Lit. Hum. in Real English

In the perpetual struggle to translate the "masterpieces of Western literature" into readable English, recent years have seen some notable advances and unfortunate missteps. Lit. Hum. authorities and enthusiasts should listen up.

Edith Grossman's new translation of Don Quixote (2003) is a vast improvement over other translations of this text, including the 1950 J.M. Cohen translation that Lit. Hum. used until recently and the John Rutherford version in use this year. Grossman, more or less the star of Spanish-English translation in the last 15 years, is best known for her work with Gabriel García Márquez. She imparts something of the lyrical smoothness that she gave to Love in the Time of Cholera to the Quixote, which has hitherto been read in choppy English translations. Demonstrating the confidence that generally characterizes her work in this text, she renders the first line simply as "Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember." Rutherford's more literal phraseology gives, "In a village in La Mancha, the name of which I cannot quite recall," but this is the language of translation, not English (not to mention that Rutherford's translation of "no quiero" as "I cannot" is completely wrong). Grossman's work represents exactly the kind of translation that Lit. Hum. should use--lyrical in English, even when it departs from the letter of the original. It's too expensive to use for Lit. Hum. now, but this is clearly the translation that the Core should adopt as soon as it makes its way into HarperCollins' cheaper Perennial Classics imprint.

Supposedly, more than 50 English translations of Dante have been published since 1900, and several noteworthy translations have made their way onto the market in the past few years. Robert Pinsky's and Ciaran Carson's versions of the Inferno (1994; 2003) are both written in Dante's terza rima rhyme scheme--long considered an almost impossible feat because of the paucity of rhymes in English. The Pinsky, while poetic and unobjectionable, lacks the mysterious emotional force that surfaces in those rare translation masterpieces like John Ciardi's 1954-1970 version of the entire Commedia or W. S. Merwin's 2000 translation of Purgatorio. Carson's translation, a radical rendering in contemporary Irish slang, is fascinating and entertaining--sort of the closest Dante comes to pleasure reading--but completely unusable for teaching purposes. It's not even really a translation; in Carson's Canto 31, Dante hears "the mad ta-ra-ra-boom-di-ay/ of some gargantuan bugle-megaphone." The Ciardi version, which is what Lit. Hum. ought to be using, more faithfully has Dante hear "the shrill note of a trumpet bray/ louder than any thunder."

Instead, Lit. Hum. uses Allen Mandelbaum's Inferno (1980), which everyone agrees is a conservative compromise between literalism and poetry. In Mandelbaum's version of the line in Canto 31, Dante is subjected to "a bugle blast/ so strong, it would have made a thunder clap/ seem faint." This is more like what the Italian says than Ciardi's more beautiful rendering, but Lit. Hum. doesn't need to err that way; literal translations sound awful, and they are absurd in this context. The point is to read these texts in a way that extracts from them the maximum literary force.

Most of these texts have been read in their original language over the course of Western history, and translations that make the texts feel alien do not responsibly represent their reception history. This year Lit. Hum. replaced Robert Fitzgerald's excellent liberal translation of the Aeneid (1981) with Mandelbaum's dry literal one (1971)--a silly and irresponsible choice. Literal translations of Virgilian poetry can't really exist anyway, since he often leaves out verbs or otherwise employs linguistic devices that don't work in English. Early in the Aeneid, Virgil has a complete sentence that asks, "Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?," which means "Such angers in heavenly minds?" Fitzgerald has it as "Can anger black as this prey on the minds of heaven?" and Mandelbaum has "Can such resentment hold the minds of gods?" The Fitzgerald version is more creative and less Latin, but infinitely more English. The "masterpieces of Western literature" deserve to be read in real English.