Occasionally, the subject of translation became a part of class discussion. This occurred mainly when a student raised a question about a particularly obscure passage in a text, and I had to explain that in some cases translations simply cannot convey the original meaning. I also told my students at the beginning of each semester that they would be reading translated versions of texts written many centuries earlier whose original style and language were very different from modern English. (For students, this seemed to be a bonus for taking a survey of world literature rather than American or English: the translations were modernized and not written in what they called "old English.") For the most part, however, I taught these translated works of literature as I would teach any English-language text; I didn’t feel that translation issues were a vital part of discussion in an introductory world literature course. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my teaching illustrated what a noted translator, Lawrence Venuti, says is generally true of most teachers who teach literature in translation:

...The whole issue of translation is really repressed in the classroom....The problem is that academics who are doomed to reading translations in the classroom don’t know how to read translations as translations. (qtd. in Wechsler 189)

Eventually, however, I became increasingly interested in the differences among translations and in translation as a subject of study in itself. This resulted in part from the number of excellent and highly-discussed translations of ancient works that have been published over the past decade—Robert Fagles’ versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s "Inferno," Seamus Heaney’s best-selling version of Beowulf. A trip to Greece—which, despite my Greek family background, made me aware of how limited my knowledge of modern Greek actually was—also heightened my awareness of the problems involved in translating from one language to another. Finally, I decided that I wanted to study the issues involved in literary translation and find ways to make "teaching translation" a central part of my world literature courses.

With the help of a VCCS summer stipend, I spent several months reading everything I could find on translation theory, which I quickly learned is a complex and rapidly-growing field of study. The biggest problem I faced was to develop limits for my project. I decided to deal with this by focusing on my students and how they would best be served by what I accomplished, rather than letting myself become entangled in the many complex issues involved in creating and evaluating translated literary works.

My first problem was to justify the inclusion of a "translation" unit in ENG 251 (Survey of World Literature I). As is true of any "survey" course, in ENG 251 the amount of time available to discuss the primary readings is much too short, and, as students see it, the amount of reading and writing is quite heavy. I felt that I would need to explain to students why this subject was sufficiently important to justify the amount of time we would be spending on it. And this, of course, meant first justifying it to myself. Fortuitously, I came upon a comment made by the translator Rosanna Warren, as quoted in Robert Wechsler’s Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation. Speaking of students in graduate creative writing courses, Warren told Wechsler:

One thing that surprises me is that young writers...are extraordinarily naive about the act of translation....They think that there’s one right translation. When you start taking one line apart and showing all the different ways it would come, and what would be brought out and expressed by a different set of pressures, they’re quite shaken. And then it goes and makes them think about their own writing. (182)

I was especially taken by Warren’s words, "[it] makes them think about their own writing." I decided that this would become the central purpose of the method I wanted to develop to "teach translation": to enhance student awareness of the ways in which written communication is affected by language choices.

I knew, though, that this reasoning—though I found it extremely important—would have little effect on my students. They would be more receptive, I felt, if I could convince them that comparing translations would make it easier for them to understand the works they were reading. I knew from my own experience that studying different translations of a text is a good way to clarify obscure passages since word choices, word order, and punctuation are all crucial to the "sense" a reader makes of a translated passage. In addition, translations highlight what can be a very comforting realization to students: that there is no one "right" way to read a text. Different translators may interpret key lines in different ways, and the words they choose inevitably communicate different meanings. I concluded, therefore, that I would need to use numerous illustrations and develop exercises that would make students interact with the texts, thereby increasing their understanding of the text rather than simply giving them information about translation.

Designing a "Translation Web Site"

At this point, I decided that I had a sufficient number of reasons to continue with this project. The next step was to develop a way to show students the value of studying a variety of translations.

I began to work on developing a web site that would demonstrate how translation "works." I decided that the site would contain separate "modules" with each focusing on one major work that I teach in the world literature course. The modules would consist of general discussion of translation issues, examples of different translators’ choices in relation to these issues, and exercises that would help my students to analyze and compare translations. I also decided to include on each page of the modules a selection of images that I was able to obtain from a useful—though not free—web site, arttoday.com, to heighten the visual interest of each page.

I began the first module on The Iliad by reproducing brief quotations from well-known translations of The Iliad by Robert Fagles and Richmond Lattimore. Fagles’ version (the one I use in my course) opens with these words:

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses .... (lines 1-2)

In contrast, Lattimore’s translation begins:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.... (1-2)

On the first web page I reproduced the two passages and then have included an exercise asking students to think about "the difference it makes" to begin the poem in these different ways. I also asked them to think of other words that might have been used by the translators to express the same idea. (For extra help, if they should need it, I provided a link to the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus.) My intent is to make students aware that that Fagles’ opening the poem with the word "rage" is significantly different from Lattimore’s opening, which begins with the words, "sing, goddess," and only then introduces "the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus."

The next page of the Iliad module introduces three key translation issues that I refer to as accuracy, sense, and sound. To illustrate the importance of "accuracy," I reproduced the first five lines of the original Greek version of The Iliad (transliterated into the Roman alphabet and easily accessed at the excellent "Perseus" web site) next to a literal translation of the same lines. After this, the translated versions of these lines by Fagles and Lattimore, above, are reprinted. The exercise on this page asks students to consider the "accuracy" of each translation in relation to the ancient Greek version of the text. The exercise points out that the original version of the poem begins with the word "menion" (which can mean "wrath," "rage," or "anger") followed by "aide thea Peliadeou Achileos," which translates literally as "sing goddess of Peleus’ son Achilles." It is obvious that Fagles’ version, beginning with "rage," is closer to the original version than Lattimore’s "Sing, goddess," but Fagles’ is also not literal because it repeats the word "rage," used only once in the original text. Finally, the exercise at the end of the page asks students to compare Fagles’ and Lattimore’s translations of other phrases in the opening lines. The insight I hope students will gain from this exercise is not that one translator is more "accurate" than another, but that all translators are forced to make choices that deviate, to a greater or lesser extent, from the literal translation.

To illustrate this point further, the third page of the module focuses on the importance of what I’ve called making sense. My use of this term derives from reading Seamus Heaney’s comment in the introduction to his translation of Beowulf that he had tried to capture the "sound of sense"—in other words, to create a translation that is meaningful to modern readers even though it might deviate somewhat from the original text. As illustrations of how translations are usually directed toward contemporary audiences, I quote two versions of the passage in Book One of The Iliad where Achilles explodes with anger at Agamemnon, the first as translated by Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century and the second by Stanley Lombardo in 1994. Pope’s begins, " O Monster, mix’d of Insolence and Fear,/ Thou Dog in Forehead, but in Heart a Deer!" while Lombardo’s version is "You bloated drunk,/With a dog’s eyes and a rabbit’s heart!" (lines 236-7). I then point out the obvious reasons why Lombardo’s wording is targeted to a contemporary audience while Pope’s seems more remote. For those students who might prefer Pope’s version precisely because it doesn’t seem modern (and thus better suited to a work of "long ago"), I explain that most scholars believe Homer’s poem was directed toward an audience of his own contemporaries. Thus, using language of our own day is one way that modern-day translators can re-create the immediacy of this experience for a modern audience. Students are then asked to "try being translators" by writing a paraphrase of the Achilles passage (using any wording they want, including slang) for a present-day reader of the poem.

The next page of the module deals with the issue of sound in translation, an especially important consideration when poetry is being translated. I felt this would be a particularly useful way to make students aware of The Iliad’s versification and the problems it poses for translators. As simply as possible, I explain what the term "hexameter" means, how the hexameter line is used in The Iliad, and why this line form is so difficult to reproduce in English. I then give examples from Lattimore’s translation, which uses the hexameter form, to illustrate its differences from Lombardo’s much shorter line, followed by the reasons (based on the translators’ own accounts) for each translator’s particular choice. The exercise that concludes this page asks students to write their own "translation" of a passage from The Iliad in either prose or verse.

On the final page of the module, I attempted to counteract what might be an unintended outcome of this discussion of translation—students coming to the conclusion that since all translations are different, there’s no one version that’s worth reading. In other contexts, I’ve learned over the years that many students believe there’s only one "right" way to interpret a literary work (and if I’ll simply tell it to them, they can pass the course). I became further aware of how this same misconception might apply to translation studies after reading a comment by a language professor, quoted in Robert Wechsler’s Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation:

The only problem with using translation in the classroom, particularly for a group that doesn’t know the original language, is that once they begin to realize how much is in the original language, that has to be in some sense either lost or choices have to be made, to a certain extent it can undermine their enjoyment of the translation, or reading anything in translation. (189-90)

I attempted to address this issue by explaining that although no translation can reproduce the exact experience of reading the original writing, good translations provide pleasure of their own and —above all—are the only means by which most of us will ever be able to know great works like The Iliad.

The second module I developed, on Dante’s Divine Comedy, follows the same pattern as the module on The Iliad. Since in my classes we primarily read the "Inferno" section—which is also the most frequently translated section—I used examples from this section throughout the module. The module begins by explaining that there have been more than fifty English-language translations of the "Inferno" in the past century and many more in the preceding centuries. (In fact, only a few months after I finished the module, a new translation by Robert and Jean Hollander was published.) Excerpts from translations by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dorothy Sayers, John Ciardi, Seamus Heaney, and Robert Pinsky are used to illustrate the key translation issues of accuracy, sense, and sound as they apply to Dante’s poem. For example, the sound section discusses Dante’s use of the verse form known as terza rima and the difficulties faced by translators who attempt to reproduce the exact meter and rhyme of his verse. This is demonstrated by juxtaposing a short quotation from Dorothy Sayers’ terza rima translation (one of the few relatively successful translations that uses this form) with freer translations by John Ciardi and Robert Pinsky, pointing out the benefits and liabilities of each translator’s choice. To highlight the differences in rhyme schemes, I used a variety of color fonts with rhyming words printed in corresponding colors. The exercise at the end of the page asks students to write a poem of their own (on any subject) using one of the rhyme schemes illustrated. For those who might feel uncomfortable writing poetry, I included an alternative topic allowing them to "translate" the quoted passage from Dante in their own words and in the form of either prose or verse.

Outcomes

I asked students in my Fall 2000 ENG 251 (Survey of World Literature I) class to do both translation modules and to send email comments to me as they completed each module. Somewhat to my surprise, since this was a class of average students, the comments I received were unanimously positive. Many of the students said that they enjoyed the examples and images, and that the exercises were "fun" to do. A typical comment was as follows:

I thought it was a great website (very fast! and the pictures were neat!) and everything went smoothly.…The directions were very clear and easy to understand, and your explanations definitely helped me to understand translation better.

Another student said, "... I thought it was a very interesting way to get several perspectives about a single work." My favorite comment (which I’ve reproduced with the original spelling) was the following: "I did the Iliad translation. I just want to tell you that i had fun doing it.... Part c and d of the worksheet was realy fun. I felt like I was a modernday translater."

From my own perspective as a teacher, I found that after students had done the first set of exercises, it became much easier to mention translation issues in class discussions. For example, when students encountered a passage that was particularly difficult to understand, they could understand my explanation of why and how this might be a translation problem. I found that students were also eager to contribute their own experiences with translation problems. One American-born student, who had lived in South America and had read Don Quixote in the original language, mentioned that the experience of reading Don Quixote in English was completely different from her reactions when she read it in Spanish. This led to a discussion of particular words and phrases that might cause problems in comprehension for the English-language reader. Since several of the students in the class had ESL backgrounds, they were particularly happy to realize that even professional translators have difficulty "finding the right words."

I was also pleased to discover that some aspects of literature that I found difficult to teach have become much easier through the use of these translation modules. For example, I concluded years ago that teaching versification was an almost useless exercise in the traditional classroom since most students couldn’t grasp—and didn’t care about—the differences between various metrical forms and stanza patterns. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when a number of students chose to write their own "poems" after they had read the discussion of terza rima in the Dante module and did a credible job of reproducing one or more of the illustrated rhyme schemes.

Long Range Projects

After completing the pilot project on translation, I began to revise the modules on The Iliad and The Divine Comedy with the aim of making them accessible and useful to other teachers and students. The web site—which I’ve called "Translation: What Difference Does It Make?"—contains a "translation home page" which explains the purpose of the site and provides links to the modules. The site also contains a "Resources" page with a list of print and online sources for those interested in doing further reading on translation issues. At the time of this writing, the site contains only the Iliad and Divine Comedy modules, but within a few months I hope to add a module on Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In the future I hope to expand the site to include other works—such as Beowulf and Tartuffe—in the hope of making this web site on translation a resource that will be useful in all courses that rely on translated literature. My site is open to teachers who wish to use it for their classes and may be adapted as needed. It can be accessed at the following URL:
http://www.nv.cc.va.us/home/vpoulakis/translation/home.htm .

I welcome comments and suggestions for its further development.

Works Cited

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

The Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Dorothy Sayers. New York: Basic Books, n.d.

Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

The Divine Comedy. Trans. John Ciardi. In The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition. Vol. I. Ed. Maynard Mack. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.

The Divine Comedy. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In ELF Presents the Divine Comedy: Research Edition. Electronic Literature Foundation. <http://www.divinecomedy.org> 8 August 2000.

Heaney, Seamus. Trans. of Cantos I-III of Dante’s "Inferno." In Dante’s Inferno: Translations by 20 Contemporary Poets. Ed. Daniel Halpern. Hopewell, N.J.: The Ecco Press, 1993.

Homer: Iliad. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994.

The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Alexander Pope. In Homer in English. Ed. George Steiner. London: Penguin Books, 1996. 78-93.

The Inferno of Dante. Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Wechsler, Robert. Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation. North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 1998.