Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘Translators are always being accused of faithlessness,’ boomed Professor Playfair. ‘So what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty? Let us begin with what Dryden wrote about the Aeneid. I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.’ He looked around the classroom. ‘Does anyone here think that is fidelity?’ ‘I’ll bite,’ said Ramy. ‘No, I don’t think that can possibly be right. Virgil belonged to a particular time and place. Isn’t it more unfaithful to strip all that away, to make him speak like any Englishman you might run into on the street?’ Professor Playfair shrugged. ‘Is it not also unfaithful to make Virgil sound like a stuffy foreigner, rather than a man you would happily carry on a conversation with? Or, as Guthrie did, to cast Cicero as a member of the English Parliament? But I confess, these methods are questionable. You take things too far, and you get something like Pope’s translation of the Iliad.’ ‘I thought Pope was one of the greatest poets of his time,’ Letty said. ‘Perhaps in his original work,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘But he injects the text with so many Britishisms that he makes Homer sound like an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. Surely this does not accompany our image of the Greeks and Trojans at war.’ ‘Sounds like typical English arrogance,’ said Ramy...