Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

Who stole me from myself, oh, Lycia, youWho exulted so when beautiful Cynara died,Leaving your beauty unrivalled, where has it gone,What is there left? When Cynara died youngThe gods gave early death to her as a gift,And, Lycia, they gave all your years to youTo give the young men something for them to laughat,Old crow, old torch burned out, fallen away to ashes,I thought I’d got it, I thought we’d got it, Horace and I,and then the next morning, so to speak, I read once againthe Latin of the quatrain in which the wonderful shift ofregisters occurs, and heardQuo fugit venus, heu, quove color? decensquo motus? Quid habes illius, illius,quae spirabat amores,quae me surpuerat mihi,heard that quo … quove … quo, quid and quae and quae,and the pun, or whatever you call it, on venus, so thatQuo fugit venus means both where has your sexinessgone and where has your once-patroness goddess Venusgone to, abandoning you, just like her son Cupid flyingaway, and when I heard the rhymes on venus, motus,habes, and then the anguished, repeated illius, illius, socruelly and, one might say, tragically impersonal, Quidhabes illius, illius, “What do you have left of her, ofher?” and when I thus heard and saw and thus realizedthe intensity of the Horatian organization of what hesaid, I knew the game was up and how my translationhad gone its own way, partly of course because I’m sofar from being Horace, partly because the Latin linguisticresources were doing things my English linguisticresources couldn’t do or didn’t want to do. I wasn’ttranslating, if translating means bringing it over; I wasfollowing, as best I could, the example of what I wasreading, and of course I was missing quite a lot, missing,strictly speaking, all of it. This is, I think, what Frostmeant in his famously misunderstood “The poetry iswhat is lost in the translation.” The exhilaration of havingtried was still there, and of course the humiliation ofnot having gotten it, but also something else, because theact of translation isn’t only an activity of trying to bringit over, leaving the original for dead; it’s also an act ofreading, the most focused and vivid experience of readingthat there is, and that has its own value. Seeing whatthe translation couldn’t get is an intensely pleasurableexperience of coming to realize what the original did get.And that’s where, for me, the original survives.For another example, there’s this from Virgil’sSecond Georgic, which I translated as follows:Worse than winter’sHarshness and the tyranny of the sunAre the buffalo and the deer when they can getIn at the vines and make themselves free withthem;And sheep and hungry heifers feed on them too.The coldest frost, and the most oppressive heatThat weighs down on a thirsting landscape, don’tDo half as much harm as the beasts with theirvenomous teethAnd the scars of their gnawing on the helplessstems.This is the crime, no other, for which the goatIs sacrificed to Bacchus at all the altars,And old-time stage plays first began on suchOccasions, with, in rural villages,Or down at the crossroads near them, singingcontestsAnd dancing on oiled goatskins in the meadows.And indeed, even today, in country places,With lots of laughing, the peasants put on fearsomeMasks made out of hollowed cork, and chantTheir uncouth verses, and, Bacchus, sing theirjoyfulSongs to you, and on the pine-tree branchesHang little amulet faces that sway in the breeze,And so the vines grow ripe and lavishlyBring forth their fruit, and every vale and gladeIs full to overflowing, everywhereTo which the pleased god turns his beautifulface.So, as is right for us to do, we’ll singOur rustic songs in honor of the god,And, taking the goat by the horn, we’ll lead himupTo the sacrificial altar, and afterwards roastThe rich goat meat on spits of hazelwood.Here, in this lavishly anxiously joyful propitiation ofgods and weather and chance that can turn against youanytime at all, it’s knowing that you can’t possibly dowhat one word, oscilla, can do. When you see the lineTranslation Review 11