a response to some theories of translation

For my class tomorrow, I've read some early modern theories of translation presented by Cowley, Dryden, Goethe and von Humboldt. As befits the Renaissance period, most of the authors are discussing translation of classical antiquities--sources like Pindar, Virgil, Homer and Aeschylus. All four of the readings deal with the eternal question of the translator: to what extent does literal faithfulness to the words of the author actually damage fidelity to the text? When (if ever) is a translator permitted to add or omit? How much or how little may a translator make his presence felt?

Cowley faults translators for not making up for the lost excellencies of a translated language with new excellencies of their own; Humboldt advocates translation rooted in a "simple and modest" love of the original, albeit inspiration on the part of the translator is ineluctable; and Goethe makes a fascinating case for the need for coexistent--though not necessarily codependent--forms of translation in order to fully express the potential of the original in another language. All of these ideas, while often contradictory, are deeply compelling; however, the quote that most struck me in terms of my own rather daunting translation project was Dryden's: he expresses his aim "to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age."

Here Dryden provides an emphatic answer to a question that has been dogging even my first cursory attempts to translate Tschernichovsky: the question of register. Rendering speech is a central question in any translated text that contains dialogue, and obviously the problem is front and center when one is translating a play. But the difficulty in deciding what sort of register to render Tschernichovsky in is made more difficult by the linguistic oddity of the text itself. Tschernichovsky's play is no more and no less than an attempt to create lifelike speech in a language that hadn't been spoken in a thousand years. This idea is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he chose to set the play in ancient Israel (Roman Palestine); given the already-stilted quality of the play and its frequent quotation of Biblical and Talmudic texts, I cannot help but wonder what lengths Tschernichovsky would have had to go to to recreate the speech of, say, Odessan fish merchants (something his contemporaries in Hebrew literature attempted - with mixed success, needless to say). The first act of Bar Kochba attempts to depict ancient Israelite life in the tense environs of the Roman occupation; we see a number of Jews (referred to as 'Jew number one,' 'Jew number two,' etc) discussing military matters and then dispersed by Roman soldiers, and in the following scene, we are treated to a whimsical gathering of young virgins atop a mountain, picking flowers in a manner highly reminiscent of the Song of Songs. The dialogue is pure Biblical pastoral; the girls are eventually joined and wooed by Jewish shephers, who recite a long erotic poem that's a fine example of Tschernichovsky's idyllic-erotic verse (among his most famous poems is the very sexy 'Ashtarti Li,' 'My Astarte,' an ode to a Canaanite sex goddess). The scene culminates in an attempted rape of a Jewish girl by a Roman soldier, and the violent response of the Jewish men, who murder the officer and are forced into hiding. (All of which could result in a fascinating discussion of Haskalah writers' attempts to subvert traditional images of Jewish masculinity or lack thereof--but that's for another post.)

How to transmit all this dialogue into English? Is it fair to Tschernichovsky to strip his writing of its intricate tissue of quotations, often no more than two words long? As a speaker of Modern Hebrew, I find myself often amused and perplexed by his word choices--for example, using the archaic חדל(chadal) instead of the more modern עצר(atsor) for 'to stop', and countless such examples. Shall I express this disjunct by using, for example, 'to cease' instead of 'to stop'? --On the other hand, Tschernichovsky was playing fast and loose and inventing as he went along: he had no idea that the Biblical "chadal" would sound tinny to modern Hebrew readers, as he had no guarantee that modern Hebrew would ever develop in the first place as it has -- is it fair to me to archaize his prose, when that wasn't necessarily his intention? And what of the playful dialogue of the shepherds? It seems a shame to render the sexy flirtation of these young men into wooden, stiff, archaic meter, but at the same time it feels dishonest to strip it of its strong association with the Song of Songs. This is an erotic scene whose pulsating eroticism must be transmitted into English - but at the same time the eroticism is uniquely Israelite, and uniquely Hebrew in character. Part of me wants to create a smooth read in English, to make Tschernichovsky speak English like I do,--but the read isn't smooth in Hebrew, and the linguistic project is so odd that a smooth read must have been the last thing on his mind!! I find myself leaning towards von Humboldt's fascinating idea that a translator ought to make his audience feel "the foreign" without "foreignness" (which I presume to mean that stilted clumsiness that often dogs translated works) but Tschernichovsky is a foreigner in his own tongue, a paradoxical, clumsy exile, and I feel like my work as a translator is incomplete unless I convey that as well.

What to do, readers?!
T

blog begins!

This blog will chronicle my journey through the play Bar-Kochba, by Shaul Tschernichovsky, as I try to unravel the strange and exciting threads of his early and highly innovative (and often frustrating and awkward) modern Hebrew.