The Violence of Translation
Alexander Loney, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Classical Languages; Classical Languages Section Coordinator
In The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin writes about the challenge of translation. He writes, “The necessary violence of the translation involves making very subtle and difficult choices.” The kind of translation Baldwin is writing about here is the taking of a story and retelling it in a different medium. His example was taking a written text (Billy Holiday’s autobiography) and translating it into a film. Because these are in different media, they require different ways of telling a story in order to be successful. Film favors the visual over the aural. As Baldwin writes, “A film is meant to be seen, and, ideally, the less a film talks, the better.” In a different example, Baldwin was critical of changes a technical expert had made to a script Baldwin had written to adapt the autobiography of Malcom X to the screen. Some of the changes were aesthetic in nature, owing to the change of medium; others seemed to force the narrative into established patterns and tropes that films made by Hollywood used. In one scene where Malcom X has an awkward interaction at a bar, he nearly winds up in a shoot-out straight out of Western. For Baldwin, such changes were symptoms of a deeper problem—Hollywood could not tell an authentic Black story like Malcom’s or Billy Holiday’s because it always did the wrong kind of violence in the translating.
As I reflected on these challenges of translation, I was led to consider how the work I do as scholar and teacher of ancient Greek and Latin texts also engages in a violence of translation. Baldwin is right that translation always involves violence of a kind. The sort of “translating” I and my students do is different from the sort Baldwin was talking about in adapting a work in one medium to another, but there are also similarities. We translate the words and the stories and ideas they express, which were written in a (dead) language, to our own, contemporary vernacular (usually English). Whenever we do so with a given word (ancient Greek logos, for example), we can select a word in our target language that most closely denotes the same idea or event in a given passage, but we can never fully convey all the connotations of that word in its original context. The dictionary will tell you “speech” might gloss logos, but even if that best fits the particular context of a given passage, any such word will never exhaust the full meaning of logos, whose connotations vary from “rationality,” “word,” “account,” “number,” “value,” “law” to “proportion.” Even to give such a string of glosses vastly simplifies the matter, for it gives the impression that the meaning of a word can be conveyed by merely assembling a list of other words that are partial synonyms for it. But in doing this we never encounter the feel of the original word. That feeling—its connotation—was set by countless individual uses of that word, each of which slightly colors its meaning. Therefore, the full, original meaning of an ancient term is unrecoverable. Often the best we can do is to preserve as much of its original ambiguity and potential as we can. A translation that aims for maximum intelligibility by a contemporary audience (as so many translation now do) will sacrifice a great deal and do greater violence (and violence of the wrong kind) than a translation that strives to retain as much of the original’s distinctness and strangeness as possible.
Does this all seem far afield from the points Baldwin was making? Not as much as you might think. In Baldwin’s examples, the issue at stake is a text written by a Black American whose experience of the world was organized by the patterns of life he or she had inherited. But when it gets translated for mass consumption by Hollywood, it takes on the patterns Hollywood uses to organize experience—e.g., a Western-style shoot-out instead of a more typical Black experience in what Baldwin called “a very hip Harlem bar.” By translating the actions of Malcom and the other patrons in that scene into the genre of a Western, we lose the original connotations of the actions. To be sure, those connotations are not knowable to most Americans today, or even when Baldwin was writing. But the goal of the translator should be to preserve as much of the original feeling as possible, even at the expense of ease of intelligibility. Therefore, as I see it, translators of ancient texts and of modern minority experiences should both strive to retain as much of the original feeling as possible, all the while knowing that to do so fully would be impossible. But, as Baldwin wrote, “it is important that [we] try.”