The Duty to Translate: Was: Re: Notitia Dignitatum

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Dec 2 08:06:33 EST 1998


To: TonyProst at aol.com
From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
Subject: Re: The Duty to Translate: Was: Re: Notitia Dignitatum
Cc: Biblical Greek <b-greek at franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Bcc: "Ÿ:List messages Ÿ alias:B-Greek"
X-Attachments:

At 3:53 PM -0600 12/1/98, TonyProst at aol.com wrote:
>Dear Professor Conrad,
>
>	I respect absolutely your vast erudition and deep learning, on 
> which I count
>regularly when I sign on line. With that said, let me say, I find your
>attitude regrettably jaundiced. You are satisfied with the way things are.

In this instance, I think you caught the skeptical tenor of my post as a 
whole and have missed some of the particular points I was trying to make 
about the enthusiastic promotion of a proposition that scholars have a 
moral obligation to translate hitherto untranslated works. It seems to me 
that there are some unexamined assumptions here, and I attempted to call 
attention to some of them in what I wrote yesterday. Let me put some of 
this in the form of questions:

Does every untranslated work in Greek or Latin deserve to be translated 
into a modern language? Is everything that has been written and that has 
survived of such importance that those who can't read Greek or Latin ought 
to have access to it? Given the fact that we know that some of the best has 
not survived (Ovid's tragedy "Medea," Varius' tragedy "Thyestes", scores of 
plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides not included in the schoolbook 
anthologies of seven of each, etc.) and we have good reason to surmise that 
pure chance has preserved a vast amount of what has survived that was 
written antiquity, how are we to distinguish between what is relatively 
important and what is relatively unimportant? Is any discrimination at all 
to be exercised in this matter?

>Fine, don't translate. However, I am not as certain as you that nothing
>remains to be done. I, myself, found what I consider to be a gem, the
>Paraphrase of Nonnos, as a passing reference in a chapter on Christian
>history. It is full of poetry that has been effectively lost for 1500 years,
>beautiful language and interesting literary effects. I think it unlikely that
>I serendipitously chanced upon the only work of merit not rendered into
>English.

I do, in fact, translate, but what I have worked on is authors that have 
been translated by others (in particular Pindar and Catullus) and I am far 
from convinced that my translations deserve publication beyond what I use 
for teaching. Later in your post you talked about the fact that Homer has 
been repeatedly translated and that there are even several recent versions 
of Homer (e.g., Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles) that are highly esteemed. I 
happen to believe that it is precisely these major classics of antiquity 
that most deserve to be set forth into the modern tongues afresh in every 
generation or so--and I think that those equipped to do it are few--because 
they have to be as talented artists in the modern tongue as they are 
competent scholars of the ancient tongue.

Some silly rhetorical questions might illuminate what is at stake: Is a bad 
translation better than no translation? Should everyone who wants to 
translate do it? How much competence in the original tongue and literature 
is enough to enable one to translate? If everything that has survived is 
not equally worth translating, who decides what is worth it and how?

Finally, with regard to Nonnos, about whom I confess to know all too 
little, I have visited your web site, found it very interesting, but 
nevertheless find myself wondering: is Nonnos simply interesting (he is at 
least that, I readily grant) or is he also important? If he is important, 
how or for what is he important? Does he illuminate our understanding of 
the gospel of John, or does he illuminate our understanding of how the 
gospel of John was understood in the fifth century? Perhaps one of the more 
curious questions is this: why are you relying upon an edition more than 
100 years old for your Greek text of Nonnos? If Nonnos really is important, 
it would seem to me that getting someone to work on an up-to-date critical 
text might be more urgent than translating one that old.

In sum, the concerns I raised in my post yesterday were not meant to 
express any complacency with the way things are nor to discourage the 
efforts of those who want to translate the untranslated; they were chiefly 
a suggestion that a moral imperative to translate the untranslated works of 
antiquity deserves some thought prior to its issuance.

I have been reminded by this that a couple decades ago it was urged that 
classical scholars ought to turn their research away from Homer and 
Aeschylus and Sophocles and Vergil and Horace and focus upon the more 
obscure Hellenistic figures like Dionysius Skutobrachion. Some of that has 
in fact been done, but not an awful lot. The authentic classics will 
continue to be classics and will continue to be the major focus of 
scholarship and new translations. And while it may very well be that some 
authentic gems have been slipped through the cracks, it behooves those who 
discover them to bring them to public attention.

Finally, I think this is an inappropriate forum for discussion of this 
topic; I don't know that we've offended any list-members with it (other 
than each other? ;-)  ), but our concern here is really with Biblical 
Greek, and I'm not sure how many of our subscribers may feel this 
discussion misplaced in this forum.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad at yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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