On Strong Language

A concern to anyone who reads historical fiction with a discerning eye is, of course, diction. The very best historical novels attain a tinge of the past without losing a contemporary, or at least flowing, feel. I don't have the best examples of this, as my favorites have stylized, though not stilted, dialogue. No one would, or ever would have, spoken any of Mary Renault's dialogue in the streets of Athens, but it still doesn't feel forced. A more specific concern is, well, swearing.

Recently I read Michael Curtis Ford's Gods and Legions, which isn't bad in ways that are not worth going into here. The reason I bring it up is that once the emperor Julian swears: "Seize the f****** gates," I believe. In the abstract, I don't mind modern expletives in historical fiction, or even in fantasy, as long as you're presenting your world as one in which people would swear. Obviously if your novel is about hard-bitten soldiers/pirates/sorcerers, they're not going to strive to keep their language acceptable. However, if only one person ever swears, once, the reader is going to think about it.

There's nothing wrong with making your reader think, of course. If fact, I'd say that if you never made your reader think, you've failed a little bit. But there's ways of making people think that are good and ways that are bad. For instance, in this case, this reader is thinking, "Hmm, did you really mean to do that?" Certainly Julian's been associating with soldiers and other rough folk; certainly there's no reason why he couldn't swear. But since it's the only time it happens in the book, it gives the moment an unnecessary weight. It's during a climactic battle, but it's not a point in his characterization that he doesn't usually swear; it doesn't particularly show that he's falling apart, any more than his entire expedition in Persia does.

I think the best way to get swearing into narrative is to have it be what it often is in modern speech: punctuation. Swearing should be unmarked, the way K. J. Parker uses it: she writes fantasy novels in which f****** shows up fairly often as a modifier for missing nails or people who haven't come through on the end of their deal; but, since it is used fairly often, it doesn't have the weight that it does in Gods and Legions. It should either be unremarkable or remarked on, either by the narrative or by a character.

In conclusion, strong language should be used sparingly, but more than once; and of course, only if it makes sense for your setting and character.

Poetry, Myth, and Meaning

Where exactly am I going with a title like that? Nowhere, I think, as global as it seems. This post is about poems that rely on myth to resonate with their audience. I recently wrote a poem, and it's fairly good, I think, but unless you know the myths that come before the Trojan War fairly well, it's utterly meaningless. To take an example less personal, there's George Seferis' "Pentheus."

"Sleep filled him with dreams of fruit and leaves;
wakefulness kept him from picking even a mulberry.
And the two together divided his limbs among the Bacchae.*"

For me, who grew up on Edith Hamilton and the d'Aulaires, this makes perfect sense; to someone who hadn't, it would be just words. Does this mean that it's not a good poem? In general, I believe that a poem should stand alone. One should, of course, know the general time it was written - it's unfair to judge a medieval or ancient poem on modern standards. However, you shouldn't need to know that the author wrote it in prison, for example, for it to make sense. Knowing might add another dimension of meaning, but it shouldn't be all the meaning. Why, then, do I enjoy poems that depend entirely on knowledge of myth?

Some of the answer is, of course, hypocrisy. I don't like knowing things about poets; I'd rather not know that this one was an alcoholic or that one beat his wife. I do like knowing myths. A good poem about a myth amplifies the myth, or shows something new about it; the poem doesn't just repeat the myth. In "Pentheus, " Seferis gives the agency in Pentheus' death to sleep and wakefulness: consciousness and the unconscious, the desire for knowledge and the "sleep" of ignorance. Mulberries are of course related to Dionysus, his destroyer. His poem encapsulates one of the the problems of Euripides' Bacchae in three lovely lines. It's not just a retelling, though it is, of course, wholly dependent on the original play for its meaning.

A good poem should, I believe, stand on its own; yet all poems depend on something for their meaning. To take another classical example, there's H. D.'s Helen in Egypt. There are parts of that, I believe, would have resonance with people who are not versed in classical myth. The line that haunts me is the final line of one of the poems: "Do I love war? Is this Helena?" The names may be unfamiliar, but the introspection that runs through much of the book is clear to anyone who has looked inside him or herself and seen someone different than they thought they would. But to someone who lacks that introspection, what is the strength of the poem?

A non-classical example: I love the following sonnet of Pound's:

If on the tally-board of wasted days
They daily write me for proud idleness,
Let high Hell summons me, and I confess,
No overt act the preferred charge allays.

To-day I thought what boots it what I thought?
Poppies and gold! Why should I blurt it out?
Or hawk the magic of her name about
Deaf doors and dungeons where no truth is bought?

Who calls me idle? I have thought of her.
Who calls me idle? By God's truth I've seen
The arrowy sunlight in her golden snares.

Let him among you all stand summonser
Who hath done better things ! Let whoso hath been
With worthier works concerned, display his wares!

But why? Beauty of language, of course, and the way that to me it's like intricately wrought gold, and the challenge in the speaker's voice. I like the defense of idleness in love, and the medieval feeling of the poem. What is beautiful to me, I know, would seem overwrought to another; Pound depends on others have the same sensibility as he does. There must always be something that catches the reader and draws him in: a strong first or last line, a feeling, a word, a well-placed adjective.

Which brings us back to mythic poems. They depend on their readers' knowledge; but doesn't every poem, to some extent? If you've never thought of growing old and past the reach of people, what does Louise Bogan's Portrait mean to you? If you've never been in love, love poems are flimsy. Poetry is about knowledge and understanding, or at least good poetry: you feel along with the speaker of the poem, and it brings you to a place you didn't know you could be. A good mythic poem does the same; if it doesn't give you a new interpretation of the myth, it shows another possibility, leads you down another path.

--
*translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Sarah Ruden & the Possibility of Translation

Sarah Ruden is, evidently, a rising star in the world of classical translation. This is unfortunate, because she is a bad translator.

I have a professor who loves her and who gave us some of her translation of the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite. She uses colloquial language throughout, though mixed with loftier diction, so that the hymn reads awkwardly. Further, she's decided to use forced iambic pentameter. All these problems are best shown by quotation.

The shining goddess swore a powerful oath
On the head of Zeus, her aegis-holding father,
To stay untouched - and this has had fulfillment.

This is bad for several reasons. First, read it aloud. Although it's certainly metrical, it has no ring - it just doesn't sound good. Second, "fulfillment" sounds like a first attempt to translate a word with an awkward meaning; it's certainly not something that should be in a polished translation. Third, the dash. It creates unnecessary tension in the line. Dashes, if they have a place, should be used to show an explanatory break; this is a direct consequence. Fourth, I'm not sure that something that hasn't happened can be said to be fulfilled. Fifth, translating αἰγιόχοιο as "aegis-holding" rather than "aegis-bearing" is pointless variation.

Ruden has trouble with epithets in general. The compound adjectives Homer is so fond of are incredibly hard to render well in English, but "Zeus - who has such fun with thunder" is a translation that makes Zeus into a child in the playground. The less said about this dash the better. Likewise, "fun-loving" for "φιλομμειδής" makes Aphrodite into a woman writing a profile for a dating site.

She's also anachronistic.

Now Zeus gave his tormentor sweet desire
For a human lover, since it was his purpose
To stamp out her immunity to mortals
And stop her ever bragging up in heaven -
With a sweet smirk, because she loves a good joke -

I dislike most of this; it's awkwardly phrased: "stop her ever bragging up in heaven" doesn't quite work with American English, and "with a sweet smirk, because she loves a good joke" is awkward and too low a register for the Homeric hymns. My biggest problem, however, is with "immunity." I don't think you should avoid any word in English that has a meaning rooted in something the Greeks wouldn't have known about or is specifically Roman - ominous, for example - but "immunity" specifically is a medical term that was discovered in, I believe the 19th century. It sticks out and makes the careful reader stop to think about the word, not what the word is trying to say.

Ruden has also translated Lysistrata. Her colloquial style works a lot better, as Aristophanes is probably writing in something closer to the spoken language than the author of the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite. She has a nasty habit of translating "τέκνον" as "honey", but I suppose that could be overlooked. The problems with her Homeric hymns remain - her lines have no ring and read awkwardly; she translates things with more meaning than they have. For example:

Calonice: Precious, what is eating you?
Why summon us in this mysterious way?
What is it? is it...big?
Lysistrata: Of course.
Calonice: And hard?
Lysistrata: Count on it.
Calonice: Then how could they not have come?

The original is, of course, a penis joke - let no one say that Aristophanes was highbrow! - but the extension into "come" simply isn't present with ἥκομεν, and if it were LSJ would certainly have mentioned it.

Her whole translation is full of anachronisms - on purpose, of course, but what purpose is served by having Calonice say "Darn tootin' right" or Lysistrata "It's such a bitch assembling Attica"? I suppose it's to make it funny, and really, if you ignore her awkward lines, Ruden's translation is quite amusing. But is it really a translation?

A translator's goal, I believe, should be to convey the words and intentions of the original author as best as possibly into another language. If there is more meaning in the translation than in the original, a mistake has been made. And if the diction is distinctly different than the original, a far graver sin has been committed.

So, is it possible to translate comedy? I'm not sure. I'd call Ruden's a version rather that a translation; it gets the idea of Lysistrata across, but not Aristophanes' words. Certainly you couldn't use it if you were going to analyze the text. It does have the bawdiness that the original would have had to an Athenian audience member, and certainly a totally literal translation wouldn't have that resonance to a modern reader. Even in Ruden's translation, she has to footnote to explain jokes.

But why do we translate it, then? It's like attempting to translate a work saturated with references to Harry Potter, Twilight, and Kim Kardashian for an audience 2000 years in the future. The conclusion I've come to is rather disheartening: Aristophanes in a literal translation is perhaps best left to people with a very strong grounding in the Classics - I mean, I find Jack Lindsay's quite amusing - and a translation like Ruden's is better if you want to find it funny. Still, I hesitate to call it a translation, since much of the humor is Ruden's rather than Aristophanes'.

All that is to say, I'm not sure comedy can ever be translated, and that's tragic.

I read U. C Knoepflmacher’s “Literary Fairy Tales and the Value of Impurity,” which is part of a very interesting paper. She starts with contamination in literary fairy tales and ends with how Professor Bhaer from Little Women is analogous to the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. The problem is really that the introduction is much more interesting than the actual body, though the writing is consistently amateurish:

“Any transmitted narrative that is persistently subjected to multiple cultural revisions must necessarily be impure. And any enduring literary form shaped by a sophisticated awareness of its own generic fluidity surely ought to be prized for its sturdiness, adaptability, and capacity to spawn a great variety of offspring.”

That’s the first two sentences. I don’t mind beginning a sentence with “and”; it’s a valid stylistic choice, I think, but not your second sentence, and certainly not that second sentence. It reads as though she'd written a single sentence and then broken it into two.

She makes some good points, like this: “Why should Perrault’s “Cinderella” be, for Dickens, an ur-text that ought to be kept intact, never to be updated or allowed to serve some adult agenda?” Perrault’s is not the first version of Cinderella (some people argue it’s the Rhodopis story), and it’s probably not the “best,” though it is the classic one. Some of her points are, however, somewhat outré: “As his allusion to a female text, Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast,” suggests, it is not that phallic hog, but its taming or castration by powerful women that actually disturbs Dickens.”

My background is, of course, in Classics rather than in English literature, but the basic analysis of texts is the same; it it clear to me when someone is going beyond the bounds of what is reasonable.

This quotation, for example, shows that she has an agenda and wants to make everything conform to it. “In still another “queer” gender inversion, MacDonald forces the hero of “The Light Princess” to adopt the comatose posture of a Sleeping Beauty.” This is an over-extension of the story: it's unreasonable to say that any supine character is or represents Sleeping Beauty. The argument could be made that having the princess kiss the prince to save him is a sort of inversion, but the princess kisses the frog, and Beauty kisses the Beast, so having the princess doing the saving with a magic kiss isn’t really new.

She has a fairly interesting discussion of masculinity and femininity in Perrault, but her arguments are undermined by her writing style:

Cinderella is lucky indeed to have a godmother who just happens to be a fairy. Her girlish beauty and demureness, it would seem, could not by themselves have withstood her stepmother’s sexual domination of a husband too weak to stand up for his biological daughter’s rights. Left to her own resources, this sweet “cinder-breech” could not have acquired the skills to overwhelm gawking kings and princes. She required tutoring by a marraine as knowing as the nurses, bawds, and procuresses so prominent in Basile or in the sexual comedies of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theater.

It’s a mix of decent, if uninspired points: “Cinderella is innocent and emerges victorious through luck” and the whole of the last sentence, which again is reading into the story. The clunky prose aside, the fairy godmother's "knowledge" is not all that important, either in French or English.

It's when she writes about the novel and fairy tales that her paper most loses its thread. She ties together Jane Eyre and To the Lighthouse by the thin thread of "Beauty and the Beast," but since I am innocent of To the Lighthouse, I shall let her analysis stand.

Her argument becomes overextended: “Soon, several gender inversions—all originating in Beaumont’s revisions of Perrault—can take place. Jane first plays prince to Rochester’s Sleeping Beauty when, entering his fiery bedchamber at Thornfield, she rouses a comatose sleeper, not with a kiss, but with a dash of cold water.” Although I hate the term, this is what I'd called reading into it. The only connections between Rochester and Sleeping Beauty is that they both fall asleep.

While her analysis of Jane Eyre is fairly interesting, I feel that again that much of it is a stretch & probably not what Brontë intended, though I suppose one could argue that that doesn’t matter. I am, however, a firm believer in the intent of the author.

Structurally, the paper’s weak: her introduction doesn’t do much introducing – I was blindsided by the section about a. the novel and then b. the children’s story. The paper would, perhaps, have been well-served by editing.

Then follows some truly odd discussion of the Indian/Eastern fairy tale tradition. It’s not odd as in bad, but odd because it came out of nowhere, with, I suppose, Sara Crowe’s father who goes to India as a transition. The Indian tradition is certainly important, and it's unfortunate that "classics" tends to mean "western classics," but this paper does not seem to be the place for it.

The conclusion picks up the thread of the introduction and argues that changes allow the fairy tale to endure, but makes little to no mention of the body of the paper. If the paper had consisted of only its introduction and its conclusion, it would have been very interesting; as it was, it lacked coherence.

I recently reread The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse, which are lovely in their entirety, though not consistently strong. Jack Zipes' translation is, I believe, although without having read the original, very good. Among my favorites of the stories is Flute Dream, especially the very last sentence.

Flute Dream is about a young man who goes off to seek his fortune with only a flute his father gave him. He meets a beautiful young maiden and sings of love; his song continues to be joyful etc, until he gets into a boat with a ferryman who proves to be Death. That sounds kind of awful, I'm sure, but it's really better than that. In any case, the young man learns of the sorrows of the world, and the last line is, in English: "And since there was no way back [to the joyful world he had lived in before his voyage], I continued my voyage into the night."

It is, of course, the English that attracted me to the sentence, but the German is "Und da kein Weg zurückführte, fuhr ich auf dem dunklen Wasser durch die Nacht.” Now my German is, unfortunately, rather lacking, but there's some striking differences. The first is that the English has simply "there was no way back" while the German has "kein Weg zurückführte" - no way led back. The use of a strong verb has more force than "there was no way back." The use of "fuhr" is hard to translate, but perhaps "went on" would convey the fact that it's not a verb that means "continue", but rather "travel, go".

Zipes leaves out "auf dem dunklen Wasser," "on the dark water," and I'm not entirely sure why. My last objection is, perhaps, small: "durch" means "through" rather than "into." But "into" gives a certain sense of purpose: it has a direction. "Through" is directionless. It gives a sense of motion, but not purposeful motion; and further "into" implies that there is an outside. It is part of Hesse's point that there isn't really an outside. The night is the world that we travel through.

I would, therefore, render that last sentence as "And since no path led back, I traveled over the dark water through the night.

I'd been eying "German Literary Fairy Tales" for a while. It's always interesting to see attempts to write fairy tales, because they hardly ever work. A while ago, I read Goethe's attempt, simply called "The Fairy Tale," which is beautiful and strange, but fails as a fairy tale because it's too complicated. It's part of the nature of fairy tales that there are strange things, but that not everything is strange, and very little is symbolic. In Goethe's fairy tale nearly everything is fantastic: the ferryman can't accept gold as a fee, but only living things; the old woman can't carry living things, as they appear heavy to her, but stones are light.

The earlier tales are similar to Goethe's. Novalis' Klinsohr's Tale is evidently a response to the Goethe, but is not nearly as well translated, so it seems weaker. A common theme is the need to reject the worlds show in the stories. In "The New Melusine," the hero marries an elf princess and puts on her magic ring, which makes him minuscule like her, but grows tired of his life as an elf prince, saws off the magic ring with a file, and goes back to his life as a poor layabout. In several of the stories the hero is presented with a choice between a supernatural woman and a good peasant girl. The supernatural woman is invariably the wrong choice.

Two stories stand out: Theodor Storm's "Hinzelmeier: A Thoughtful Story" and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Tale of the 672nd Night." In the first, a young man grows up with apparently ageless parents. He discovers the secret of their eternal youth: his mother is a Rose Maiden, and his father has fallen in love with her and found her, which grants him her immortality. There are certain men who are destined to be Rose Lords, and fall in love with the Rose Maidens, if they can find them. If he doesn't, both he and the Rose Maiden are doomed. Hinzelmeier, distracted by the World and the promise of the Philosopher's Stone meets his Rose twice but cannot keep her. Not only is the premise original, the prose, even in translation, is lovely, and the conclusion sorrowful: Hinzelmeier has failed and has lost his grace forever.

The second story is remarkable not for its plot, since nothing much happens, but for Hofmannsthal's creation of atmosphere. The theme of isolation, too, is apparent, as it often is in his work. The main character of the story, a merchant's son, sees a beautiful servant girl, but her beauty "fills him with longing but not desire" - he is not truly part of the world. At the end he is killed by accident by a horse, and as he is dying he hates everything: there is no revelation.

This, like many of the stories, is not really a fairy tale. The term is used because the authors certainly wouldn't have thought of themselves as writing speculative fiction, even had the term existed.

Both of the stories mentioned in this post are beautiful failures. The first is about loss of grace through blindness, the second about loss of the world through over-abstraction.

I found the Norton Anthology of World Poetry at Strand recently, and have found many things that I've loved, often better in English than in the original. I believe that that might be because the translations chosen are often very free. The translators aim for beauty more than for fidelity to the original. It is, of course, debatable whether that's a problem or not. In any case, one of the poems that stuck out to me as particularly lovely and also strangely translated was Georg Heym's Die Seefahrer, or The Seafarers.

Here's the original:

Die Stirnen der Länder, rot und edel wie Kronen
Sahen wir schwinden dahin im versinkenden Tag
Und die rauschenden Kränze der Wälder thronen
Unter des Feuers dröhnendem Flügelschlag.


Die zerflackenden Bäume mit Trauer zu schwärzen,
Brauste ein Sturm. Sie verbrannten, wie Blut,
Untergehend, schon fern. Wie über sterbenden Herzen
Einmal noch hebt sich der Liebe verlodernde Glut.

Aber wir trieben dahin, hinaus in den Abend der Meere,
Unsere Hände brannten wie Kerzen an.
Und wir sahen die Adern darin, und das schwere
Blut vor der Sonne, das dumpf in den Fingern zerrann.

Nacht begann. Einer weinte im Dunkel. Wir schwammen
Trostlos mit schrägem Segel ins Weite hinaus.
Aber wir standen am Borde im Schweigen beisammen
In das Finstre zu starren. Und das Licht ging uns aus.

Eine Wolke nur stand in den Weiten noch lange,
Ehe die Nacht begann, in dem ewigen Raum
Purpurn schwebend im All, wie mit schönem Gesange
Über den klingenden Gründen der Seele ein Traum.

And the translation:

We saw the brows of countries, worthy of crowns,
and crimson, too, cut down in the day's demise,
and the rustling crests of forests in their thrones
under the hammering wingbeat of solar fires.

A storm arose to deck the flickering trees
with mourning: burning them off like blood descending
in the distance. Thus from a broken heart the embers
of love flare up before its final rending.

We pushed much farther into the ocean's evening.
Our hands caught fire like a candelabra.
Each vein clear cut, the thick blood eddying
from our fingers, the sun eluding our grasp.

Night fell. Somebody sobbed in the dark. We drifted,
hope gone our of our sails and out of our souls.
We kept a silent vigil on the deck
to unravel the shadows, but our light went dead.

One cloud hovered for a moment in the distance
before night went about its shady business.
It hung there, staining the sky with indigo
like a sweet-voiced dream sounding the depths of the soul.

Now, I like the translation, by Christopher Benfey, a good deal. It is, after all, what drew me to the poem in the first place. There are a couple of places where it falters, on second inspection, on its own. "like blood descending/its final rending" feels forced as a rhyme and as line ends. "Hope gone out of our sails and out of souls" is awkward and would be well served by eliminating the second "out of." "Its shady business" is not in keeping with the tone of the rest of the poem. But on the whole, it's quite lovely, with a couple of outstanding lines.

As a translation of the poem, though, it's not as strong. The "headlands of countries" are not "worthy of crowns,/ and crimson too" but rather "red and noble like crowns." My German is not yet good enough to know the register of "rot" or what it would evoke for a German. It is, though, the unmarked color; "crimson" most decidedly is not. "Crimson" calls up damask and blood, kings and vampires. Calling the headlands "worthy of crowns" demolished Heym's image, which is that the headlands themselves are like crowns; it is an image, rather than an abstraction.

"Under the hammering wingbeat of solar fires," which I like very much, translates "Unter des Feuers dröhnendem Flügelschlag" unexactly. A literal translations would be "under the booming wingbeats of the fire;" why is "solar" added to the fire? I am not sure that that is what was intended; if it is, it is subtler to leave it out, as Heym himself did.

"Our hands caught fire like candles." Thus Heym. Benfey: "like a candelabra." again, a much higher register than the German. A Kerze is a simple household object; a candelabra is a furnishing, and an old-fashioned one at that.

"Und wir sahen die Adern darin, und das schwere/ Blut vor der Sonne, das dumpft in den Fingern zerrann." A very literal translation "And we saw the veins in them [our hands], and the thick/blood, in front of the sun, melt away dully in our fingers." The image is a clear one: the men on the ship hold their hands up to the sunlight, seeing the sun shine though the flesh. And Benfey: "...Each vein clear cut, the thick blood eddying/ from our fingers, the sun eluding our grasp." The lines are, perhaps, more overtly "poetic;" but the everyday beauty of Heym's conceit is gone. The sun in the original is a glorified lamp, an agent rather than the object of the men's grasp.

"Hope gone out of our sails and out of our souls" is particularly unjustifiable because it doesn't translate anything. The line is "Wir schwammen/ Trostlos mit schrägem Segel ins Weite hinaus," "we swam/ desolate with oblique sail into the distance," lovely on its own. This entire stanza is particularly lacking: "We kept a silent vigil on the deck/ to unravel the shadows, but our light went dead" barely translates "Aber wir standen am Borde im Schweigen beisammen/ In das Finstre zu starren. Und das Licht ging uns aus." Where Benfey has "unravel" the German reads "stare into." There is no conceivable reason for this change. Further, Benfey makes the last line into a single sentence, losing the fatality of "Und das Licht ging uns aus."

The last stanzas have little to do with each other. They touch at points, but Benfey's translation conveys a feeling very different from that of Heym's original, though I am happy to note that "sounding the depths of the soul" is fairly close to what Heym wrote.

Further, the first three stanzas of the translation rhyme ABAC; the last two do not at all. While I appreciate the difficultly of translating rhyme, I believe that consistency is important; if the rhyme cannot be maintained, it should not be attempted. (Heym rhymes ABAB all the way through.)

Is this a good translation? It depends on what you want from a translation. It is, quibbles aside, a good poem in English, as the original is a good poem in German. And perhaps that's all that's important - that the quality of the poem is preserved, and perhaps some of the ideas, as in the Renaissance English translations of the ancients. However, it seems that Benfey attempted a more literal translation (except in the last stanza, which only touches upon the German). On that account he has failed - he changes images, he alters the feeling of the poem by, for example, using 'crimson' for Heym's 'red.'

Benfey's main failing is a tendency to use the ostentatious (crimson, candelabra), where Heym has the discipline to limit himself to the everyday and to use the abstract where Heym is strongly rooted in the concrete.