crushing “the heads
of Leviathan”; at Ps 104:26, Leviathan is mentioned as
one of the manifold works of God in the realm of the
sea; at Job 3:8, Job curses the night of his birth by saying: “Let those curse it who curse the Sea, those who are
skilled to rouse up Leviathan”; and at Job 40:25, Job is
reminded of the greatness of the creatures created by
God: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or
press down its tongue with a cord?” Translators into Aramaic substantially changed the text: TgIsa refers the
announcement of punishment upon Leviathan (Tyre) at
Isa 27:1 to Roman power at sea and proclaims that God
will “punish the king who exalts himself like Pharaoh the
first king, and the king who prides himself like Sennacherib the second king”; the name Leviathan disappeared totally; at Ps 74:14, TgPs changes the Hebrew
phrase rāšê liwyātān, “the heads of Leviathan,” into rêšê
gibbārê par‘ōh, “the heads of the heros of Pharaoh”; in
the translation of Ps 104:26, the name liwyātān is
retained, but at Job 3:8, TgJob changes the entire sentence: “May the prophets curse it who curse the day of
retribution, who are ready when aroused to lead off their
lament”; at Job 40:25, the targumist is quite accurate and
also retains the name liwyātān.
Non-Semitic translations also have various renderings: in LXX, the word Leviathan is translated with the
word drákōn at all places; Vg according to LXX has the
rendering dracon at Pss 74:14; 104:26, whereas at other
places the name is transliterated by Leviathan. The great
Translation Review
majority of later versions used transliteration; the exceptions are almost limited to Ps 104:26 and to Job 40:25:
crocodile (NLT); great beast (BBE); dragon (DRA);
Walfische (LUO); große Fische (LUT); der Drache, das
Krokodil (ZBI in Job); das Krokodil (SCH, EIN at Job
40:25); crocodile (LSG, NEG); dragon (BFC); le
Tortueux (TOB in Job); coccodrillo (NRV); crocodilo
(ARA); krokodyl (BTP); krokodil (NBG); Krokodillen
(D31). It is noteworthy that some collective versions are
not consistent in transliterating or translating the same
names. TOB, for instance, has transliteration in Isa 27:1;
Pss 74:14; 104:26, and translation in Job 3:8 and 40:25;
EIN has translation only in Job 40:25.
Symbolic Names of Hosea’s Children
In the first part of Hosea’s autobiography we find God’s
command to the prophet concerning the birth of his three
children. After his unfaithful wife Gomer gave birth to
the first son, the Lord said to him (Hos 1:4): “Name him
Jezreel (yizrə‘e’l); for in a little while I will punish the
house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel …” After she bore
a daughter, the Lord said to him (Hos 1:6): “Name her
Lo-ruhamah (lō’ ruhāmāh), for I will no longer have pity
on the house of Israel or forgive them.” After the birth of
his second son, God commanded him (Hos 1:8): “Name
him Lo-ammi (lō’ ‘ammî), for you are not my people and
I am not your God.” The names of Hosea’s children are
striking for their symbolic meaning in relation to the
people of Israel. The verdict of rejection is emphasized
in two ways: first, by the Hebrew wording and stylization of the names; second, by explanation following the
names in a causal clause. It seems therefore reasonable
for translators to transmit the names using transliteration
instead of translating them.
The etymological meaning of the second and third
names is obvious, but the first name is reminiscent of socalled folk etymology. The name yizrə‘e’l literally means
“May God sow”; a West Canaanite variant is yizra‘-’el ,
“May El sow.” The etymological meaning of the name,
known as the town and valley of Jezreel, is positive. But
the Valley of Jezreel was the scene of many crimes and
atrocities committed by the Israelite kings, and these
memorable events are the reason for naming Hosea’s son
after this place. The mystery of the child’s name lay in
its ambivalence. Since the name Jezreel already existed
as a place name, there was hardly any serious reason to
translate it. LXX and Vg transliterate it: Iezraél (LXX),
Hiezrahel (Vg). On the other hand, in spite of the inner
relationship between naming and the explanation of the
Translation Review
names, LXX and Vg transmitted the second and the third
names by translation: Ouk-ēleēménē, Ou-laós-mou
(LXX); Absque misericordia, Non pupulus meus (Vg).
TgHos takes an opposite way: the translator retains the
original Semitic words of the second and third names but
interprets the literal meaning of the name Jezreel as a
reference to God’s scattering (literally “sowing”) of
Israel in exile. The paraphrase reads: “And the Lord said
to him, ‘Call their name Scattered ones (məbadrayyā’),’
for in yet a little while I will avenge the blood of the
idolaters, which Jehu shed in Jezreel, when he put them
to death because they had worshipped Baal …”.
Later versions testify to the fact that careful thought
was given to the dilemma as to whether to transliterate or
to translate the names. Most Renaissance versions transmitted the symbolic names of Hosea’s children by
transliteration. LUB has transliteration of the second and
third names in a strange orthography: Jesreel, LoRyhamo, LoAmmi. DAL shows complete reliance on LUB,
for this version even retains Luther’s questionable
orthography. When it comes to modern versions, some
follow the ancient and others the Renaissance tradition.
The transliteration method was adopted by some modern
Catholic and ecumenical versions, for instance, by FBJ,
TOB, and EIN. A special phenomenon is transliteration
with added translation: Lorucama, c’est-à-dire Sans-miséricorde; Loammi, c’est-à-dire Non-mon-peuple (BLS);
Jesreel, “Den-Gott-sät”; Lo-ruchama, “Ihr-wird-Erbarmen-nicht”; Lo-ammi, “Nicht-mein-Volk” (BUR); Lo
Rouhama, Non-Matriciée; Lo ‘Ami, Mon-Non-Peuple
(CHO). Some translators preferred just translation of the
names: Not pitied, Not my people (RSV); Without mercy,
Not my people (DRA); No Mercy, Not My People (ESV);
Non-amata, Non-popolo-mio (IEP); Bres milosti, Ne
moje ludstvu (JAP); Brez-milosti, Ne-moje-ljudstvo
(WOL); Nepomiloščena, Ne-moje-ljudstvo (SSP); etc.
Chapter 2 manifests a total restoration of God’s
favor; consequently, the names are changed. At Hos 2:3,
God commands: “Say (’imərû) to your brothers, Ammi
(‘ammî), and to your sisters, Ruhamah (ruhāmāh).” The
plural address indicates that the radically new name is
given to the whole nation. TgHos substantially paraphrases God’s command to rename Hosea’s children:
“Prophets! Say to your brothers, ‘My people (‘ammî),’
return to my law and I will have pity on your congregations.” LXX and Vg translate both names: laós mou,
Ēleēménē; Populus meus, Misericordiam. The majority
of later translations transliterate the name, but a considerable number of versions manifest more or less original
forms of translation or a combination of transliteration
47
and translation: mein Volck, Sie sey in gnaden (LUB);
(Ammi) ony ío moj folk, ona je v’milo∫ti (DAL); Ó lide
můj, Ó milosrdenství došlá (BKR); Vous êtes mon people, Vous avez reçu miséricorde (BLS); dat zij mijn volk,
dat zij in genade is (LUV); My People, Lovingly
Accepted! (TNK); Ammi, mon peuple, Rouhama, Bienaimée (TOB); Ammi (Mein Volk), Ruhama (Erbarmen)
(EIN); Mein Volk!, Dir wird Erbarmen! (BUR); Ami,
mon peuple!, Rouhama, matriciée (CHO); etc.
The Symbolic Name of Isaiah’s Second Son
The striking symbolic names of Hosea’s children
recall the naming of Isaiah’s second son (Isa 8:1-3), with
the important difference that the symbolic meaning of
naming Isaiah’s son is not coupled with an announcement of doom for Israel but for Syria and Ephraim. The
point is the expectation that Assyria will have destroyed
both Damascus and Samaria before Isaiah’s son is more
than about a year old. This emphasizes another difference between the meaning of the names of Hosea’s two
children and Isaiah’s son: the doom of Israel is not final
(cf. Hos 2-4), whereas the doom of Syria and Ephraim is
final and irreversible. In Isaiah, doom is attested by the
words written on a tablet and by the birth of the child
bearing the name according to God’s determination:
Then the LORD said to me, Take a large tablet and
write on it in common characters, “Belonging to
Maher-shalal-hash-baz,” and have it attested for me
by reliable witnesses, the priest Uriah and Zechariah
son of Jeberechiah. And I went to the prophetess, and
she conceived and bore a son. Then the LORD said
to me, Name him Maher-shalal-hash-baz; for before
the child knows how to call “My father” or “My
mother,” the wealth of Damascus and the spoil of
Samaria will be carried away by the king of Assyria.
The significance of these words is made explicit by the
prophet (Isa 8:18): “See, I and the children whom the
LORD has given me are signs and portents in Israel from
the LORD of hosts, who dwells on Mount Zion.”
The sign-name (lə)mahēr šālāl hāš baz is compounded of two synonymous nouns šālāl // baz, the verbal
adjective mahēr, and the participle hāš, so that the literal
translation is “the spoil speeds, the prey hastes,” as RSV
and NRS correctly state in margin. At its first occurrence
(Isa 8:1), the exact wording of the name is introduced by
Lamedh inscriptionis, which indicates hardly more than a
mere quotation-mark.2 Ancient translators decided to
48
translate the name. TgIsa paraphrases the name slightly
differently at both places: môhî ləmibbaz (bəzā’û)
ləme‘dê ‘æ dā’āh, “He is hastening to plunder the spoil
and to take away the booty.” The translator of LXX saw
in the Lamedh a descriptive function, hence the rendering: toû oxéōs pronom„n poiêsai skýlōn, “concerning
making a rapid plunder of the spoils.” It is striking that
the same Hebrew wording of the name in its second
occurrence (Isa 8:3) is not rendered in the same way in
LXX. It reads káleson tò ónoma autoû takhéōs skýleuson
oxéōs pronómeuson, “Call his name, Spoil quickly, plunder speedily.” Vg also translates the name differently in
both cases: Velociter spolia detrahe Cito praedare;
Adcelera spolia detrahere Festina praedari.
The Renaissance and later versions manifest a variety of translation and transliteration methods. GNV and
DIO translate the name in the first occurrence and
transliterate it in the second: Make speede to the spoyle:
haste to the praye // Mahershalalhash-baz (GNV); Egli
s’affretterà di spogliare, egli solleciterà di predare II
Maher salal, Has baz (DIO). Some have the same wording of translation in both places: Raubebald, Eilebeute
(LUB); Eilebeute-Raubebald! (BUR); Hâtez-vous de
prendre les dépouilles, prenez vite le butin (BLS); Krychlé kořisti pospíchá loupežník (BKR); Plejni bèrsu, inu
rupaj hitru (DAL). JAP has a slightly different formulation in both places: Pobéri bersh rope, ropaj hitru // Híti
rope pobrati, ropaj hitru. A slight difference also exists
in WOL: Hitro vzemi plen, hitro ropaj // Hitro vzemi
plen, in hitro ropaj. Several versions have transliteration
of the name in both places: Mahershalalhashbaz (KJV,
RSV); Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz (NKJ, NIV, NIB);
Maher-shalal-hash-baz (DBY, BBE, WEB, NAS, NAB,
NRS). Some others transliterate the name but add a
translation: Lemahèr shalal hash baz, “Vite au butin,
presse, pille” (CHO); etc. A survey of other versions
shows a similar variety of translation or transliteration
and of corresponding orthography.
Etymological Translation of the Proper Names
Philistines and Goiim
The people Philistines (Heb. pəlištîm) are mentioned
for the first time at Gen 10:14. LXX transliterates the
name of this people by Phylisti(e)ím within the Heptateuch, but after the Heptateuch, this name is translated
almost exclusively by the term allóphyloi, “those of
another tribe, foreigners.” Other translations, including
the Targums, are consistent in transliterating the name.
Translation Review
The double practice in dealing with this name confirms,
among other linguistic and literary indicators, the
assumption that LXX is the work of different authors
who lived at different periods during the last three centuries BCE.
The proper name Goiim appears at Gen 14:1, 9 and
Josh 12:23 in the construct expression melek-gôyîm. The
phrase by itself suggests understanding an indefinite
meaning “king of nations,” but the context requires a
proper name for a people or a place Goiim. The Targums
treat the Hebrew place name as a plural noun meaning
“peoples, nations”; LXX has an etymological translation
basileùs (basiléōs) ethnôn at Gen 14:1, 9 and transliteration (basiléa) Gõim at Josh 12:23; Sym changes the
name to Pamphylías; Vg has translation by rex (regem)
Gentium (gentium) at all places. Most medieval, Renaissance, and later versions do not follow Aramaic, Greek,
and Latin models but transliterate the word gôyîm as a
proper name. It is all the more surprising that the most
influential Renaissance translations translate the word as
a common noun, but at this point they were not followed
by many later versions: the nations (GNV, KJV, DBY,
NKJ, DRA, WEB, RWB); die Heiden (LUB, LUO); die
Völker (LUT); les (N)nations (BLS, DRB); i nazioni
(DIO, LND); etc. The BUR version is not consistent: at
Gen 14:1, 9, it uses transliteration by Gojim, at Josh
12:23 translation by das Stämmegemisch.
Etymological Translation of the Proper Names
Aram-naharaim and Paddan-aram
The Hebrew compounded place name ’æ ram
nahæ rayim, “Aram-of-the-two-rivers” is designated in
Gen 24:10 as “the city of Nahor,” and it appears at Gen
24:10; Deut 23:5; Judg 3:8; Ps 60:2; 1 Chr 19:6. The
place name Paddan-aram, “the way/plain of Aram,”
seems to be a country, and it appears at Gen 25:20; 28:2,
5, 6, 7: 31:18; 33:18; 35:9, 26; 46:15. The attitude of
translators to these names shows a strong tendency to
interpret in accordance with their supposed etymological
meaning. TgO and TgPsJ have a combination of transliteration and explanation of the double Hebrew name
Aram-naharaim at all places: ’æ ram dî‘al pərāt, “Aram,
which is by (on) the Euphrates”; TgN reproduces the full
form of the Hebrew double name at Deut 23:4, but at
Gen 24:10, it renders literally only the second word,
Naharaim. On the other hand, all the Targums reproduce
the full form of the Hebrew form of the compound name
paddan ’æ ram at nearly all places; TgN exceptionally
retains only the word Paddan at Gen 25:20. LXX intro-
Translation Review
duces the designation Mesopotamía, “(the land) between
rivers,” for both Hebrew names. At Gen 24:10 and Deut
23:5, the Greek translator omits the first word of the double Hebrew name ’æ ram nahæ rayim, and the second
word, meaning “the two rivers,” he interprets simply as
the land between the Euphrates and Tigris. In Judg 3:8,
he translates it by Syrías potamôn, “the Syria of rivers”;
at Ps 60:2, the name is rendered by Mesopotamían
Syrías; at 1 Chr 19:6, we find the same designation in
the opposite order, Syrías Mesopotamías. The Hebrew
double place name paddan ’æ ram is rendered in LXX
simply by Mesopotamía at Gen 25:20; 28:2, 5; 31:18;
elsewhere, it is rendered by the double name
Mesopotamía(n, s) (tês) Syrías. For the first name, Vg
has at all places the simple rendering by Mesopotamia; at
Ps 60:2, it has Syriam Mesopotamiam. The second name
is rendered simply by in Mesopotamiam at Gen 25:5;
31:18; doubly by in (de) Mesopotamiam Syriae at Gen
28:2, 5, 6; 33:18; 35:9, 26; 46:16; and simply in Syriam
at Gen 28:7.
In the medieval, Renaissance, and later translations,
only a minority have transliteration of the name Aramnaharaim; most translators adopt the Greek translation
form Mesopotamia, introduced by LXX, and very few
translate the name into their own language: l’Aram-desdeux-Fleuves (TOB); paese (Paese) dei due fiumi (IEP);
do aramského Dvojřičí (CEP); even fewer combine
translation and transliteration: Haute-Mésopotamie
(BFC); Siria mesopotámica (RVA); Stroomland-Aram
(LEI); in (nach, von) Aram (dem) Zwiestromland (BUR).
At Ps 60:2 and 1 Chr 19:6, the LXX rendering
Mesopotamían Surías and that of the Vg Syriam
Mesopotamiam obviously prompted many translators to
similar combinations: Syrians of Mesopotamia (DBY);
Mesopotamia of Syria (DRA); mit den Syrer zu
Mesopotamia (LUB); mit den Aramäern von
Mesopotamien (LUT); mit den Syrern von Mesopotamien
(ELO, ELB, SCH); mit den Aramäern Mesopotamiens
(EIN); mit dem (beim) Aramäer des Zwiestromlandes
(BUR); aux Syriens de Mésopotamie (LSG, NEG); les
Araméens de Mésopotamie (TOB); ai Siri di
Mesopotamia (NRV); els arameus de Naharaim (BCI);
stemi Syrerji v’ Mesopotamij (DAL); de Syriërs van
Mesopotamië (LUV); de Arameeërs van Mesopotamië
(NBG); de Syriers van Mesopotamie (SVV). At 1 Chr
19:6, we also find unusual translations: from the Aramaeans of Upper Mesopotamia (NJB); des Syriens de
Haute-Mésopotamie (BFC); od Aramejců z Dvojříčí
(CEP). The Hebrew double name paddan ’æ ram is
transliterated in nearly all the translations. Very few
49
translators use the Greek translation form Mesopotamia
(LUB, DAL, N30, N38, NBK, NBN, FIN), whereas
some others use mixed translation forms in their own
languages: Haute-Mésopotamie (BFC); la plaine d’Aram
(TOB); Pádan Syrské (BKR); z Rovin aramskýh (CEP);
die Aramäerflur (BUR at all places).
Etymological Translation of the Proper Names Moreh
and Moriah
Gen 12:6 speaks of Abraham’s itinerary “through the
land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh (’ēlôn
môreh).” At Deut 11:30, a description is given where the
mountains Gerizim and Ebal are to be found: “As you
know, they are beyond the Jordan, some distance to the
west, in the land of the Canaanites who live in the
Arabah, opposite Gilgal, beside the oaks of Moreh (’ē∑el
’ēlônê mōreh).” At Judg 7:1, the narrator says: “Jerubbaal (that is, Gideon) and all the troops that were with
him rose early and encamped beside the spring of Harod;
and the camp of Midian was north of them below the hill
of Moreh (miggib‘at hammôreh), in the valley.” In the
absence of any other indications for identification of the
place name Moreh, we may assume that the same place
is meant in these three passages. We note that the
Hebrew word ’ēlôn(ê) stands in the singular at Gen 12:6
and in the plural at Deut 11:30.
The interpretation presented in ancient and modern
translations of the Bible is not uniform. Aramaic versions
of the Pentateuch consistently render ’ēlôn(ê) by mêšar,
possibly wishing to save Abraham from the suspicion of
tree-worship. At Gen 12:6 and Deut 11:30, TgO has the
formulation mêšar môreh, “the plain of Moreh”; it seems
likely that the translation counteracts the Samaritan
belief in the holiness of a certain local tree. LXX translates the kind of tree at Gen 12:6 and Deut 11:30 in the
singular, but interprets the name of the place according
to its supposed etymological meaning: epì tèn dryn tèn
ˆ dryòs
hypsēlén, “at the high oak” (Gen 12:6) and plēsíon
tês hypsēlês, “by the high oak” (Deut 11:30); the translation of Deut 11:30 may well be based on Gen 12:6. This
interpretation of the place name is probably based on an
understanding of the word as related to the root rwm, “to
be high,” on the assumption that the first and the third
consonants are transposed. The preserved version by
Sym has at Gen 12:6 tês dryòs Mambrê, “at the oak of
Mambre”; Vg has at Gen 12:6 ad convallem Inlustrem, at
Deut 11:30 iuxta vallem tendentem et intrantem procul.
Most later translations have at Gen 12:6 and Deut 11:30
50
oak/terebinth/tree of Moreh, some have the plain of
Moreh, but we also find a rendering according to Vg: the
noble vale (DRA); die Steineiche des Rechtsweisers
(BUR); la vallée illustre (BLS at Gen 12:6); près d’une
vallée qui s’étend et s’avance bien loin (BLS at Deut
11:30); une colline fort élevée (BLS at Judg 7:1).
The phrase miggib‘at hammôreh at Judg 7:1 has a
variety of renderings in translations. TgJudg has an interpretive translation: gə‘atā’ dəmistakyā’ ləmêšərā’, “the
hill that faces the plain”; LXX has transliteration of both
words here: apò Gabaàth Hamorá; LXXO has apò
Gabaathamoraí. There are numerous MSS variants:
Amòr (Codd. 19, 108, SyrHex); apò toû bōmoû toû Abòr,
or Abōrai, Aborè, Amōrai, Amorè (Codd. II, 54, 75, 76,
etc.); apò toû bounnoû toû Amorraíou (Cod. 58 in the
text); toû hypsēloû (in the margin); etc. In various MSS,
both terms appear in variants: gaath, gabōath, gabaad,
gabaōn, gaatham; amora, amore, amorai, tou amore, tou
abōrai, tou aborai, tou abōre, tou abore, amōr, abōr, tou
abōr, mōra, tou mōre, amorrai, amorraiōn, tou amorraiou, borra, mõraith, tou hupsēlou, amōrai. Vg has a
rendering by translation: collis Excelsi. In later translations, the phrase is usually rendered by a combination of
translation/transliteration: the hill of Moreh, dem Hügel
Moreh, etc. Translation of both terms is very rare: vom
Hügel des Weisenden (BUR); Hrib te Strashe (DAL). On
the other hand, a few versions have transliteration of
both terms: Gabaathamorai (LXE); Gibeath-hammoreh
(NAB); Gibeath-moreh (TNK); Gib’at-Gammorev
(UKR).
The place name Moriah appears in the Hebrew Bible
with minor orthographic differences only in the Elohistic
source at Gen 22:2 and 2 Chr 3:1. According to Gen
22:2, God commanded Abraham: “Take your son, your
only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of
Moriah (wəlek-ləkā ’el-’ere∑ hammōriyyāh), and offer
him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains
that I shall show you.” Any mountainous region associated with a tradition of human sacrifice would satisfy the
conditions of this report. But according to 2 Chr 3:1,
Moriah is the mountain on which God appeared to David
and on which the temple stands in Jerusalem: “Solomon
began to build the house of the LORD in Jerusalem on
Mount Moriah (bəhar hammôriyyāh), where the LORD
had appeared to his father David, at the place that David
had designated, on the threshing floor of Ornan the
Jebusite.” Various early rabbinic sources testify that the
gradual association between the vision of Abraham in
“the land of Moriah” and the temple on “Mount Moriah”
Translation Review
has suppressed the original name of the mountain of
Abraham’s trial. It is even possible that the name Moriah
was inserted into Gen 22:2 from 2 Chr 3:1 in a later
stage of redaction.
Ancient recensions and versions of Gen 22:2 present
different interpretations: eis tèn gên tèn hupsēlēn, “into
the high land” (LXX); eis tèn gên tèn kataphanê, “into
the evident, clearly seen land” (Aq); … tês optasías,
“into the land of appearance, of manifestation” (Sym); in
terram Visionis, “into the land of Vision” (Vg). The rendering by LXX probably has the same background
understanding as the interpretation of the toponym
Moreh at Gen 12:6 and Deut 11:30, whereas other Greek
and Latin versions are based on the same tradition as the
Samaritan version. Syr reads the name of the people the
Amorites instead of the toponym Moriah. All the Targums identify the mountain Moriah with the mountain in
Jerusalem, where the Temple was built, for their rendering of God’s command to Abraham at Gen 22:2 is: lāk
lə’ar‘ā’ pûlhānā’, “go forth to the land of worship.” This
anachronistic shift from the proper name to a common
noun testifies particularly clearly how strong was the
early rabbinic claim that “the land of Moriah,” where
Abraham bound Isaac, was Mount Moriah in Jerusalem.
Such an interpretation presupposes that Mount Moriah in
Jerusalem was a cult center even in the Patriarchal Age.
The Samaritan Hebrew Pentatech has the form ’ere∑ hammôrā’āh, “the land of vision”; this form presupposes the
root rā’āh, “to see.” It is noteworthy that the Samaritans
claim Mount Gerizim as the mountain of Abraham’s trial.
In view of the preference given to the translation method
at Gen 22:2, it is surprising that all the ancient versions
have transliteration of the name Moriah at 2 Chr 3:1:
Amoría (LXX), Moria (Vg). It is equally surprising that
nearly all later translators transliterated the name Moriah
at both places; the only exception found so far is DRA,
using translation by the land of vision only at Gen 22:2.
Etymological Translation of the Proper Name
Machpelah
The name Machpelah appears only in the book of
Genesis, in the narratives of the P source: 23:9, 17, 19;
25:9; 49:30; 50:13. According to Gen 23:8-9, Abraham
asked the Hittites, the people of the land: “If you are
willing that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hear
me, and entreat for me Ephron son of Zohar, so that he
may give me the cave of Machpelah (mə‘ārat hammakpēlāh), which he owns; it is at the end of his field.
Translation Review
For the full price let him give it to me in your presence
as a possession for a burying place.” At other passages,
the relation of the words makpēlāh and śādeh is variously described in fuller phrases as śādeh ‘eprôn ’æ šer bammakpēlāh, “the field of Ephron which is in Machpelah”
(Gen 23:17); mə‘ārat śədēh hammakpəlāh, “in the cave
of the field of Machpelah” (Gen 23:19; 50:13);
bammə‘ārāh ’æ šer biśdeh hammakpēlāh, “in the cave
which is in the field of Machpelah” (Gen 49:30). It is
easy to see that the form makpēlāh is a derivative in the
causative participle (the type maqtil) of the root kpl, “to
double,” but the phrases and the context of the abovementioned passages clearly indicate that the word hammakpēlāh is used as a place name.
Ancient translations nevertheless embrace the etymological meaning of the word. In LXX, the phrase is rendered at all places by tò spélaion tò diploûn, “the double
cave” and in Vg by spelunca duplex. TgO and TgJ also
associate the noun hammakpēlāh with the verb kpl and at
all places use the rendering mə‘ārat kape(ê)ltā’, “the double cave”; TgN renders it similarly by mə‘ārat kəpêlāh.
The common Jewish tradition of the etymological interpretation of the cave finds an explicit explication in b.
Erubin 53a: “Rab and Samuel differ as to its meaning.
One holds that the cave consisted of two chambers one
within the other; and the other holds that it consisted of a
lower and upper chamber. According to him who holds
that the chambers were one above the other the term
machpelah is well justified, but according to him who
holds that it consisted of two chambers one within the
other, what could be the meaning of machpelah? — That
it had multiples of couples.” Rashi adopts this explanation
of the two possible meanings of the word mkplh.
In spite of the insistence of the ancient translators
that the place name Machpelah applies to the root meaning of the term, the medieval, Renaissance, and modern
translators almost unanimously transliterate the bound
phrase “the cave (field) of Machpelah.” Exceptions are
reduced to the very literal American translation of Vg of
1899, to LUB, and to Luther’s followers: the double cave
(DRA); die zwifache H(h)ö(h)le (LUB, LUO); la caverne
(antre) double (BLS); dvojna I(j)ama (DAL, JAP, WOF);
dubbele spelunk (LUV).
Etymological Translation of the Proper Name
Shephelah
In the Hebrew Bible, the word šəpēlāh, a feminine
noun form from the regular adjective form šāpēl, “low,”
occurs twenty times in a context indicating that the term
51
is used as the name or designation of a territory: Deut
1:7; Josh 9:1; 10:40; 11:2, 16 (twice); 12:8; 15:33; Judg
1:9; 1 Kings 10:27; Jer 17:26; 32:44; 33:13; Ob 19; Zech
7:7; 1 Chr 27:28; 2 Chr 1:15; 9:27; 26:10; 28:18. The
range of its meaning is therefore “the low country, the
lower part, the lowland,” and it is reminiscent of the
Akkadian form šapiltu(m) meaning “lower, or inner
part.” The word in this meaning also appears in 1 Maccabees in Greek forms: Sephēlá (12:38); prósōpon toû
pedíou, “facing the plain” (13:13). This geographical
term always refers to the area between the Philistine
plain and the southern hill country of the Holy Land. The
nature of the passages shows that any interpretation of
the meaning of the term in a given text must consider not
only geographical but also literary and rhetorical criteria.
The strong rhetorical character of most passages makes it
difficult to decide with any certainty between the options
of proper name or a general geographical designation.
Most passages belong to the Deuteronomistic framework of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Jeremiah, and
Chronicles. In these books, the term Shephelah appears
in similar formulaic structures. The general geographical
description summarizes declarations of God’s command
or promise that the Promised Land will be given to
Israel, or describes a coalition of the peoples against the
Israelites. Geographical terms often indicate the principal
geographical divisions of the Promised Land. According
to Deut 1:7, Moses refers to defining the borders in
God’s command at Mount Horeb: “Resume your journey,
and go into the hill country of the Amorites (har
hā’ěmõrî) as well as into the neighbouring regions — the
Arabah, the hill country, the Shephelah, the Negeb, and
the seacoast (bā‘æ rābāh ûbāhār ûbaššəpēlāh ûbannegeb
ûbəhôp hayyām) — the land of the Canaanites and the
Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates.”
The geographical description at Josh 9:1 includes only
the southern part of the country by referring to the kings
who were “in the hill country and in the lowland (bāhār
ûbaššəpēlāh) all along the coast of the Great Sea toward
Lebanon” gathered together to fight Joshua and Israel. At
10:40, the narrator summarizes the outcome of the battle:
“So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and
the Negeb and the Shephelah and the slopes (hāhār
wəhannegeb wəhaššəpēlāh wəhā’æ śēdôt), and all their
kings.” The general geographical description of the lands
inhabited by Israel’s adversaries at Josh 11:1-3, 16-17,
and 12:8 is similar. According to Judg 1:9, the people of
Judah fought against “the Canaanites who lived in the
hill country, in the Negeb, and in the Shephelah (hāhār
wəhannegeb wəhaššəpēlāh).”
52
Within the conditional promise of Jer 17:24-26, the
writer reports that “the people shall come from the towns
of Judah and the places around Jerusalem, from the land
of Benjamin, from the Shephelah, from the hill country,
and from the Negeb (ûmin-haššəpēlāh ûmin-hāhār ûminhannegeb), bringing burnt offering and sacrifices.” More
or less the same geographical coordination with some
changes of order appears in the promise of Israel’s
restoration at Jer 32:44; 33:13. Obadiah’s description of
Israel’s final triumph coordinates the regions of Negeb
and Shephelah (v. 19), and the same coordination
appears in Zechariah’s condemnation of hypocritical fasting at Zech 7:7. According to 2 Chr 28:18, the pair is
used in the opposite order: “The Philistines had made
raids on the cities in the Shephelah and the Negeb of
Judah …”. According to 2 Chr 26:10, Uzziah had “large
herds, both in the Shephelah and in the plain
(ûbaššəpēlāh ûbammîšôr).” There are only a few places
in which the name Shephelah stands without coordination with other names or designations of territory: at Josh
1:33, the term šəpēlāh stands alone designating the district of fourteen towns; at 1 Kings 10:27 (= 1 Chr 1:15; 2
Chr 9:27), the name Shephelah is used in a metaphorical
description of Solomon’s great wealth: “The king made
silver (and gold) as common in Jerusalem as stones, and
he made cedars as numerous as the sycamores of the
Shephelah”; at 1 Chr 27:28, the term Shephelah is mentioned in connection with distribution of lands to civic
officials.
In view of the nature of the passages treated, it is
understandable that there is no unified interpretation of
the word šəpēlāh whether in the scholarly literature or in
Bible translations throughout history. The coordination of
the term with some other names or designations of territory shows most clearly whether the term is used as a
proper name or as a general geographical designation.
The parallelism with negeb and ‘æ rābāh means that both
terms are probably meant as proper names. On the other
hand, the parallelism with hāhār may constitute the figure of merism, i.e, an expression of totality by using
opposite terms. On the whole, the term is so often clearly
used as a proper name that it seems reasonable to
transliterate it as proper name rather than to translate it in
accordance with its etymology.
The history of Bible translations, however, shows an
opposite situation. The term is rarely transliterated; since
antiquity, it was usually translated by a great variety of
words and phrases without paying sufficient attention to
coordination of the term with other geographical terms
and to the literary or rhetorical features of the texts. We
Translation Review
pay special attention to ancient translations: tò pedíon,
“the plain,” he pediné, “the plain country” (LXX); humiliora, campester, plana (Vg). We note that LXX transliterates the term by Sephēlá at Jer 32:44; Ob 1:19; 2 Chr
26:10, and the Targums surprisingly by šəpeltā’ at all
places, even though some other coordinating Hebrew
place names are, often in contrast to LXX, changed into
designating or descriptive terms: instead of the proper
name negeb, there is the common noun dārômā’ ,
“south,” and ‘æ rābāh is changed into mêšərā’, “plain,
valley.” On the other hand, VUL never transliterates it.
The medieval, Renaissance, and later translations
usually translate the term: the valley (GNV); the (low)
plain(s) (KJV); low country (KJV); the vale(s) (KJV,
DRA, WEB, RWB); the L(l)owland(s) (DBY, ASV, JPS,
NKJ, RSV, NAS, NAU, NJB, ESV, NRS); the (western)
foothills (NIV, NIB, NAB, NLT); die G(g)ründe (LUB,
LUO); das Hügelland (LUT); die Nied(e)rung (BUR,
ELO, ELB); das Tal (SCH); le pays plat (DRB); la vallée (LSG, NEG); le Bas-Pays (BFC, TOB); il bassopiano
(LND); la regione bassa (NRV); doline, raune, planjave
(DAL, JAP, WOL); etc. There are few translations in
which we find transliteration of the name in more or
fewer passages (RSV, EIN, IEP, RVA, BCI, BTP, SSP).
Because of inconsistency within most translations, it is
impossible to offer here a complete and accurate survey
of the forms of translation and transliteration of the term
according to all passages. In RSV, for instance, the term
is transliterated by Shephelah ten times and translated by
lowland (Deut 1:7; Joshua; Judg 1:9; Zech 7:7) ten times.
Supposed Etymology of Harmagedon
In the context of a scene showing the last struggle of
the forces of good and evil, we find in Rev 16:16 the
name for the place of assembly of the kings of the world
to judge the demonic spirits that come from the mouths
of dragons, beasts, and false prophets: “And they (the
kings) assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is
called Harmagedon.” This name presents a puzzle
because the word does not occur anywhere in Hebrew or
Greek sources. Moreover, the MSS of this single passage
testify to three alternative readings of the name: Armagedon, Harmagedon, and Maged(d)on. Suggested interpretations to explain the alternative forms Harmagedon and
Armagedon include: har-məgiddô, “Mount Megiddo,” as
designating Mount Carmel near the city of Megiddo;
har-mô‘ēd, “the mount of assembly,” referring to the
assembling of pagan gods (Isa 14:13); har-migdô, “his
fruitful mountain,” designating Mount Zion; ‘ar-
Translation Review
məgiddô, “city of Megiddo”; ’arā‘ məgiddô, “land of
Megiddo” (Aramaic and Syriac); and ‘ar-hemdāh, “the
city of desire,” designating Jerusalem. To clarify the
name, it is necessary to consider the historical circumstances surrounding the city of Megiddo and the fact that
the book of Revelation abounds in symbolical language.
Mount Carmel near Megiddo was the place of Elijah’s
contest with the prophets of Baal, when false prophets
were put to the sword. On the other hand, the apocalyptic
literature prefers to present Mount Zion as the place from
which God will proceed in his battle against the forces of
evil.
The history of interpretation testifies to an equilibrium between the alternative forms Harmaged(d)on and
Armaged(d)on. In various MSS and editions of the Greek
original, we find the alternative forms Harmageddõn and
Harmagedōn; Vg has the form Hermagedon; the Renaissance versions have Arma-gedon (GNV); Armageddon
(KJV); Harmagedon (LUB); Armagheddon (DIO);
Armageddon (BKR); Harmagedon (DAL). In later versions we find all these variant forms but with more variation in spelling: Armagedon (JAP, WOL); Harmagedon
(SSP); etc. It is interesting that the NRS changed from
using the form Armageddon (KJV, RSV, etc.) to the form
Harmagedon.
Summary
The history of the forms of the biblical names
reveals several development stages in the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and the Jewish Christian linguistic
and cultural tradition in general. An examination of the
extraordinary variation in transliteration or translation of
the original forms of the biblical names in ancient and
modern Bible translations says much about the understanding and pronunciation of Hebrew names by the
translators. The series of transformations of the biblical
names in ancient and later translations provides quite
reliable evidence of the sources used by translators in
their translation work and of what constitutes their original contribution. It is reasonable to suppose that at least
the forms of the important biblical proper names were
absorbed into ancient Bible translations through the
intermediary of an established ancient Jewish tradition
and through previous translations no longer available.
Generally speaking, nearly all biblical personal and place
names manifest the influence of linguistic, literary, and
cultural traditions on pronunciation of the source form or
on the translation form in another influential ancient language in a given land. For the development of the forms
53
of the biblical names, four languages are of utmost
importance: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. The
influence of these languages was naturally different
according to the linguistic, religious, and cultural spheres
of Europe. The long history of the original or of translation forms of the biblical names gives the impression that
the majority of translations drew in their target language
through the intermediary of the established living tradition or through ancient translations. The attitude to the
main name of the God of Israel is the most striking proof
of how important the role of tradition was in transmission of the biblical names. Various sources testify that
the divine name yhwh (Yahweh) was considered too
sacred to be pronounced, before the oldest extant translations of the Bible were created. This explains why yhwh
was substituted by the Greek translators with the general
designation Kýrios.
In the Jewish tradition, Jerusalem became the center
of Judaism and of the world. This fact must be taken into
consideration in evaluation of the forms of the biblical
names in the Palestinian and Babylonian Targums and in
the Alexandrian Greek translation of the Old Testament.
In spite of their geographical distance, translators obviously wanted to be in close contact with the geographical
reality of the Holy Land and with the Palestinian tradition. All the more, the Jews living in Alexandria and in
Babylon must have missed immediate contact with the
Holy Land when a decision about whether to transliterate
or to translate a particular name and how to transliterate
it was made. A survey of the forms of the proper names
in ancient Jewish translations of the Bible proves, however, that unity in the use of names was not such a high
ideal as in recent times. Especially LXX surprises with
its pluralism regarding the decision for transliteration or
translation in various sections of the Bible as well as in
regard to the forms of transliteration. It is all the more
obvious that this version is significantly called after the
number of its translators. In the case of a collective translation, one could assume that division of the tasks
according to individual translators is the only or at least
the main reason for inconsistency in the use of the forms
of biblical names. But how to explain inconsistency in
versions by one person, for instance in Vg and in many
later European versions? Such cases force us to assume
that translators were not especially prepared to deal with
the challenges of biblical names. Most of them were
obviously not particularly in favor of the ideal of their
phonetic, morphological, and orthographic unification. It
seems that the pluralism is rooted in reading of the Scriptures in the synagogues and in homes. Translators
54
received there the initiative for transliteration or translation and for various forms of transliteration of the names.
They did not possess, however, either grammar or dictionary or concordance.
The medieval, Renaissance, and later European Bible
translations were based more or less primarily on the
original text, on LXX in its various versions, on Vg, and
on some earlier translations into other European languages. Translators who are in favor of a unified system
of translation could easily discover that consistency in
using the forms of biblical proper names is much greater
in the original than in ancient translations, therefore they
must have found the inconsistency in transliteration and
translation technique unacceptable. Inconsistency is confusing especially regarding the phonetics and morphology of well-known names. A greater attention to the original text in modern times explains why consistency in
transliterating or translating of proper names in modern
versions of the Bible is greater than in ancient translations. It seems that in ancient times, tradition dominated
more strongly over the biblical text and context than in
modern critical times. Only in modern times did the text
and context acquire their proper role. Examples of radical deviation from tradition and of a return to the source
forms is a modern phenomenon, but the marks of this
movement are present already in the medieval and
Renaissance translations of the Bible. This movement
does not explain why since Renaissance times there has
been a greater tendency to transliterate rather than to
translate biblical proper names, but this does demonstrate
that all the fundamental dilemmas concern all translations to the same extent. In relation to phonetic forms of
biblical names, there is, therefore, only a limited justification to speak of Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, and
Protestant traditions in use of the forms of biblical proper
names.
What are the possibilities of establishing reliance of
translators on previous translations? In general, it is true
that translators in the East took LXX and in the West Vg
considerably into account in addition to the original text.
It is well-known that numerous European translators
explicitly relied upon recognized ancient and contemporary translations. The forms of biblical proper names
more than other linguistic and literary elements manifest
the degree of dependence between some translations of
the Bible. If in individual cases the model and the copy
are equal both in content and form of the name, up to
orthographic details, reliance is obvious. The question of
reliance on previous translations is of special interest.
When the content and the form of translation or translit-
Translation Review
îm
û∫ů
î
eration coincide, it becomes apparent that a given later
translator drew on the former one who was in general his
model. Coincidences of this kind between LUB, DAL,
and some other versions according to LUB clearly prove
a very great dependence of DAL and some other European translations on LUB. Even more striking is the fact
that GNV and LUB obviously often drew on LXX or on
Vg rather than on the original text. Plurality concerning
the forms of biblical proper names in ancient times and
the great influence of antiquity on the development of
European cultures on all levels are today great reasons
for the attempts to return to the sources and to make
valid the authority of the original text. Justifiable exceptions are only the well-known names being a part of
national cultures.
Unfortunately, the tendency to harmonize the forms
of biblical proper names with the original text does not
proceed consistently enough. It is noteworthy that TOB
was prepared on a precedent agreement of the translators
on the “homogénéité de la traduction,” but the established rules hardly included unifying the forms of proper
names.3 In recent times, only the German authors of EIN
took the necessary effort to establish phonetic rules for
transliterating the proper names.4 These rules served as a
welcome basis for the standardization of the forms of
biblical proper names in the new SSP. In the German and
Slovenian versions, all the proper names except those
which are part of an established cultural tradition are preserved in their Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek forms. Any
attempt to change the overpowering authority of the phonetics of the well-known biblical names would mean to
strike out boldly in the direction of a split with the living
language and culture.
Author’s Note
A first, shorter version of this study, entitled “Prevajanje
imen v renesančnih prevodih Svetega pisma / Translation
of Names in Renaissance Bible Translations” was published in Slovenian in the Proceedings of the Association
of Slovene Literary Translators, Volume 27: Prevajanje
srednjeveških in renesančnih besedil / Translation of
Medieval and Renaissance Texts, edited by Martina
Ožbot (Ljubljana: Društvo slovenskih književnih prevajalcev, 2002), pp. 13-25. For this publication, the material treated was substantially enlarged and the argument
completed.
Notes
Translation Review
For bibliographies consulted, see especially H. Thackeray, A Grammar of the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909; reprint
Hildesheim et al.: G. Olms, 1987; G. Lisowsky, Die
Transkription der hebräischen Eigennamen des Pentateuch in der Septuaginta (Dissertation, Basel: 1940); M.
Harl et al., La Bible d’Alexandrie: LXX (Paris: Serf,
1986-); B. Zadok, The Pre-Hellenistic-Israelite Anthroponomy and Prosopography (OLA 28; Leuven: Peeters,
1988); J. W. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of GenesisDeuteronomy (SBL.SCSt 35, 30, 44, 46, 39; Atlanta, Ga.:
Scholars Press 1993-1998); M. M. Jinbachian, Les techniques de traduction dans la Genèse en Armenien classique (Lisbon: 1998); E. Tov, The Greek and Hebrew
Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint (VT.S 57; Leiden / Boston / Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1999); T. Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity. Part I: Palestine
330 BCE-200 CE (TSAJ 91; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2002).
1
See E. Kautzsch and A. E. Cowley, Gesenius’ Hebrew
Grammar (15th ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980),
§ 119 k.
2
See Ph. Reymond, “Vers une traduction française
oecuménique de la Bible,” Hebräische Wortforschung:
Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Walter Baumgartner
(VT.S 16; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 231-243.
3
See K. D. Fricke and B. Schwank, Ökumenisches Verzeichnis der biblischen Eigennamen nach den Loccumer
Richtlinien (Stuttgart: Katholische Bibelanstalt / Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1971; reprint 1981); H. Haug
(ed.), Namen und Orte der Bibel (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelgesellschaft, 2002).
4
Bible Versions in Various Languages
ACF
Almeida, Corrigida Fiel: Brazilian Portugese
Version (1753/1819/1847/1994/1995)
ALB
Albanian Version (1994)
Aq
Aquila
ARA
Almeida, Revista e Atualizada: Brazilian Portuguese Version (1993)
ARC
Almeida, Revista e Corrigida: Brazilian Portuguese Version (1969)
ASV
American Standard Version (1901)
55
BBE
Bible in Basic English (1949/1964)
HUN
Hungarian Karoli Bible: Magyar nyelvü Karoli
BCI
Biblia Catalana: Traducció Interconfessional
(1996)
IEP
Italian Edizione Paolina Bible (1995-1996)
JAP
BFC
Bible en Français Courant (1997)
BKR
Bible Kralická: Czech Bible (1613)
Japelj: The second Slovenian complete Bible
translation made by Jurij Japelj and co-operators
(1784-1802)
BLS
La Bible de Lemaître de Sacy: French translation
made by Louis-Isaac Lemaître de Sacy of PortRoyal (1657-1696)
JPS
Jewish Publication Society Bible (1917)
KJV
King James Version: English Bible (1611/1769)
LBA
La Biblia de Las Americas: Spanish Bible (1986)
LEI
Leidse Vertaling: Dutch Revised Leiden Bible
(1912/1994)
BRP
Bíblia Sagrada Traduzida em Português (1994)
BTP
Biblia Tysiaclecia: Polish Bible (1965/1984)
BUR
Buber/Rosenzweig: Translation of the Old Testament into German (1925-1936)
LND
La Nuova Diodati: Italian Revised Diodati Bible
(1991)
CEP
Český Ekumenický Překlad: Czech Bible (1985)
LSG
Louis Segond: French Version (1910)
CHO
La Bible de André Chouraqui (1985)
LUB
DAL
Dalmatin: The first Slovenian complete Bible
translation made by Jurij Dalmatin and co-operators (1584)
Luther Bibel: Die gantze Heilige Schrifft Deudsch (Wittenberg 1545)
LUO
Luther Bibel: German Revised Luther Bible
(1912)
LUT
Lutherbibel: German Revised Luther Bible
(1984)
D31
Danish Bible (1907/1931)
DBY
Darby: English Darby Bible (1884/1890)
DIO
La Bibbia di Diodati: Italian Bible (1641)
LUV
DRA
Douay-Rheims American Edition: English Bible
(1899)
Lutherse Vertaling: Dutch Revised Luther Bible
(1648/1750/1933/1994)
LXE
LXX English Version by Sir Lancelot C. L.
Brenton (1844, 1851)
LXX
Septuagint (Greek) Translation of the Old Testament
DRB
Darby: French Darby Bible (1885)
EIN
Einheitsübersetzung der Heiligen Schrift: German Bible (1980)
ELB
Elberfelder Bibel, Revised Version: German
Bible (1993)
LXXO Hexaplaric Recension of LXX
MGK Modern Greek Bible (1850)
ELO
Elberfelder Bibel: German Darby Bible (1905)
MS(S) Manuscript(s)
ESV
English Standard Version (2001)
N30
Norwegian Bible: Bokmíl (1930)
FBJ
French Bible de Jérusalem (1973)
N38
Norwegian Bible: Nynorsk (1938)
FIN
Finnish Bible: Pyhä Raamattu käännös
(1933/1938)
NAB
New American Bible ( 1970, 1986, 1991)
NAS
New American Standard Bible (1977)
GNV
Geneva English Bible (1599)
NAU
New American Standard Bible (NASB 1995)
56
Translation Review
NBG
Netherlands Bijbelgenootschap Vertaling: Dutch
Bible (1951)
NBK
Nřrsk Bibel Konkordant: Norwegian Bible
(1994)
NBN
NEG
NIB
NIV
Tg
Targum
TgJ
Targum Jonathan
TgN
Targum Neofiti 1 of the Vatican Library
Norsk Bibel Nynorsk: Norwegian Bible (1994)
TgO
Targum Onqelos
Nouvelle Édition de Genève: French Bible
(1975)
TgPsJ Targum Pseudo-Jonathan
New International Bible: British Version (1973,
1978, 1984)
New International Version: American Version
(1973, 1978, 1984)
NJB
New Jerusalem Bible in English (1985)
NKJ
New King James Version (NKJV 1982)
NLT
New Living Translation of the Holy Bible (1996)
NRS
New Revised Standard Version (NRSV 1989)
NRV
La Sacra Bibbia Nuova Riveduta: Italian Bible
(1994)
R60
Reina Valera Revisada: Spanish Bible (1960)
R95
Reina Valera Revisada: Spanish Bible (1995)
RSV
Revised Standard Version (1952)
RVA
La Santa Biblia Reina-Valera Actualizada: Spanish Bible (1989)
TNK
Tanakh: New Jewish English Version (NJV
1985)
TOB
Traduction Oecuménique de la Bible: French
Bible (1988)
UKR
Ukrainian Version of the Bible (1996)
VL
Vetus Latina
Vg
Latin Vulgate Bible
WEB English Noah Webster Bible (1833)
WOL Wolf: The third Slovenian complete Bible translation made by a group of translators and named
after bishop Anton Alojz Wolf (1856-1859)
ZBI
Zürcher Bibel: German Bible (1907-1931)
RWB The English Revised 1833 Webster Update 1995
(1988-1997)
SCH
Schlachter Version: German Bible (1951)
SRV
Spanish Reina-Valera Bible (1909)
SSP
Slovenski Standardni Prevod: Slovenian Standard Version (1996)
SVV
Statenvertaling: Dutch Bible (1637)
Sym
Symmachus Ben Joseph
SyrHex Syro-Hexapla
Theo
Theodotion
Translation Review
57
EN ATTENDANT LE VOTE DES BETES SAUVAGES, BY AHMADOU
KOUROUMA: A COMPARISON OF TWO ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
By Judith Schaefer
In the matter of language we should, by a discrete
combination of loyalty to the forms and sounds of the
original language and a certain tastefulness in handling
turns of phrase, aim to do justice to the vitality of the
culture we are trying to translate.
Isidore Okpewho
I
Ahmadou Kourouma (1927–2003) made his mark on
Francophone literature with his first novel, Les soleils
des indépendences (1976), now considered an African
classic. With Monné, outrages, et défis (his favorite), En
attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, and Allah n’est pas
obligé ..., his reputation continues to grow, not only as a
master storyteller but as a brave, witty, sardonic, and
deeply truthful observer of life in sub-Saharan Africa in
the wake of colonization, independence, and the Cold
War.1 He also wrote a play (Le diseur de vérité, 1998),
four beautifully illustrated books for children describing
aspects of traditional Malinke society, and one for young
people addressing problems of traditional culture. His
books have won the Prix Tropiques (1998), the Grand
Prix de la Société des gens de lettres, Livre Inter (1999),
the Prix Renaudot, and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens
(1999), but Ahmadou Kourouma remains largely
unknown in the English-speaking world.
An English translation of En attendant le vote des
bêtes sauvages by Carroll F. Coates was published in the
United States in 2001; a second translation, by Frank
Wynne, appeared in the United Kingdom in 2003.2 I
thought it would be interesting to compare the two and
evaluate them primarily on the basis of two criteria: (1)
Kourouma’s own stated objectives, gleaned from published interviews, and (2) the translator’s understanding
of the cultural context.
One of Kourouma’s primary objectives was to make
his Malinke oral culture come alive in a written language
not its own. He wrote in French because his first language, Malinke, although spoken by some ten million
people, has no standard written form. But he was not
content to use French (the language most perfectly adapted to the universal nature of thought, or so thought de
Gaulle) simply to describe the culture. Instead, he broke
58
sacrosanct rules of syntax and grammar to make it actually reflect the Malinke way of thought. Among Frenchspeaking readers, Kourouma is known, indeed notorious,
for disregarding the sequence of tenses, using nouns as
verbs and vice versa, dropping articles, inventing words,
and so on. He explained his style by reminding us that
some three hundred million Africans use French as a
means of communication, and it is inevitable that this
jealously guarded language escape its keepers and take
on a new dimension.3 “My characters are Malinkes, and
when a Malinke speaks, he has his own way of looking
at reality ... they must speak in the text as they speak in
their own language.”4 But the language of the novels is
not simply a transcription of Malinke oral discourse.
Instead, Malinke is the substrate on which Kourouma artfully builds his own new style. Makhily Gassama goes so
far as to assert that the real protagonist of Kourouma’s
novels is, in fact, his style — the Malinke style transposed into French without recourse to slang or pidgin.5
However, because English is more flexible than French,
English readers are not likely to be aware of the linguistic improprieties that so disgusted Gassama initially.6 An
English translation may then have to concentrate on
qualities other than linguistic modification to convey the
sense of otherness. Through the veil of French, the translator must discern the signs of Malinke culture and
reproduce them as faithfully as possible.
Like all great novelists, Kourouma had other goals as
well: he wanted to be a witness to his times, a Malinke
voice confronting the West with the profoundly disorienting effects of colonization (Les soleils des
indépendences, 1976, and Monné, outrages, et défis,
1990), the disastrous results of the Cold War in Africa
(En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, 1998), and the
horrifying world of child soldiers (Allah n’est pas obligé
..., 2000). And he wanted to present the problems of contemporary Africans in terms of the human problems we
all face.7 The better the translation, the louder his voice
will be heard.
The problem of cultural context is a major stumbling
block. Because Kourouma wrote in French, the only language he knew well that also has a written form, translators of French may feel they are in familiar territory. But,
as Madeleine Borgomano warns, we should not be
Translation Review
deceived: this is a foreign text requiring effort and flexibility for understanding.8 Kourouma himself said that the
distance between the language he used and the content
he described is greater than that occurring when, for
example, an Italian speaks French.9 Christopher L. Miller
argues persuasively that “a fair Western reading of
African literatures demands engagement with, and even
dependence on, anthropology.”10 For this text, I would
add history and even natural history to the reading list.
Translators of Kourouma must do their homework.
Finally, there is the problem of translating a work
based on West African oral literature, rich in epic tales
comparable to Homer’s Iliad and the anonymous
Chanson de Roland. Kourouma structures this novel on a
variant of the West African epic: the donsomana, a tale
told and sung for a master hunter and intended to purify
him, to enable him to recapture lost power. The many
episodes are told and sung over an extended period of
time by a griot and his responder in a pattern of call and
response familiar to us in jazz. In The Ozidi Saga, J.P.
Clark-Bekederemo describes such a performance as a
many-faceted event, with words, music, dance, drama,
ritual, and magic, and suggests Western opera, especially
Wagnerian opera, as a useful comparison.11 The West
African epic is characterized by dramatic delivery with
emphatic pauses, direct address, repetition of words and
phrases, distinctive rhythm, alliteration, anaphora, and
abundant neologisms; yet there is also extensive use of
everyday language.12 The whole is shot through with
proverbs and sayings, many shades of humor, elaborate
digressions, and interjections by members of the audience. This last characteristic leads to a multiplicity of
voices, and it is not always clear who is speaking. Nor
does Kourouma intend that it should be. “Some of these
voices can be identified, but in other utterances, difference more than identity seems to be the root condition.”13
Sometimes it is Kourouma himself who speaks, as if he
were one of those sitting in the circle. The translator
must be aware of these multiple voices and adjust the
style if appropriate.
How should the translator who has little experience
of sub-Saharan Africa and no possibility of visiting the
region take on a West African novel? The first task is to
identify the unfamiliar cultural concepts (in this portion
of the novel, the hunter brotherhood or society, West
African montagnards, wrestling, proverbs, oral tradition)
and then head for the library. Especially recommended is
the reading of some examples of West African tales and
epics, many of which have been transcribed into
French.14 Then, motion pictures made in West Africa are
Translation Review
great eye-openers. They provide a rudimentary cultural
context, visual rather than simply intellectual, and leave
the viewer with images to refer to when searching for the
right word or phrase. Two that I saw recently provided
happy insights with regard to our subject: Madame
Brouette, from Senegal, provides a gorgeous example of
a griot in action; and Alex’s Wedding, a documentary
made in Cameroon, shows people using proverbs as part
of everyday conversation.15 Finally, there is always the
Web. Astonishing bits of information can be found there,
and interesting dictionaries are also available online.
II
A brief summary of the novel’s plot will make the selection chosen for comparative translation more comprehensible.
The setting is postindependence Africa, when “the
powers of East and West delivered us bound hand and
foot into the hands of the worst of dictators, who did as
they liked with us during the Cold War.”16 Koyaga, dictator of the fictitious Republic of the Gulf, hears his life
story told by a griot, a traditional poet-singer, in a traditional epic form. The narration (based on the donsomana
form already described) unfolds during six nights, each
night covering a portion of Koyaga’s life: his birth and
parentage, his youth, his coming to power, and his initiatory travels to visit Africa’s other infamous dictators,
their names and countries thinly disguised. Long, entertaining digressions relating the adventures of other characters intervene. (Such digressions are typical of the
West African epic and not “sudden disruptions,” as
Coates describes them in his Afterword.17) The final
episode recounts the near downfall of Koyaga’s long
reign and predicts his survival, this time through a democratic election — even if it takes wild animals to cast the
winning votes.
III
I will analyze the translations of the first two pages of
the novel line by line. Most of the translation problems
encountered throughout the novel are already evident
here. First the French, next the two translations (CC =
Carrol F. Coates and FW = Frank Wynne), and last, my
suggestions and comments (JS), which are based on the
criteria already proposed. I will also comment occasionally on style. The terms or phrases in question are underlined. All the lines of this excerpt are included and are
numbered.
59
THE COMPLETE TEXT
VEILLÉE I
Votre nom : Koyaga! Votre totem : faucon!
Vous êtes soldat et président. Vous resterez le président et le plus grand général de la République du
Golfe tant qu’Allah ne reprendra pas (que des années
et années encore il nous en préserve!) le souffle qui
vous anime. Vous êtes chasseur! Vous resterez avec
Ramsès II et Soundiata l’un des trois plus grands
chasseurs de l’humanité. Retenez le nom de Koyaga,
le chasseur et président-dictateur de la République du
Golfe.
Voilà que le soleil à présent commence à disparaître derrière les montagnes. C’est bientôt la nuit.
Vous avez convoqué les sept plus prestigieux maîtres
parmi la foule des chasseurs accourus. Ils sont là
assis en rond et en tailleur, autour de vous. Ils ont
tous leur tenue de chasse : les bonnets phrygiens, les
cottes auxquelles sont accrochés de multiples grigris,
petits miroirs et amulettes. Ils portent tous en bandoulière le long fusil de traite et arborent tous dans la
main droite le chasse-mouches de maître. Vous,
Koyaga, trônez dans le fauteuil au centre du cercle.
Maclédio, votre ministre de l’Orientation, est installé
à votre droite. Moi, Bingo, je suis le sora ; je
louange, chante et joue de la cora. Un sora est un
chantre, un aède qui dit les exploits des chasseurs et
encense les héros chasseurs. Retenez mon nom de
Bingo, je suis le griot musicien de la confrérie des
chasseurs.
L’homme à ma droite, le saltimbanque accoutré
dans ce costume effarant, avec la flûte, s’appelle
Tiécoura. Tiekoura est mon répondeur. Un sora se
fait toujours accompagner par un apprenti appelé
répondeur. Retenez le nom de Tiécoura, mon
apprenti répondeur, un initié en phase purificatoire,
un fou du roi.
Nous voilà donc tous sous l’apatame du jardin de
votre résidence. Tout est donc prêt, tout le monde
est en place. Je dirai le récit purificatoire de votre
vie de maître chasseur et de dictateur. Le récit
purificatoire est appelé en malinké un donsomana.
C’est une geste. Il est dit par un sora accompagné
par un répondeur cordoua. Un cordoua est un initié
en phase purifictoire, en phase cathartique. Tiécoura
est un cordoua et comme tout cordoua il fait le bouffon, le pitre, le fou. Il se permet tout et il n’y a rien
qu’on ne lui pardonne pas.
60
Tiécoura, tout le monde est réuni, tout est dit.
Ajoute votre grain de sel.
Le répondeur joue de la flûte, gigote, danse.
Brusquement s’arrête et interpelle le président
Koyaga.
—Président, général et dictateur Koyaga, nous
chanterons et danserons votre donsomana en cinq
veillées. Nous dirons la vérité. La vérité sur votre
dictature. La vérité sur vos parents, vos collaborateurs. Toute la vérité sur vos saloperies, vos conneries ; nous dénoncerons vos mensonges, vos nombreux crimes et assassinats . . .
—Arrête d’injurier un grand homme d’honneur
et de bien comme notre père de la nation Koyaga.
Sinon la malédiction et le malheur te poursuivront et
te détruiront. Arrête donc! Arrête!
Une veillée ne se dit pas sans qu’en sourdine au
récit ronronne un thème. La vénération de la tradition est une bonne chose. Ce sera le thème dont sortiront les proverbes qui seront évoqués au cours des
intermèdes de cette première veillée. La tradition
doit être respectée parce que :
Si le perdrix s’envole son enfant ne reste pas à
terre.
Malgré le séjour prolongé d’un oiseau perché
sur un baobab, il n’oublie pas que le nid dans lequel
il a été couvé est dans l’arbuste.
Et quand on ne sait où l’on va, qu’on sache d’où
l’on vient.
(En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, Ahmadou
Kourouma. Editions du Seuil. Paris. 1998, 9-11.)
THE COMPARISON
1. VEILLÉE I
CC: FIRST SUMU
FW: First vigil
JS: NIGHT I
In traditional West Africa, tales are told at night, after
the evening meal — an unproductive time; it is forbidden
to tell them in the daytime.18 J.P. Clark-Bekederemo says
that the Ozidi Saga is “told and acted in seven nights.”
“Veillée” refers to a time of day and by extension a gathering at that time of day, so I question CC’s use of
“sumu.” It transforms a matter-of-fact term into an esoteric one. Nor do I think the word “vigil,” defined as a
“watch” or “wake” and implying prayer and devotion,
Translation Review
fits here. In West African traditional culture, story-telling
is instead a major form of entertainment for rural people.
I suggest following Clark-Bekederemo’s example and
using Night One (I), Night Two (II), and so on.
2. Votre nom : Koyaga! Votre totem : faucon!
CC: Your name: Koyaga! Your totem: the falcon!
FW: Your name: Koyaga! Your totem: the falcon!
JS: Your name: Koyaga! Your totem: Falcon!
I would leave out “the” before “falcon” because it seems
to relegate the falcon to its biological status of bird and
ignore its more powerful traditional, animist significance.
Initiation into the brotherhood of hunters involved close
study of animals and their ways and habitats. Each game
animal according to its size and status, has a degree of
nyama — “evil or vengeful power” — that may pursue
the hunter who kills it. The grigris attached to their shirts
(see line 9) are there to protect the hunters from this
power. West African hunters identified closely with the
animals they hunted, conceiving of them as “like people,
with families, societies, enemies, habits, personalities.”19
Choosing Falcon as a totem was an attempt to identify
with the bird’s fierceness and skill as a hunter.
3. Vous êtes soldat et président.
CC: You are a soldier and president.
FW: Soldier and president are you.
JS: You are a soldier and a president.
Here, the issue is word order and level of discourse.
In English, inversion is a common rhetorical device to
lend emphasis. In Malinke, the most common sequence
is subject + verb + complement,20 with emphasis added
in the ways already described, so I suggest leaving the
original word order and adding the article “a” before
“president,” leaving the sentence a simple statement of
fact.
4. Vous resterez le président et le plus grand
général de la République du Golfe tant qu’Allah ne
reprendra pas (que des années et années encore il
nous en préserve!) le souffle qui vous anime.
CC: You will remain president and the greatest
general of the Republic of the Gulf as long as Allah
(may he spare us for years and years to come!) does
not take from you the breath that animates you.
FW: You will be the President of the République
du Golfe and its greatest general for as long as Allah
(may he yet preserve us for years and years to come)
Translation Review
does not take from you the breath that gives you life.
JS: You will be the president and the greatest
general of the Republic of the Gulf so long as Allah
does not take back (may he spare us this for years
and years to come!) the breath that gives you life.
In the parenthetical clause, the wish is for the postponement of Koyaga’s demise, and not that of our own.
The final part of CC’s sentence does not preserve the
rhythm of the original: “animates” has one too many
syllables.
5. Vous êtes chasseur! Vous resterez avec
Ramsès II et Soundiata l’un des trois plus grands
chasseurs de l’humanité.
CC: You are a hunter! Along with Ramses II and
Sundyata, you will remain one of the three greatest
hunters of humankind.
FW: You are a hunter. With Rameses II and
Sundyata, you are forever one of the three great
hunters among men.
JS: You are a hunter! You, Ramses II and
Sundyata — you will always be one of the three
greatest hunters known to mankind.
The phrase “hunters of humankind” is ambiguous.
FW leaves out the exclamation point, a helpful device to
convey a spoken emphasis we cannot hear. The second
sentence is problematic, and FW’s version is certainly
one way to handle it, but he should have left “you” in the
first position (anaphora, mentioned above).
6. Retenez le nom de Koyaga, le chasseur et
président-dictateur de la République du Golfe.
CC: Remember the name of Koyaga, hunter and
president-dictator of the Republic of the Gulf.
FW: Remember the name of Koyaga, hunter and
President-dictator of the République du Golfe.
Questions of capitalization and retention of names in
French arise here. In my view, arguments could be made
for both versions.
7. Voilà que le soleil à présent commence à disparaître derrière les montagnes. C’est bientôt la nuit.
CC: Now the sun is beginning to disappear
behind the mountains. Soon it will be night.
FW: See, the sun begins to disappear behind the
mountains. It will soon be night.
61
I like FW’s better. “See,” is more direct, more
indicative of the oral style; the reader imagines a gesture.
The speaker is addressing Koyaga directly.
8. Vous avez convoqué les sept plus prestigieux
maîtres parmi la foule des chasseurs accourus.
CC: You have summoned the seven most prestigious masters among the multitude of hunters that
have come running.
FW: You have called together the seven most
celebrated masters from the multitude of hunters who
came forward.
JS: You have called together the seven most
prestigious masters from the crowd of hunters gathered here.
In CC’s version, the relative pronoun should be
“who” and not “that.” And I think it helps the rhythm
and is more in keeping with the oral style and with
Kourouma’s “Malinkéization” of French to stick to simple past tenses rather than compound ones. For “accouru” I have used “gathered” in the sense of a crowd gathering, of a turnout, of people coming together from various other places to a single point to witness an event.
This would be the case in rural Africa; hunters (and other
spectators) would have come from all around to attend
the donsomana.
9. Ils sont là assis en rond et en tailleur, autour
de vous. Ils ont tous leur tenue de chasse: les bonnets
phrygiens, les cottes auxquelles sont accrochés de
multiples grigris, petits miroirs et amulettes.
CC: They are sitting cross-legged in a circle
around you with their Phrygian bonnets and their
hunting cloaks bedecked with gris-gris, tiny mirrors,
and amulets.
FW: Here they sit, crouched about you. They
wear their hunting dress, their Phrygian caps hung
about with grigi, mirrors and amulets.
JS: Here they are, sitting cross-legged in a circle
around you. They are all wearing their hunting
clothes: phrygian bonnets, shirts with all sorts of grigris, little mirrors, and amulets attached.
CC has transformed the oral to the written by combining sentences and by using “bedecked,” a rather fancy
word. His sentence is merely descriptive, whereas the
sora is speaking directly to Koyaga — and to us, the
reader, the invisible audience. Here, Kourouma helps us
out, as he frequently does, with a bit of specific cultural
62
information, which neither translator got quite right. The
“cotte” is not a cloak but a simple long shirt or tunic,
pulled on over the head.21 FW left it out, as he did “en
tailleur.” The word “all/tous” should be included; it is
repeated in the next sentence, as the description continues.
10. Ils portent tous en bandoulière le long fusil
de traite et arborent tous dans la main droite le chasse-mouches de maître.
CC: They all have their long slave rifles slung
over their shoulders and a master’s fly-swatter in
their right hands.
FW: They wear their long rifles slung over their
shoulders, in their right hands they bear the fly-swatters of the master.
JS: They all wear their long trade rifle on a bandolier and all hold in their right hand the fly-whisk
of a master.
“La traite” sometimes refers to the slave trade, but
the distinguishing feature of a “fusil de traite” is that it
was always of lesser quality than the European traders’
own firearms. “Slave rifles” implies that the hunters are
slaves. I would repeat the word “all,” because as already
mentioned, repetition is an important element of the West
African oral style. And I believe it is better stylistically
to use “right hand” in the singular, since each person has
only one.
“Fly-swatters” is incorrect and misleading. The term
is “fly whisk,” and the implement, which may have had
purely practical origins (remember, West Africa is not
only in the tropics but also in the tsetse fly belt) has long
had ritual significance. It is the symbol of a master
hunter’s science, an instrument of thaumaturgy, an essential part of his impedimenta, considered as powerful as
his rifle or any other weapon.22 A fly whisk consists of a
bundle of braided grass or leather thongs, or of the hair
of various animals attached to a handle decorated with
carvings, beads, or cowries.23
11. Vous, Koyaga, trônez dans le fauteuil au centre du cercle.
CC: You, Koyaga, sit enthroned at the center of
the circle.
FW: You, Koyaga, sit enthroned in the center.
Why omit “the circle”?
12. Maclédio, votre ministre de l’Orientation, est
Translation Review
installé à votre droite.
CC: Macledio, your minister of orientation, is
seated on your right hand.
FW: At your right hand sits Macledio, your
Minister of Orientation.
JS: Macledio, your Minister of Orientation, sits
to your right.
CC: Remember my name, Bingo; I am the griot
musician of the society of hunters.
FW: Remember the name of Bingo, I am the
griot, the poet and chronicler, the musician of this
Brotherhood of Hunters.
JS: Remember my name, Bingo, I am the griot
musician of the brotherhood of hunters.
Again, FW uses inversion where it is not called for.
Both translators use “right hand” where “right” is sufficient. CC has Macledio sitting “on” Koyaga’s hand.
Do not use italics; see “sora,” line 14. Furthermore,
in these days of World Music, I think the word “griot” is
becoming well known. I think “brotherhood” is better
because it has the same number of syllables as “confrérie.” Cissé describes a kind of freemasonry espousing
equality, brotherhood, and understanding among all no
matter their race, social origins, beliefs, function.26 No
need to capitalize the term.
13. Moi, Bingo, je suis le sora; je louange,
chante et joue de la cora.
CC: I, Bingo, am the sèrè; I praise, I sing, and I
play the kora.
FW: I am Bingo, the sora; I sing, I pay tribute
and pluck the cora.
JS: I, Bingo, am the sora; I praise immoderately,
sing, and play the kora.
Why not keep the word Kourouma uses, “sora”?
“Praise” is better than “pay tribute” because it is simpler
and because soras (master griots)24 are known as praisesingers. I added “immoderately” because griots are paid
to exaggerate. “Pluck” is good (FW) because it implies a
stringed instrument, something the reader might not
know.
14. Un sora est un chantre, un aède qui dit les
exploits des chasseurs et encense les héros chasseurs.
CC: A sèrè is a minstrel, a bard who recounts the
exploits of the hunters and praises their heros.
FW: A sora is a teller of tales, one who relates
the stories of the hunters to spur their heroes to
greater feats.
JS: A sora is a praise-singer, a bard who tells the
deeds of hunters and flatters the hunter heros.
Do not continue with italics. In the French, Malinke
words, once used, intentionally become part of the ordinary vocabulary of the book.25 In this sentence, the sora
turns to us, the readers, as part of his wider audience, to
explain exactly what a sora is: An official praise-singer
(“chantre”), a bard in the tradition of Homer (“aède”),
who recounts the deeds of hunters and flatters
(“encense”) their heros.
15. Retenez mon nom de Bingo, je suis le griot
musicien de la confrérie des chasseurs.
Translation Review
16. L’homme à ma droite, le saltimbanque
accoutré dans ce costume effarant, avec la flûte,
s’appelle Tiécoura. Tiécoura est mon répondeur.
CC: The man on my right, the acrobat dressed in
his outrageous costume and with his flute, is called
Tiekura. Tiekura is my responder.
FW: On my right, the performer with his flute
and strange attire, is Tiécoura. He is my responder;
JS: The man on my right, the acrobat in the outrageous get-up, with the flute, is called Tiekoura.
Tiekoura is my responder.
In the next few lines, Kourouma will describe the
responder in more detail. We find out that he is a foil for
the sora — a buffoon, a trickster, a fool. For now, we
learn only that his behavior and appearance are out of the
ordinary. Dominique Zahan describes a fantastic, eccentric figure cavorting around wearing an outrageous hat of
feathers, or a whole bird, or a vulture’s wing decorated
with birds’ beaks, skulls, and claws. On his body, a powderhorn, necklaces of beans and catfish bones, and other
rattly things attached to a sort of net shirt, and trousers
tight, with one pantleg long and one short, or billowy
and made of many different-colored pieces.27 Neither
translator gives “accoutré” its somewhat pejorative value.
FW’s “performer” is too general, and he neglects the element of repetition by omitting the name at the beginning
of the second sentence. FW also combines this sentence
with the following one, connecting them with a semicolon, thereby detracting from the oral style.
17. Un sora se fait toujours accompagner par un
apprenti appelé répondeur. Retenez le nom de
63
Tiécoura, mon apprenti répondeur, un initié en phase
purificatoire, un fou du roi.
CC: A sèrè is always accompanied by an apprentice called a responder. Remember the name of
Tiekura, my apprentice responder — he is an initiate
going through the purificatory stage, a king’s jester.
FW: ... a sora is always accompanied by his
apprentice or responder. Remember the name of
Tiécoura, my apprentice, my responder; an initiate
undergoing purification; a king’s fool.
JS: A sora is always accompanied by an apprentice called a responder. Remember the name of
Tiekoura, my apprentice responder, an initiate in the
purification stage, a king’s fool.
For sèrè, see lines 13 and 14. In the second sentence,
CC uses too many words, and misses the chance to
duplicate the rhythm of the original final phrase by using
the two-syllable “jester” instead of the simple but
emphatic “fool.” FW substitutes “his” for the general
“an,” not a major mistake but indicative of a certain pervasive haste.
18. Nous voilà donc tous sous l’apatame du
jardin de votre résidence. Tout est donc prêt, tout le
monde est en place.
CC: Here we all are, in the garden apatam of
your residence. Everything is ready; everybody is in
place.
FW: Here are we all gathered in the great gardens of your palace. Everything is ready, each is in
his place.
JS: So, here we all are at the pavilion in the garden of your residence. All is ready, everyone is in
place.
An “apatame” is a typical West African structure: a
roof supported by pillars, built as a gathering place. It
may be small or large, a simple straw roof supported by
rough wooden pillars or something more elaborate. West
African readers would recognize the term, but I think for
Western readers a translation is helpful. Such information
can be found on the web or in the Dictionnaire de francophonie universelle, which is available online.28 I would
quibble with CC’s “everybody” as being too lumpy a
word to use here.
19. Je dirai le récit purificatoire de votre vie de
maître chasseur et de dictateur.
CC: I will recite the purificatory narrative of
64
your life as master hunter and dictator.
FW: I will tell the tale of purification; the story
of your life, life as master hunter and dictator.
JS: I will tell the purification tale of your life as
master hunter and dictator.
Unlike the original text, FW’s version repeats “life,”
the effect being more written than oral. It also places
emphasis on telling the life story, thereby lessening the
impact of the outspoken, audaceous “dictator.” One does
not usually call a dictator that to his face.
20. Le récit purificatoire est appelé en malinké
un donsomana. C’est une geste. Il est dit par un sora
accompagné par un répondeur cordoua. Un cordoua
est un initié en phase purificatoire, en phase cathartique.
CC: The purificatory narrative is called, in
Maninka, a donsomana. That is an epic. It is recited
by a sèrè accompanied by a responder or koroduwa.
A koroduwa is an initiate in the purificatory stage,
the cathartic stage.
FW: In the Malinké tongue, the tale is called a
donsomana. It is an epic told by a sora with his
koroduwa — an apprentice in the purificatory stage,
the cathartic stage.
JS: The purification tale is called in Malinke a
donsomana. It’s an epic, a heroic tale. It’s told by a
sora accompanied by a responder, a kordoua. A kordoua is an initiate undergoing purification, undergoing catharsis.
I see no reason to change “Malinké” to “Maninka”
(CC). Both names, as well as “Mandinka,” appear to be
valid, and Kourouma uses “Malinké” in interviews.29
Here again, FW combines sentences, achieving an
acceptable written style at the expense of an oral one. As
for “cordoua,” various spellings are possible, most
adding the extra syllable, for example, “kore dugaw,”
“kore duga,” and “korèdugaw.”30 But because there is
such variety, why not stick with Kourouma’s “cordoua”
(or kordoua)? I suggest expanding the translation of
“geste” because in English, the word “epic” has become
somewhat unmoored from its literary source, and “geste”
as used here is specifically literary. Again, FW has combined sentences to a more written than oral effect. For
use of italics, see line 14.
21. Tiécoura est un cordoua et comme tout cordoua il fait le bouffon, le pitre, le fou.
CC: Tiecoura is a koroduwa, and, like all koro-
Translation Review
duwa, he plays the buffoon, the clown, the jester.
FW: Tiécoura is a koroduwa and, like all of his
kind, he plays the fool, the idiot, the loon.
JS: Tiekoura is a kordoua and like all kordouas
he plays the buffoon, the clown, the fool.
Again, the tendency to render a text based on oral literature in a style appropriate for written texts. I would
leave out the first three commas (CC), keeping them only
in items in a series. FW neglects to repeat “kordoua.”
“Loon,” a northern waterbird not found in Africa and
also, to us, a silly, crazy person, is geographically and
culturally out of place. Our characters are West African
hunters who have intimate knowledge of each and every
creature of the bush and would be astounded to see a
loon among them.
22. Il se permet tout et il n’y a rien qu’on ne lui
pardonne pas.
CC: He does anything he wants, and nothing he
does goes unpardoned.
FW: He can do as he wishes, Everything is permitted him, and nothing that he does goes unpardoned.
JS: He says and does whatever he wants and
there’s nothing we won’t forgive him.
According to Zahan, a kordoua has almost complete
license, and his antics, jokes, obscenities, and outlandish
clothing evoke general hilarity. Cissé describes him as a
“bouffon sacré.” Bad copyediting in the FW version.
23. Tiécoura, tout le monde est réuni, tout est dit.
Ajoute votre grain de sel.
CC: Tiekura — everybody is here, everything
has been said. Add your grain of salt.
FW: Tiécoura, all are gathered here, all has been
said. Add your pinch of salt.
JS: Tiekoura, everyone is here now, all is said.
Add your pinch of salt.
Again, the clumsy “everybody.” In English, “a grain
of salt” is an idiom suggesting caution (“take it with a
grain of salt”). A “pinch of salt” suggests adding flavor,
which Tiekoura will do.
24. Le répondeur joue de la flûte, gigote, danse.
Brusquement s’arrête et interpelle le président
Koyaga.
CC: The responder plays the flute, wiggles, and
Translation Review
dances. Abruptly, he stops and calls to President
Koyaga:
FW: The koroduwa trills his flute, jiggles and
dances. Suddenly he stops and addresses President
Koyaga:
JS: The responder plays the flute, dissolves in
spasms, does a dance. Stops suddenly and addresses
President Koyaga.
To see West African dancers perform is to realize
that “wiggle” and “jiggle” only barely conjure up the
true picture. I would expand on “gigoter,” as above.
Kourouma omits the subject in the second sentence, a
common structure in West African oral performance.31
The omission should be maintained. Why change
“responder” to koroduwa? For italics, see line 14.
25. Président, général et dictateur Koyaga, nous
chanterons et danserons votre donsomana en cinq
veillées. Nous dirons la vérité. La vérité sur votre
dictature. La vérité sur vos parents, vos collaborateurs. Toute la vérité sur vos saloperies, vos conneries; nous dénoncerons vos mensonges, vos nombreux
crimes et assassinats ...
CC: “President, General, Dictator Koyaga, we
are going to sing and dance your donsomana during
five festive sumu. We shall tell the truth. The truth
about your dictatorship. The truth about your parents
and your collaborators. All the truth about your filthy
tricks and your bullshit; we shall denounce your lies,
your numerous crimes and assassinations.”
FW: ‘President Koyaga, General, Dictator, here
we will sing and dance your donsomana over the
feast of six vigils. We will tell the truth, about your
dictatorship, your parents, and your collaborators.
The whole truth about your dirty tricks, your bullshit,
your lies, your many crimes and assassinations ...’
JS: “President, general, and dictator Koyaga, we
are going to sing and dance your donsomana for five
nights. We are going to tell the truth. The truth about
your dictatorship. The truth about your parents, your
collaborators. The whole truth about your filthy
behavior, your stupidities; we will denounce your
lies, your many crimes and assassinations ...”
“Festive” and “feast” are not necessarily part of a
donsomana. CC uses “shall,” which is inconsistent with
the ordinary language of this oral performance. I think
“saloperies” refers to disgusting personal behavior and
not to “dirty tricks” or “filthy tricks,” which seem to
65
have a more political connotation. And “bullshit” (nonsense, foolish talk) jars here; it is too colloquial and also
not strong enough. The suspension points should be left
in; they are indicators of a meaningful pause in the oral
presentation. Note that the speaker is Tiecoura, the
responder, and not Bingo, the sora, as CC states in his
Afterword. Remember that soras are praise singers,
whereas kordouas have license to say whatever they
want — in this case, to insult Koyaga.
26. Arrête d’injurier un grand homme d’honneur
et de bien comme notre père de la nation Koyaga.
Sinon la malédiction et le malheur te poursuivront et
te détruiront. Arrête donc! Arrête!
CC: “Stop insulting a great and righteous man of
honor like Koyaga, the father of our nation. If you
don’t, malediction and misfortune will pursue you
and destroy you. So stop it! Stop it!
FW: Cease from insulting this gentleman, a man
of great honour as is Koyaga, the father of our nation
for if you do not ruin and damnation will hunt you
down and destroy you. Hold your tongue!
JS: “ ... Otherwise curses and bad luck will hunt
you down and destroy you.”
Who is speaking here? Probably Macledio, Koyaga’s
Minister of Orientation. Such ambiguity is often found in
the polyphonic discourse of Kourouma’s novels as he
reproduces the style of a traditional oral performance,
and sometimes the speaker is Kourouma himself, as if he
were at the donsomana in person.32 The translator must
sometimes guess who is speaking and perhaps adjust the
style accordingly. FW forgets the quotation marks and
runs the sentences together (see lines 5 and 9), but his
change of tone clearly suggests that a third person is
speaking. I would translate “malediction” and “malheur”
using words that suggest the fetishistic, magical dimension of the characters’ world view. “Ruin and damnation”
suggest capitalism and Christianity.
27. Une veillée ne se dit pas sans qu’en sourdine
au récit ronronne un thème.
CC: A festive assembly cannot be conducted
without a theme as an undertone to the narration.
FW: A vigil cannot be spoken without a theme,
purring softly in its wake.
JS: A night’s tale can’t be told without a theme
humming along in the background.
Here, I would combine “veillée” and “récit.” I use
66
“humming” to emphasize the musical aspect of the performance. FW has the theme coming along after the tale
is told (“in its wake”) rather than permeating the whole
evening. CC’s sentence is clumsy. For “festive assembly”
see line 25.
28. La vénération de la tradition est une bonne
chose. Ce sera le thème dont sortiront les proverbes
qui seront évoqués au cours des intermèdes de cette
première veillée.
CC: Veneration of tradition is a good thing. From
this theme will come the proverbs enunciated during
the interludes of this first sumu.
FW: It is wise and good to respect tradition. This
will be the theme from which will spring the
proverbs spoken in the interludes of this our first
vigil.
JS: ... This will be the theme of the proverbs
evoked during the interludes of this first night.
29. La tradition doit être respectée parce que:
CC: Tradition must be respected for the following reasons:
FW: Tradition should be respected for:
JS: Tradition must be respected because
CC probably added the extra words to justify the
colon, but I think the colon could be omitted in the interest of simplicity. Three proverbs bring this section to a
close.
A. Si le perdrix s’envole son enfant ne reste pas
à terre.
CC: If the partridge flies away, its child cannot
remain on the ground.
FW: When the partridge takes flight, its fledgling
does not linger on the ground.
JS: If the partridge flies away its chick doesn’t
stay on the ground.
“Fledgling” is too specific a word for a proverb.
“Chick” is appropriate when speaking of birds but is also
a familiar term of endearment.
B. Malgré le séjour prolongé d’un oiseau perché
sur un baobab, il n’oublie pas que le nid dans lequel
it a été couvé est dans l’arbuste.
CC: Regardless of a bird’s long sojourn in the
baobab, he will never forget the nest of the humble
shrub where he was hatched.
Translation Review
FW: Though he may sojourn long in the branches of the baobab, the partridge will never forget the
nest of lowly brush where he was hatched.
JS: No matter how long a bird perches in a
baobab, it doesn’t forget that the nest it hatched in is
down in a bush.
“Sojourn” is too formal; no need to turn a “oiseau”
into a partridge.
C. Et quand on ne sait où l’on va, qu’on sache
d’où l’on vient.
CC: And if one does not know where he is
going, let him recall the place from which he comes.
FW: So then, though a man know not whither he
is going, let him remember whence he came.
JS: And if you don’t know where you’re going,
at least know where you came from.
Both translators ignore the oral style and are too formal. Proverbs have traditionally been one of the chief
forms of oral expression among West Africans. When
conversation lags, a proverb — “conversation’s horse”
(not FW’s “thoroughbred”)33 — carries it along.34 Each
African linguistic group has its own body of proverbs,
which may number in the thousands, and whereas some
embody general truths about the human condition, others
represent the social and juridical code of the particular
society and may be intentionally cryptic, with allusions
no outsider would understand.35 Even those owning the
proverbs are sometimes hard pressed to give a clear
explanation, but obscurity may itself be a virtue in that it
stimulates reflection (and subsequent conversation — a
highly valued activity in an oral society).36 bell hooks
said we should regard not-understanding as a space for
learning.37 And so we should with the proverbs in En
attendant. However, the translator should beware of
using obscurity as an excuse for poor translation. For
example, take this one from Night II:
Si un canari se casse sur la tete, lave-toi de cette
eau.
CC: If a kannari breaks on your head, wash with
the water.
FW: If a canary falls on your head, wash in this
water.
JS: If a water pot breaks on your head, use the
water to wash yourself.
This proverb does not have to be obscure. A “canari”
Translation Review
is a large clay pot used for cooking and to carry water (on
the head). Why use “kannari” when “water jar” or “water
pot” makes it all clear. FW’s translation reduces the
proverb to nonsense and violates the author’s integrity.
A further point: the style of West African proverbs is
often not brief, pithy, and oracular, as is common in
European languages, but conversational, so I suggest
using ordinary words and contractions when translating
them. Remember, they are meant to be spoken, not read.
I disagree with CC’s assertion in his Afterword “that they
likely have mystical impact.”
There is much more to be said about the translation
of the proverbs in this novel, but that should probably be
the subject of another article. Kourouma’s most recent
publication, Le Grand Livre des proverbes africains,38
which appeared just a month before his death, will certainly shed light on this important component of African
thought and literature. I look forward to reading it.
IV
Other examples of mistranslated words occur in both
texts, but misunderstood concepts, also evident in both,
are arguably more serious. Here are two examples, both
from the first chapter, in which key aspects of West
African culture, the culture Kourouma was so intent on
representing, do not come across clearly.
The sora begins his tale with the story of Koyaga’s
father, one of the so-called Paleonegritics who originally
lived in isolated communities in the mountainous regions
ranging from Senegal on the west to Sudan. Neither
translator has understood the interesting habitations of
these montagnard people, who, according to Kourouma,
lived in fortins. These fortins, or little forts, were not villages but individual circular, walled compounds, either
scattered across the landscape or more or less clustered
to form a village. Each compound housed not a clan or
tribe but usually one adult male and his extended family:
his several wives, their children, and possibly some other
adult relatives. Centuries ago, to escape the depredations
of slave-trading groups coming from the north and south,
these people left the plains and took refuge in the mountains. There they built their various versions of easily
defended walled compounds, either clustered or dispersed.39 Thus, when the French had to subjugate these
people “fortin par fortin,” it meant one family at a time
— a difficult and dangerous matter. Here is one phrase
that shows the translators going astray:
Chaque chef de famille vit dans son fortin ...
67
CC: Each head of a family lives in his fortified
village ...
FW: Each clan lived in a walled village ...
JS: Each head of a family lives in his little fort ...
Not understanding “fortin” leads to confusion in
translating “chef de famille” and renders other lines less
comprehensible. The subsequent phrase “sans organisation sociale,” (with no social organization) doesn’t
entirely make sense if the people lived in a village as
commonly conceived. To further emphasize the autonomy of each family, Kourouma goes on to say that the
authority of the “chef de famille” (the “head of the family,” and not the “chieftain” [FW], or “chief” [CC])
extends no farther than he can shoot an arrow. Both
translators missed the clues.
As the tale of the Paleo montagnards (also called the
naked men) continues, a lack of cultural understanding
causes CC and, to a lesser extent, FW to botch one of
Kourouma’s favorite devices: the fateful results of mistranslation. To get the episode right, the translator must
know that throughout West Africa, the wrestling match
has for centuries been a favorite sport.40 Kourouma, ever
the willing translator of his own culture, explains that the
most admired man among the naked men is “l’évélema,
le champion de luttes initiatiques” (the évélema, the
champion of initiatory wrestling matches) and that
Tchao, Koyaga’s father, was such a man. The story continues: The First World War is going badly for the
French; they need to beef up their army and decide to
recruit Africans from the colonies. They tell the griots,
who often served as messengers and translators, to tell
the Paleos, the naked men, that they are needed to fight
in the war and will be paid. The griots understand the
French to say that they need hero wrestlers, because
“Malheureusement, dans le langage des montagnards,
c’est le même vocable qui dit bagarre, lutte et guerre.”
(Unfortunately, in the language of the montagnards the
word for fight, wrestling match, and war is the same.)
When Tchao, the champion wrestler, hears the message,
he volunteers, thinking he will go beyond the seas to participate in some huge world championship of wrestling.
Only in the trenches of Verdun does he discover the difference between wrestling and war.
Kourouma uses “lutte, luttes initiatiques, champion
de lutte.” CC never once uses the words “wrestle” or
“wrestlers,” substituting “fighting,” “combat,” “hand-tohand combat,” and “hero fighters,” which lead to this
vague phrase: “Tchao learned the difference between war
and hand-to-hand combat ... .” FW is inconsistent, using
68
“wrestler” initially and then switching to “combat of initiation,” and “fighter”; ultimately, however, he gets the
semantic quid-pro-quo in this key phrase right:
FW: ... in the language of the mountain people,
to wrestle, to fight and to wage war share the same
word.
CC: ... in the language of the mountain people,
the same word means ‘brawl,’ ‘combat,’ and ‘war.’
CC leaves out “wrestling” entirely, thus missing the
point.
V
I’m acutely aware that translation is a perilous business,
with each word, phrase, and sentence presenting an
opportunity for creative interpretation but also error.
Probably no translation can be said to be perfect, and the
versions I suggest in this paper are no exception. But the
point I want to make is that translators who work in cultural areas outside their expertise cannot simply rely on
instinct; they are obligated to do rather extensive preliminary research. Both CC and FW seem to have been lax in
this regard. That said, I think that FW’s translation is the
better one because it is easier to read — its vocabulary is
better and its sentences more graceful. CC includes an
Afterword that is informative with regard to Kourouma
himself but misleading or incomplete on the subjects of
his style and “Aesthetic Functions of History and
Tradition.” CC’s addition of a glossary might seem helpful, but I don’t believe Kourouma’s intention was to
write a novel that required one. In my view, its presence
casts an unnecessary scholarly, even pedantic, pall over a
splendid work of imagination that stands unequivocally
on its own.
Author’s Note
I wish to thank Michael J. Milton for his careful editing
of this article.
Notes
Ahmadou Kourouma, Les soleils des indépendences
(Paris: Seuil, 1976); Monné, outrages, et défis (Paris:
Seuil, 1990); En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages
(Paris: Seuil, 1998); Allah n’est pas obligé . . . (Paris:
Seuil, 2000).
2
Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals,
trans. Carrol F. Coates (Charlottesville and London:
University Press of Virginia, 2001); Waiting for the Wild
1
Translation Review
Beasts to Vote, trans. Frank Wynne (London: William
Heinemann, 2003).
3
Kourouma, “Il faudrait qu’on parle de nous,” interviewed by Manfred Loimeier, Africulture #54, October
1998. www.africulture.com.
4
Kourouma, “Des écrivains à la dure,” interviewed by
René Lefort and Mauro Rosi, UNESCO Courier, March
1999. www.unesco.org/courier.
5
Makhily Gassama, La langue d’Ahmadou Kourouma
(Paris: Karthala et ACCT, 1995), 21.
6
Ibid., 17.
7
Kourouma, interviewed by Lefort and Rosi.
8
Madeleine Borgomano, Ahmadou Kourouma: Le guerrier griot (Paris: L’harmattan, 1998), 5.
9
Kourouma, interviewed by Lefort and Rosi.
10
Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), 4.
11
J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, The Ozidi Saga: collected and
translated from the Ijo of Okabou Ojobolo (1977; reprint
with a critical introduction by Isidore Okpewho,
Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991, xxix).
12
Gordon Innes, “Formulae in Mandinka Epic: The
Problems of Translation,” in Okpewho, in The Oral
Performance in Africa, ed. Isidore Okpewho (Ibadan:
Spectrum Books, Limited, 1990), 103; Isidore Okpewho,
in Okpewho, op. cit., 113; Kourouma, interview by
Lefort and Rosi.
13
Miller, 223.
14
See Youssouf Tata Cissé, La confrérie des chasseurs
Malinké et Bambara (Ivry: Editions nouvelles du Sud,
1994) and Clark-Bekederemo for some examples.
15
Moussa Sene Absa, Madame Brouette, Productions la
Fête, Inc. and MSA Productions, Canada and Senegal,
2002 (motion picture); Jean Marie Teno, Alex’s Wedding,
Les Films du Raphia, Cameroon, 2002 (documentary
motion picture).
16
Kourouma, “Ahmadou Kourouma, humaniste et homme
de parole,” interviewed by François Xavier, April 14,
2003. www.e-terviews.net.
17
Coates, in Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild
Animals, 267.
18
Pierre Alexander, “Zones culturelles et grandes traditions orales,” in Le Grand Atlas des littératures, ed.
Jacques Bersani (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis,
1990), 92.
19
Cissé, 64.
20
Gérard Dumestre, ed. and trans., La geste de Ségou:
Racontée par des Griots Bambara (Paris: Librairie
Armand Colin, 1979), 37.
21
See the illustration on the dust jacket of the Coates
translation and Pamela McClusky, Art from Africa, Long
Steps Never Broke a Back (Seattle and Princeton: Seattle
Art Museum and Princeton University Press, 2002), 63ff.
A web search will also turn up photographs.
22
Cissé, 63.
23
For photographs of fly whisks in the collection of the
American Museum of Natural History, see
http://anthro.amnh.org.
24
Kourouma, “La nuit du chasseur,” interviewed by
Antoine de Gaudemar, Libération Livres, October 15,
1998. www.liberation.com.
25
Miller, 218.
26
Cissé, 22.
27
Dominique Zahan, Sociétés d’initiation Bambara
(Paris: Mouton & Co., 1960), 157. Mary Kingsley
described a griot she met: “Each minstrel has a song-net
— a strongly made net of fishing net sort. On to this net
are tied all manner and sorts of things, pythons’ back
bones, tobacco pipes, bits of china, feathers, bits of hide,
birds’ heads, reptiles’ headbones, &,& ... ” and commenting on his performance wrote, “Ah! that was something
like a song! It would have roused a rock to enthusiasm.”
Mary Kingsley, West African Studies (1899; with a new
introduction by John E. Flint, London: Frank Cass and
Co., 1964 ), 126–127.
28
www.hachette-livre.com.
29
Guy Atkins, Manding: Focus on an African
Civilization, ed. Guy Atkins (London: Centre for African
Studies, [1972]), 1.
30
Zahan, 160.
31
I don’t think Kourouma simply forgot to include a subject here. In the tale called “The Rescue” (Okpewho,
129), there are lines such as these: “Fired the rifle.”
“Came out snapping.”
32
Kourouma, “Kourouma le colossal,” interviewed by
Marc Fenoli, January 18, 1999. www.libe.com. “I did not
use quotation marks because they would have been too
cumbersome ... it is always the characters who are speaking. Interventions by the narrator are not set off from the
rest, as if I were present at the donsomana, and my
thoughts appear as if in parentheses.” (My translation.)
33
“Le proverbe est le cheval de la parole; quand la parole
se perd, c’est grâce au proverbe qu’on la retrouve.” Alain
Nicolas, “Le cheval de la parole s’emballe,” review of
Kourouma, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages,
L’Humanité, November 6, 1998. www.humanite.fr.
34
See note 16.
35
Alexander, 92.
36
According to Camara Laye, “... la parole, le goût des
palabres et du dialogue, le rhythme dans la parole, ce
69
goût qui peut faire demeurer les vieillards tout un mois
durant, sous l’arbre à palabres pour trancher un litige,
c’est bien cela qui charactérise les peuples africains.” In
Madeleine Borogamo, Ahmadou Kourouma: Le “guerrier” griot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 160.
37
bell hooks, “Language, a Place of Struggle,” in Between
Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural
Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier,
(Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 299.
38
Paris: Presses du châtelet, November 2003.
39
Christian Seignobos, Nord Cameroun, montagnes et
hautes terres (Roquevaire: Editions parenthèses, 1982);
Sory Camara, Gens de la parole (Paris and Conakry:
ACCT/Karthala and SAEC, 1992), 31–34; Kourouma,
“Kourouma le colossal,” interviewed by Marc Fenoli,
January 19, 1999. www.libe.com. A beautiful illustration
of a cluster of such compounds appears in Kourouma’s
book for children, Une journée avec Le chasseur, héros
africain (Orange: Editions grandir, 1999), 18–19.
40
Ugo A. Agada, “Mgba in Ehugbo (Afikpo),” Anu 1,
no. 2 (April 1979): 35–50. Mungo Park saw a wrestling
match in December 1795: “... in the evening [they] invited me to see a neobering, or wrestling match .... This is
an exhibition very common in all the Mandingo countries.” An interesting description follows. Mungo Park,
Travels into the Interior of Africa (1816; reprint with a
preface by Jeremy Swift, London and New York: Eland
and Hipocrene Books, Inc., 1983), 30.
Dr. Owusu-Ansah, the Acting Chief Executive of the
National Sports Council, in Ghana, said in 2002, “... it is
dangerous to kill these traditional games which are part
and parcel of the life of the African.”
http://groups.msn.com/CommonwealthWrestling/
ghanawrestling.msnw.
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Gassama, Makhily. La langue d’Ahmadou Kourouma.
Paris: Karthala et ACCT, 1995.
Gyasi, Kwaku A. “Maintaining an African Poetics:
Translation and/in African Literature.” Translation
Review 56 (1998): 10-21.
___. “Writing as Translation: African Literature and the
Challenges of Translation.” Research in African
Literatures, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer 1999): 75-87.
Gordon Innes, “Formulae in Mandinka Epic: The
Problems of Translation.” In The Oral Performance
in Africa. Edited by Isidore Okpewho. Ibadan:
Spectrum Books, Limited, 1990.
Kingsley, Mary. West African Studies. 1899. With a new
introduction by John E. Flint. London: Frank Cass
and Co., 1964.
Konte, Lamine. “The griot, singer and chronicler of
African life.” In The UNESCO Courier 4 (April
1986): 21-22.
Kourouma, Ahmadou. En attendant le vote des bêtes
sauvages. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998.
Translation Review
___. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote. Translated by
Frank Wynne. London: William Heinemann, 2003.
___. Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals.
Translated by Carrol F. Coates. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Leveau, Christiane F., ed. Chasseurs et guerriers. Paris:
Musée Dapper, 1998.
Miller, Cristopher L. Theories of Africans. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Okpewho, Isidore. “Towards a Faithful Record: On
Transcribing and Translating the Oral Narrative
Performance.” In The Oral Performance in Africa.
Edited by Isidore Okpewho. Ibadan: Spectrum
Books, Limited, 1990.
Park, Mungo. Travels into the Interior of Africa. London
and New York: Eland and Hipocrene Books, Inc.
1816. Reprint with a preface by Jeremy Swift.
London and New York: Eland and Hipocrene Books,
Inc., 1983.
Schulte, Rainer. “The Translator as Scholar.”
Translation Review 64 (2002): 1-2.
Teno, Jean Marie. Alex’s Wedding. Les Films du
Raphia, Cameroon, 2002. Documentary motion picture.
Zahan, Dominique. Sociétés d’initiation Bambara.
Paris: Mouton & Co., 1960.
Jacob, Haruna Jiyah. “African Writers as Practicing
Translators: The Case of Ahmadou Kourouma.”
Translation Journal 6.4 (October 2002): 10104.
http://accurapid.com ISSN 1536-7207.
Kourouma, Ahmadou. “Kourouma le colossal.”
Interviewed by Marc Fenoli. Libération, January 18,
1999. www.libe.com.
___. “Entretien avec Ahmadou Kourouma.” Interviewed
by Héric Libong. Africulture (September 2000).
www.africulture.com.
___. “Entretien avec Ahmadou Kourouma.”
Interviewed by Manfred Loimeier. Africulture
(October 1998). www.africulture.com.
___. “Ahmadou Kourouma, humanist et homme de
parole.” Interviewed by François Xavier. E-terviews
(April 14, 2003). www.e-terviews.net.
N’Koumo, H. “Un Donsomana purificatoire.” Review
of En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages.
www.africaonline.co.ci/AfricaOnline/infos/
fratmat/215CUL1.htm.
Nicolas, Alain. “Le cheval de la parole s’emballe.”
Review of En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages.
L’humanite, November 6, 1998.
www.humanite.presse.fr/journal.
Norbert, Mbu Mputu. “Notes de Lecture,” Titre: En
attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages.
www.congovision.com
Electronic Sources
Gaudemar, Antoine de. “La nuit du chasseur.” Review
of En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages.
Libération, October 15, 1998. www.libe.com.
Translation Review
71
BOOK REVIEW
THE NEW COVENANT. Commonly Called the New
Testament. Vol. 1: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse.
Newly Translated from the Greek and Informed by
Semitic Sources. Translated by Willis Barnstone. New
York: Riverhead Books, 2002. ISBN 1-57322-182-1.
Thalia Pandiri, Reviewer
With this impressive volume, Willis Barnstone has
given us not only a new translation of the four gospels
and the Apocalypse from the New Testament (New
Covenant, henceforth NC) but also an impressive work
of scholarship. Never one to sidestep a challenge,
Barnstone has embraced the task of retranslating and
recontextualizing a canonical and sacred text. Those who
translate canonical texts are likely to be criticized for
producing a far inferior version of an “untranslatable”
original text, even of violating and betraying that text.
Retranslation, when an earlier translation has itself
become canonical and has influenced the language and
literature of the target culture (as did the 1611 King
James translation [KJV] of the Bible or August Wilhelm
Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare for German), can
be even more risky, because there is no longer the justification that the original text needs to be made accessible:
why is a new translation needed? When a sacred text is
at issue, the obstacles are magnified. John Wycliff, in the
fourteenth century, was rewarded for translating Jerome’s
Latin Bible into the English vernacular by having his
bones dug up and burned. William Tyndale (ca.
1494–1536), whose translation (from the Greek and
Hebrew texts rather than the Latin version) of the New
Testament and several books of the Old Testament into
the spoken English of his time was intended to be read
and heard with comprehension and delight by those without Latin and by the illiterate “ploughboy in the fields,”
was attacked viciously as an instrument of the devil by
Sir Thomas More, was imprisoned and in the end strangled by the hangman and burned at the stake. Today’s
translator of the Bible into English runs no such risk, but
he or she must still have good reasons. Willis Barnstone
does, and he presents them clearly and cogently.
“Why a new translation of a biblical text?”
Barnstone asks the question in his preface and provides
unassailable answers. The most obvious is that different
72
ages demand different versions, both because language
changes and because aesthetic expectations change: “old
translations are remote and contemporary ones do not
sing.” [NC p. 16] Among modern translations, Barnstone
has high praise for Richmond Lattimore’s 1962 translation of the New Testament, but it went largely unnoticed
and is now unknown and unavailable. The need for a
new translation is not only aesthetic, however, and if it
were, Barnstone might not have taken on this work and
certainly would have tackled it with less passion. He is
eloquent in his admiration of Tyndale’s “masterful”
translation “which is as austerely plain and beautiful as a
field of wheat,” [NC p. 9] and of the 1611 KJV, which
adopts much of Tyndale’s work with only minor lexical
changes and more standardized spelling and builds on it.
The KJV “with all its recognized magnificence of word,
is plainer, less convoluted than any contemporary version, closer to the Greek text, and more accurate [...].”
“Its authors were genial in deciphering complexity in the
Greek and rendering straightforward English prose. Its
strength and emotional impact lie not only in the bynow-sacred majesty of memorable phrasing but in its
clear and comprehensible speech. No serious writer in
English can afford to ignore its speech, and since its publication few major writers have not been strongly affected by it.” [NC p. 437]
Barnstone’s mission is not only to make the words of
the NC “sing” to a modern ear but also to reverse the
“deracination” of Jesus/Yeshua, the expunging of the
Jewish identity of this rabbi (and probably Pharisee), his
family and followers, and the anti-Jewish redaction that
turned Jesus/Yeshua into a gentile distinct from “the
Jews,” who are made the other, and the enemy. His interest in biblical scripture (canonical, apocryphal, and collateral texts) and in the collection, redaction, translation,
and dissemination of those texts is neither new nor transitory but has remained a constant even as he was writing poetry, memoirs, criticism; translating from a range
of languages and literatures; editing collections of texts
from widely different countries and cultures. A translation of the Song of Songs was published in 1970. In
1984, he edited (and wrote the introductions for) The
Other Bible: Jewish Pseudoepigrapha, Christian
Apocrypha, Gnostic Scriptures, Kabbalah, Dead Sea
Scrolls. The year 2003, one year after the publication of
Translation Review
The New Covenant, saw the publication of an impressive,
and massive, volume coedited with Marvin Meyer, The
Gnostic Bible. Both these recent publications are in
essence heralded by the central section (fully one third of
the entire volume) of his 1993 The Poetics of
Translation, a book that also sets forth his own practice
of translation in a theoretical and historical context.
Some of the material on the history of the Bible and its
translations and on his own theory and practice of translation that appears in The New Covenant comes from The
Poetics of Translation (II. “History: The Bible as
Paradigm of Translation,” subdivided into two chapters,
“Prehistory of the Bible and Its Invisible Translations”
and “History of the Bible and Its Flagrant Translations”).
Because the earlier discussion is more detailed, readers
might wish to revisit the older text while reading the
introductory and concluding material in The New
Covenant.
Not new either is his wish for a translation that does
not “remove Jesus from his Jewishness” (PT, p. 69) deracinating him and his followers and turning them into
gentiles. He tackles the hijacking of the (Jewish) New
Covenant at length in the introductory section of PT,
“Problems and Parables: How Through False Translation
into and from the Bible Jesus Ceased To Be a Jew”) as
well as in the substantial central section of the book.
Earlier translators wished to make the words of the Bible
accessible to the faithful: religious conviction motivated
Jerome, Wycliff, Martin Luther, Tyndale, the scholars
commissioned by King James, and later translators into
different vernaculars, or recent modernizers. Barnstone’s
purpose is to produce a work that will speak to all, that
will serve as both a sacred and a secular text, and in the
process redress old injustices and militate against the
antisemitism built into the Greek New Testament (Kaine
Diatheke) and made worse by Catholic and Protestant
translators. Barnstone’s declared aim is to
provide open reading for Jews, Christians, and all
peoples and faiths or nonfaiths, without exclusion,
without worry whether one is of the elect or the
eternally damned. Jews should be able to read this
book of marvels, of their authorship, about themselves, about some Jews who believe they have
found the Jewish messiah, whose offspring become
known as messianics or Christian. It is imperative to
remember that it is not the gentiles (non-Jews) but a
body of Jews who nourish and first proclaim Yeshua
to be their messiah. [...] This translation — having
made Yeshua’s Judaism obvious through its restora-
Translation Review
tion of Jewish names and its annotation and afterword — should encourage Jews to read the New
Covenant without terror, without fear for their very
lives and souls. If that degree of enlightenment is
accomplished, apart from literary aspirations, this
version will be a happy one. (NC pp. 439-440)
The format of this volume, and a significant proportion of the scholarly apparatus, are intended to educate
readers familiar with earlier authorized versions and, less
crucially, the growing number of readers wholly unfamiliar with the New Covenant. The titles of chapters that
follow the body of the translation suggest the tenor and
scope of Barnstone’s argument: “Anti-Judaism and the
New Covenant”; “How Yeshua Ben Yosef Became
Yeshua the Messiah and Jesus the Christ”; “Historical
Bases of Yeshua’s Life and Death: Journey from Event to
Gospel”; “Christian Jews or Jewish Christians”; “Old
Bibles of the Early Christians”; “Old Covenant or New
Covenant as in Old Circumcision or New Circumcision”;
“The Church Agon Between the Hebrew Bible and the
New Covenant and an Almost Happy Reconciliation”;
“A Gentleman’s Agreement in the Gospels that Jews in
the Yeshua Movement Not Be Perceived as Jews”; “The
Evangelists as Apologists for Rome”; “To Soften the
Blows by Softening the Translation or To Let It All Hang
Out.” In the expansive footnotes that accompany the
translation, Barnstone calls attention to the anti-Jewish
bias and the pro-Roman, pro-gentile propaganda inroduced into the gospels [p. 65 n. 72; p. 214 n. 55; p. 260
n. 193; p. 275 n. 210; p. 281 n. 223). He reminds us that
the Samaritans were Jews, one of the many sects active
in the time of Yeshua. His discussions are erudite, clear,
and a pleasure to read. Even without the notes, just using
the Hebrew/Aramaic names for people and places serves
as a constant reminder that Yeshua was a rabbi (a title
preserved in the Greek New Testament), probably himself a Pharisee, that he and his followers were Jews who
spoke Aramaic in a corner of the eastern Mediterranean
where Aramaic, Latin, and Greek coexisted. Yeshua,
Yohanan (the Dipper), Miryam take a moment of getting
used to, but Barnstone is right to make it impossible to
ignore the context of the narratives and their protagonists.
It may have become clear by this point that, like
Charles Kinbote of Nabokov’s Pale Fire and like
Nabokov himself as translator of Pushkin’s Eugene
Onegin, I am a lover of footnotes. Barnstone has given
us 1018, and I read each one carefully, always with interest and most often with pleasure. Barnstone has worked
73
closely with the koine Greek (the common spoken Greek
of the man in the street when the gospels were written),
and his translation is also “informed by Semitic sources,”
Hebrew and Aramaic. As both a note-fetishist and a
philologist, I appreciated the care with which he chooses
each word, his arguments in support of a particular translation or interpretation. Most of the time, he is right: the
verb hamartano originally meant missing the mark, for
instance not hitting a target with your arrow; in a less
concrete sense, it meant committing an error of judgment, making a mistake. The verb, and the noun derived
from it, hamartia, came to mean a moral error or, in
Christian terms, “sin,” but the older meaning has not
been wholly displaced by the more unforgiving and
absolute Christian usage, even today. Barnstone’s presentation of this information is detailed and cogent.
The reader, however, is then confused by coming
across stock phrases such as “remission of sins” in a
number of passages in the translation. It is not until a
note on p. 334 (John) that he makes clear his (valid)
rationale for treating the Greek word differently in different contexts. It would have been useful to have that discussion earlier. His note on anamartetos, one who does
not miss the mark, someone who is without fault or who
has never made a mistake (p. 333 n. 87, on Yohanan 8) is
right on target and is more accurate than the KJV “he
who is without sin.” The note on hamartolos (p. 221 n.
115) is less helpful: Barnstone appropriately translates
hamartolos as “sinful” [Luke 5] but then gives his standard explanation of the classical hamartia. Nothing
wrong here, but because hamartolos is a word that does
not appear in earlier, non-Christian Greek, the note is a
bit of a red herring.
Particularly felicitous is his discussion of faula (p.
314 n. 44, to Yohanan/John 3:20), which he translates
accurately as “shoddy things” (“For all who do shoddy
things hate the light” is Barnstone’s excellent version;
the KJV has “For every one that doeth evil hateth the
light.”) Interesting too is his note on Loukas/Luke 8, the
story of the demoniac (the man possessed by unclean
spirits, or demons) and the pigs: Barnstone follows
Tyndale in rendering the Greek daimon accurately as
“demon” — as does the Revised — whereas the KJV and
the Jerusalem Catholic versions translate the Greek as
“devil.” Largely philological notes may also provide bits
of interesting if not essential information: in a note to the
parable of the “widow’s mite” or the “widow’s small
copper coin,” we learn that there are 100 lepta, or small
copper coins, in a drachma. Incidentally, the Greek text
has “two lepta,” the plural of lepton. Why Barnstone
74
opts for “leptas” as a plural in his translation puzzles me.
It may be that he wanted a form that would suggest a
plural ending to an English audience, and in any case this
is a minuscule detail.
There are, however, a few points where I think
Barnstone is not without hamartia. It would be superhuman to make no errors of judgment in a work this ambitious, large, and full of detail. There are a few instances
of sloppiness in the notes. On p. 84 n. 118, to Mark 12,
while paraptoma can be appropriately rendered as “false
step,” a falling by the wayside, falling off the path, neither ptoma nor its plural ptomata can ever mean “steps,”
as Barnstone maintains. In this instance, as in a few others, the translation is not adversely affected. But there are
some errors that leave their mark on the translation, and I
would like to single them out precisely because they are
so rare, and I find no fault with the rest of the translation.
First, a clear error. In Matthew 27:16, Barnstone
translates the Greek desmion episemon as “a learned
prisoner.” This seemed strange to me (episemos can
mean “well-known” and “notorious,” and later on “official” or “formal,” but not “learned”). The note is confusing when it comes to the Greek, but it sheds light on how
this error (not sin) occurred. In the note, p. 194 n. 179,
the translator says:
The prisoner’s epithet is from the Greek episemon
(epistemon) which means “learned,” “sagacious,”
“prudent,” or “wise.” In virtually all translations
Barrabas is “notorious,” with the exception of the
KJV, which is neutral to positive, where he is called
“a notable prisoner.”
What has happened is clear: Barnstone has somehow
read “episemon” (an accusative, object case ending in
omicron nu) as the transliterated “epistemon” (in Greek a
nominative, subject case ending in omega nu, which in
this context would be ungrammatical: the object case is
epistemona). It’s an error in reading the Greek, which is
why his translation differs from everyone else’s. Barabba (“son of man”) is well known, whether his reputation be good or bad, but “learned” is not what he is
called.
The next example is a more complex and interesting
mistake. Barnstone argues that a Greek idiomatic phrase
can mean something that it never does, but since he
translates this phrase correctly in another passage, what
is misleading him here seems not to be linguistic inadequacy but rather the desire to have the words mean
something more than they do. Yohanan 8:24 and 8:28, in
Translation Review
Barnstone’s translation, reads “if you do not believe that
I am” … “then you will know that I am.” I was made
uneasy by the translation, but more uneasy by the note,
which strikes me as quite fanciful:
This phrase is normally translated “I am he,” but the
Greek says ego eimi (ego eimi), “I am.” “I am he”
may be implied, or “I am myself,” or the solitary
mystery of “I am.” It is richer to give only what the
Greek gives, “I am,” and then, not bound by interpretation in translation, read the verse creatively. As
for Yeshua’s take on the phrase, in the next line he is
asked the essential enigma, “Who are you?” His
answer is a riddle, which should be respected.
[p. 335 n. 91]
Attractive as Barnstone’s call for creativity is, and correct as it is to say that Yeshua often talks in riddles, the
translation is not only far from “not bound by interpretation” but is based on interpretation in defiance of normal
Greek usage. “Ego eimi” NEVER means “I am” in the
way the translator wants to take it, because Greek does
not use the personal pronoun in this particularly English
way. In fact, it has the emphatic force of “it’s me,” or
“I’m the one,” etc. This is exactly what the beggar says
(ego eimi) in John/Yohanan 9:9, when his sight has been
restored by Yeshua and some say “it’s him” while others
say, “No, but it looks like him.” Barnstone correctly renders the man’s response as “It’s me.”
One last example, this one more of a rare (in fact
unique) lapse in good sense than a conventional mistake.
After wisely saying he will not try to substitute politically correct female gender pronouns for the original gender, given that the age in which these texts came about
was not politically correct, Barnstone has a moment of
weakness — all the more jarring because it is isolated, as
far as I could see — in John (Yohanan) 13:11: “nor is the
sent one greater than he who sent her” [emphasis mine].
The Greek passage has “the [male] slave is not greater
[masculine adjective] than his master, nor is the person
sent (apostolos) greater (masculine adjective) than the
[male] person who sent him.” The whole passage is masculine, the context is masculine, and the intrusion of
what looks like a knee-jerk, politically correct feminine
pronoun is wholly atypical of Barnstone. Perhaps a later
polemical redactor tampered with the text.
And one final complaint: Given how lavish (and at
times pedantic) Barnstone is when it comes to footnotes,
I expected him to explain why in one instance he translates the same problem and mystery word epiousion in
Translation Review
the “Lord’s Prayer” as “daily” (bread) in Matthew 6 and
as “morning” (bread) in Luke 11:2. Not only is the translation different in each case, but there is no comment on
the Greek word, whose meaning is uncertain and which
has sparked a great deal of theological debate. “Epi”
means “on,” “in addition,” “against” (among other
things), and “ousion” is an adjectival form derived from
“ousia,” “essence” or “substance.” We may recall the
murderous riots over “homoiousios” (of similar substance) and “homoousios” (of the same substance) when
it comes to the divine nature of Jesus. What is this “consubstantial” (?) bread in this prayer? What Hebrew or
Aramaic word is being translated? Given how detailed
and scholarly some of the footnotes are, Barnstone’s
silence here is baffling and disappointing.
Essays and footnotes aside, is this translation of the
four gospels and the Apocalypse (one version of many
belonging to a popular genre, as Barnstone points out in
his introduction to this particular Revelation) powerful
enough to become canonical, or at least to be read widely
and remembered? Will it be assigned reading in college
courses — a fate that ensures the dissemination and at
least the temporary survival of a text today as it did in
antiquity? Barnstone (NC p. 26) has said he is aiming for
a version that is “simple and modern, without dropping
into basic English,” that he wants “the English to come
alive in a version close in meaning to the original,” that
he has with delight examined each word afresh as he
chose how to translate the Greek, and that he tried to
carry some of the sound and music of the Greek into
English.
Perhaps, however, no version is likely to be imprinted on the public consciousness if it is not experienced
primarily as a sacred text. I grew up with the Kaine
Diatheke and the Septuagint Greek Old Testament, at a
time when there was no separation between the Greek
Orthodox Chuch and the State in Greece. Religion was a
required subject in school, and for six years, we spent
several hours a week in class receiving philological and
theological instruction. The first year was devoted to the
New Testament, the second to the Septuagint, and then
we moved on to study the words and music of psalms,
chants, tropes, and hymns and eventually the exegetical
texts of the early Church Fathers and of Byzantine theologians. We had to learn the words of the koine New
Testament by heart, but this was not a classroom exercise
alone. Church attendance was both obligatory (for students) and customary even among the not particularly
pious. Biblical texts, whether spoken or chanted or sung,
were experienced not so much through the eyes but pri-
75
marily through the ears and through the mouth.
This is the poetry that is imprinted on me, and
whether or not the text is broken up into lines that suggest poetry is irrelevant to me: I hear it as poetry, and
one phrase will trigger an entire passage in my mind.
During a recent stay on Cyprus over Easter, I was
reminded of this visceral familiarity both in myself and
in others who did not study but who attend churches and
monasteries regularly and with devotion. The Greek
Cypriote community is in many ways more traditional
than urban Greeks in Greece are today, and church attendance is taken much more seriously. My hostess, a zealous frequenter of churches, monasteries, and chapels,
was in her glory during Holy Week, and I accompanied
her, arriving at the very beginning of each service, well
before the majority of more casual worshippers appeared,
and staying to the very end, long after most had taken
communion and left. To my slight surprise, everything I
had ever learned was still there, very close to the surface:
the words, the melodies of the chants. And many around
me who had never studied biblical Greek, which is quite
different from modern spoken Greek, also had all the
words and melodies in their ears, in their minds, and
ready to flow from their mouths. This is what Barnstone
would wish for his poetry; it won’t happen for me, and I
am not sure it will affect others in the way that Jerome’s
Latin version took over the minds and imaginations of
medieval monastics or the KJV left its mark for centuries
not only on Protestants but on lovers of literature. There
is no doubt, however, that it deserves a chance.
Selecting individual passages to compare with the
KJV (the only serious competition, to my mind) seems
arbitrary: Barnstone’s translation reads smoothly when
taken in its entirety, and some of its virtue lies in not
deviating from the KJV merely for the sake of novelty.
To get a sense of what Barnstone does, one needs to
examine passages of some length. With that caveat
lector, here are two well-known poetic moments, from
the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) and from
Apocalypse/Revelation 6:12-17.
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the
76
children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’
sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute
you, and shall say all manner of evil against you
falsely, for my sake.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward
in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which
were before you.
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his
savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth
good for nothing, but to be cast out and to be trodden
under foot of men.
Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill
cannot be hid.
Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel,
but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are
in the house.
(KJV Matthew 5:3-15))
Blessed are the poor in spirit
for theirs is the kingdom of the skies.
Blessed are they who mourn the dead
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the gentle
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are the hungry and thirsty for justice
for they will be heartily fed.
Blessed are the merciful
for they will obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean in heart
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers
for they will be called the children of God,
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake
of their justice
for theirs is the kingdom of the skies.
Blessed are you when they revile, persecute and speak
every cunning evil against you, lying,
because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in the heavens is
huge, and in this way did they persecute the prophets
before you.
You are the salt of the earth.
But if the salt has lost its taste, how will it recover its
salt?
Its powers are for nothing except to be thrown away and
trampled underfoot by others.
Translation Review
You are the light of the world.
A city cannot be hidden when it is set on a mountain.
Nor do they light a lamp and place it under a basket,
but on a stand,
and it glows on everyone in the house.
(Barnstone, NC p. 117)
12. And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and
lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became
black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as
blood;
13. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a
fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a
mighty wind.
14. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled
together; and every mountain and island were moved out
of their places.
15. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the
rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men,
and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves
in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;
16. And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and
hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne,
and from the wrath of the Lamb:
17. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall
be able to stand?
(KJV Revelation 6:12-17)
When the lamb opened the sixth seal I looked
and there took place a great earthquake
and the sun became black like sackcloth of hair
and the full moon became like blood,
and the stars of the sky fell to the earth
as the fig tree drops its unripe fruit
shaken by a great wind. And the sky
vanished like a scroll rolling up
and every mountain and island of the earth
was torn up from its place and moved.
And the kings of the earth and the great men
and commanders of thousands and every slave
and the free hid in caves and mountain rocks,
and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us
and hide us from the face of him who is sitting
on the throne and from the anger of the lamb
because the great day of his anger has come,
and before him who has the force to stand?”1
(Barnstone NC p. 396)
Translation Review
Clearly, Barnstone’s version is more colloquially comfortable for today’s reader, avoiding archaic verb forms,
pronouns, and syntax, replacing words (like “righteousness”) whose currency is not what it was in earlier centuries or which have since acquired different connotations. At times, the substitution seems useful, but perhaps
not always: to me, “wrath” still means something more,
and more superhuman, than “anger,” but I am old-fashioned. Readers less sentimentally attached to the KJV
than I am might well respond differently, and I think
Barnstone’s translation, on the whole, has great merit.
This is a work that must be read by anyone interested in
translation and in the politics of translation, and certainly
no library should be without it. A second volume is
promised, and I look forward to it.
Notes
It is interesting to compare Barnstone’s version with the
1962 translation by Richmond Lattimore, whom he
admires. [The Revelation of John, translated by
Richmond Lattimore. Harcourt, Brace and World, Ltd.
New York: 1962, p. 15]. Lattimore’s version, while it
does not claim to be poetry, is in fact poetic.
1
And I saw when he opened the sixth seal, and
there came a great earthquake, and the sun
turned black like cloth of hair, and all the moon
became as blood, and the stars of the sky
dropped upon the earth as the fig tree casts its
unripe figs shaken by a great wind, and the sky
shrank upon itself like a scroll curling, and every
mountain and island was shaken from its place.
And the kings of the earth and the great men and
the commanders of thousands and the rich and
the strong, all, slave and free, hid themselves in
the caves and the rocks of the mountains, and
said to the mountains and the rocks: Fall upon us
and hide us from the face of him who sits upon
the throne and the anger of the Lamb, because
the great day of their anger has come, and who
can stand?
77
78
Translation Review
CONTRIBUTORS
Martin Blackman is a poet who became fascinated
with literary translation as an intern at Copper
Canyon Press while completing his MFA in Creative
Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.
Through his experience at Copper Canyon he met
William O’Daly and encountered Copper Canyon’s
Neruda series.
Robert S. Dupree is a professor of English and
Director of Library and University Research at the
University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. He is the
author of Allen Tate and the Augustinian
Imagination and co-editor of Seventeenth-Century
English Poetry: The Annotated Anthology. He has
also translated Gaston Bachelard’s Lautréamont and
is the translation editor for the Bachelard
Translations Series published by the Dallas Institute
of Humanities and Culture.
John DuVal’s translation of Cesare Pascarella’s The
Discovery of America received the 1992 Harold
Morton Landon Prize for the Translation of Poetry
from the Academy of American Poets. In 2000
DuVal won an NEA fellowship for his translation of
Adam le Bossu’s Le Jeu de la feuillée. His latest
book of translation is Fabliaux Fair and Foul,
published by Pegasus Paperbooks, which will also
publish his From Adam to Adam: Seven Old French
Plays this fall.
Robert E. Kibler is a professor of English and
Humanities at Minot State University in North
Dakota and a specialist in the literature of Chinese
antiquity. He is also the Director of the Northern
Plains Writing Project at Minot State.
Jože Krašovec is a professor of Biblical Studies in
the Theological Faculty at the University of
Ljubljana and holds multiple doctorates from the
Sorbonne, the Hebrew University, and the Pontifical
Biblical Institute. He supervised the newest
Slovenian translation of the Bible, the Slovenian
Standard Version (1996), and is a member of the
Translation Review
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA).
His studies and articles, which number approximately 300, have been published in several languages,
including Slovene, English, German, and French. In
August 2004 he was elected president, for
2004–2007, of the International Organization for the
Study of the Old Testament. He will be responsible
for organizing that body’s World Congress in 2007,
in Ljubljana.
Thalia Pandiri, a professor of Classics and
Comparative Literature at Smith College, holds a
Ph.D. from Columbia University in Classical
Languages and Literatures, and is a Fellow of the
American Academy in Rome. Since 2000 she is editor-in-chief of the literary translation journal
Metamorphoses. She has published translations of
medieval women’s visionary narratives written in
Latin, and translations of Greek poetry and prose.
William O’Daly is a poet, translator, teacher and
editor who, in addition to recently completing an
historical novel set in China, has rendered some of
the finest English translations of the revered Chilean
Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. In an effort that
spanned fifteen years, O’Daly was the first to translate six of the great poet’s late and posthumous
works: Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter
Garden, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart,
and The Book of Questions. He resides in the
foothills of Northern California with his wife and
daughter.
Thom Satterlee holds an M.F.A. in Literary
Translation from the University of Arkansas and currently teaches creative writing at Taylor University in
Upland, Indiana. His collection of translations The
Hangman’s Lament: Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt
was published by Green Integer in 2003. Individual
translations appear in The Literary Review, Prairie
Schooner, Seneca Review, Osiris, International
Poetry Review and elsewhere. His articles on translation have appeared in Translation Review, Delos, and
The Dictionary of Literary Biography. In 1998 he
received the Translation Prize from the AmericanScandinavian Foundation.
79
Judith Schaefer is a free-lance translator who lives
in Washington, DC, and Buena Vista, Colorado. Her
published translations, all from the German, include
Basic Questions in Paleontology: Geologic Time,
Organic Evolution, and Biological Systematics, by
Otto H. Schindewolf (University of Chicago Press);
Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and their
Paleobiological Significance, by Johannes Weigelt
(University of Chicago Press); A Zoologist Looks at
Humankind, by Adolf Portmann (Columbia
University Press); and Oratorios of the World, by
Kurt Pahlen (Amadeus Press). Translations from the
French consist of many scientific papers and a book
for young people, L’oiseau en cage, by Delphine
Zanga-Tsogo, all unpublished. In progress is
Northern Cameroon: Mountains and Highlands, by
Christian Seignobos.
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80
Translation Review
The Oldest Orphan
BY TIERNO MONÉNEMBO
Translated by
Monique Fleury Nagem
With an introduction by Adele King
Tierno Monénembo was among the
African authors invited to Rwanda
after the 1994 Tutsi-Hutu massacre
to “write genocide into memory.”
In his novel The Oldest Orphan,
Monénembo writes, to devastating
effect a powerful testimony to an
unspeakable historical reality.
$15 paper | $35 cloth
From Africa
New Francophone Stories
EDITED BY ADELE KING
Out of French-speaking Africa
comes the polyphony of new
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important contemporary authors
with stories concerned with the
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in their rich and complex depths the
influence of modern European and
American short-story traditions as
well as the enduring reach of African
myths and legends.
$15 paper | $40 cloth
To Write on Tamara?
BY MARCEL BÉNABOU
Translated by Steven Rendall
As stubborn, as surprising, as artful
as life in its refusal to conform to
a particular literary genre, Marcel
Bénabou’s book is at once a memoir
and a novel, a confession and a
reflection on the prerogatives and
imperatives of writing one’s story.
$19.95 paper | $50 cloth
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