Mammon and the Black Goddess by Robert Graves
Tidings of the Port Act were received by the Bostonians with most extravagant tokens of resentment. The text of the Act was printed on mourning paper with a black border and cried about the streets as a 'Barbarous Murder'. The terms 'Whigs' and 'Tories', for want of better, lately being intro?duced into America (the former covering those who favoured the action of the Bostonians, and the latter those who con?demned it as turbulent and unwarrantable), a regular per?secution of the Tories throughout New England now began. These Tories were for the most part people of property and education, descendants of the first settlers; but their barns were burned, their cattle driven, their families insulted, their 1 louses broken into, and they themselves forced either to quit or starve. 'A Tory,' the Whigs held, 'is one whose head is in England, whose body is in America, and whose neck should be stretched.'
The most recent of my historical novels, They Hanged My Saintly Billy?Billy being Dr William Palmer, the poisoner, whose effigy I tried ineffectually to release from the Chamber of Horrors at Mme Tussaud's Wax Works? was written in the newspaper style of the 1850s and contained a good deal of race-course and hospital slang.
Here is a report from a former medical student, an ussociate of Dr Palmer's:
'Tell me more,' he says, handing me an uncommonly good cigar and igniting it for me.
'Well,' I said, 'it's this way. My "chums", as they call them?selves, are sad dogs; very sad dogs indeed?though what the significance of "sad" in this phrase may be, I'm sure I don't know. They are, in point of fact, confoundedly gay, so gay as to be perfect bores. The summum bonum of their happiness seems to consist in strolling along the Haymarket or Regent Street of an evening, clad in ruffianly overcoats, smoking foul black cigars, and peering under the bonnet of every poor little dressmaker or milliner making her solitary way home, wearied after a day's toil, and weighted down by a heavy oilskin-covered wicker basket. They call it a lark to ogle the unfortunate girls and put them out of countenance?I call it blackguardedly. Then, when the shops are closed, and they have refreshed themselves at some public-house bar with copious draughts of half-and-half, they call it a lark again to march arm-in-arm, four or five of them, down quiet streets and shouting "Lullaliety!" at the tops of their voices.'
This period-style comes easily enough to whoever soaks himself in the contemporary literature and impersonates the characters. But what sort of English should be put in the mouth of an ancient Greek or Roman? Here we reach a more difficult moral problem. In my two Claudius novels, I relied on extant specimens of Claudius's literary style: his Latin speech about the Aeduan fran?chise and his Greek letter to the Alexandrians; besides numerous conversational fragments quoted by Suetonius, Dio Cassius, Seneca and others. Suetonius records that Claudius wrote 'ineptly' rather than 'inelegantly': the easy Alexandrian Greek which he used for his historical works will have come more naturally to him than polished Ciceronian Latin. I tried to reproduce the effect:
My tutor I have already mentioned, Marcus Porcius Cato; who was, in his own estimation at least, a living embodiment of that ancient Roman virtue which his ancestors had one after the other shown. He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about. He boasted particularly of Cato the Censor, who of all characters in Roman history is to me per?haps the most hateful, as having persistently championed the cause of 'ancient virtue' and made it identical in the popular mind with churlishness, pedantry and harshness. I was made to read Cato the Censor's self-glorifying works as textbooks, and the account that he gave in one of them of his campaign in Spain, where he destroyed more towns than he had spent days in that country, rather disgusted me with his inhumanity than impressed me with his military skill or patriotism.
In my novel about Count Belisarius, the sixth-century a.d. Byzantine general, I had to think in a less conver?sational and inept but equally fluent Greek, modelled on Procopius, Agathias and other near-contemporary his?torians; and put into the mouth of Belisarius's secretary. This passage tells how Belisarius's wife Antonina, a former Circus actress, won the distinction of being the only woman in history ever to unfrock a Pope:
The Pope Silverius himself came to my mistress secretly, and said to her?I was present?'Most Virtuous and Illus?trious Daughter, perhaps you will be able to persuade the victorious Belisarius, your husband, to give over his unwise intentions. It seems that he is intending to stand a siege in our Holy Rome, which (though abundantly blessed by God) is the least defensible city in the world, and in twelve hundred years of its history has never successfully stood a long siege. Its circuit walls, as you can see, are twelve miles in length and rise from a level plain; it is without sufficient food for its many hundred thousands of souls, and cannot easily be provisioned from the sea?as Naples, for instance, could be. Since your forces are insufficient, why not return to Naples and leave us Romans in peace?'
My mistress Antonina replied: 'Beloved of Christ, Most Holy and Eminent Silverius, fix your thoughts rather on the Heavenly City, and my husband and I will concern ourselves with this earthly one. Permit me to warn your Holiness that it is to your advantage not to meddle in our affairs.'
For The Isles of Unwisdom, a novel that describes an abortive Spanish expedition to the Solomon Islands in 1598, I based my style on an account written by the Chief Pilot, a Portuguese named Quiroz; and used an old-fashioned nautical English with sufficient Spanish flavour to remind the reader in what company he was sailing. After the Admiral's lamentable death his wife, Dona Ysabel, took personal command of the fleet:
The savages were indeed remarkably white: and so closely resembled Spaniards in shape and feature that the Captain of Artillery felt shame that his wife should see them stark naked, and sent her below at once. 'If they were monkeys,' he said, 'or African negroes, it would be a different matter; but it is shameful even for a married woman to be confronted by such indecent sights.' Dona Ysabel and her sister, however, hung over the poop-rail and watched the scene below without even a flutter of their eyelids. The men were of graceful build: tall, muscular, clear-skinned, with good legs, slender fingers, the best teeth that ever I saw, and long curly hair, some of it very fair and arranged in fantastic coils and plaits. 'God's death!' I heard the Colonel cry. 'If these are the men, their women must be beautiful indeed!'
The main problem of translation into English, an extraordinarily pliable language, will always be finding the level of diction that comes closest to the original. I have translated from five different languages, and con?sider French the simplest to handle because, even though Frenchmen occasionally rebel against their strait-laced academic style which hardened in the seventeenth century, plus ga change, plus c'est la meme chose. A translator must let French take its own course: that is to say, he must imagine the author harnessing our bar?barous English to his own inveterate elegance of speech. Here is a passage from my translation of George Sand's Un Hiver a Majorque-.
In the ruins of a monastery, two strangers met by the calm light of the moon. One appeared to be in the prime of life; the other, though bent beneath the weight of years, happened to be the younger of the two. Their encounter made them both tremble, for the night was dark, the road lonely, and the Cathedral clock tolled the hour with slow and mournful strokes.
The bent stranger spoke first. 'Whoever you may be, sir,' he said, 'you have nothing to fear from a man so weak and crushed as myself. You can take nothing from me, either. I am poor and destitute.'
'Friend,' replied the other, 'my only enemies are those who attack me and, like you, I am too poor to fear robbers.'
'Then, brother, why did you start so at my approach?'
'Because, like all artists, I am somewhat superstitious, and mistook you for the ghost of one of those departed monks on whose shattered graves we are now treading. And you, friend, why did my approach equally startle you?'
'Because, being very superstitious, like all monks, I took you for the g
This Anglo-French makes, I hope, inoffensive sense. It would have been wrong to mix vintages by translating George Sand into the crisper English style of her near- contemporary Dickens, perhaps as follows:
Two strangers met by moonlight in the deserted ruins of a Spanish monastery, just as a cathedral clock began dismally tolling the hour. Both started back in alarm. The younger of the two, who seemed crushed by years of suffering, spoke first.
'I do not know who you are, sir, but you have nothing to fear from a poor broken creature like myself; or I from you, since I am not worth robbing. . . .' Etc., etc.
Other ventures in translation raised a new problem: namely, had I any right to disguise an author's foibles, follies and clumsinesses, or to omit a large part of his perhaps admirably sustained, but no longer endurable, rhetoric?
English translators, from King Alfred forward, have always felt free to deal how they please with their texts. John Skelton, in his early-sixteenth-century version of Diodorus Siculus, is a good example of this. He did not, as a matter of fact, translate Diodorus's own Greek, but only Poggio's Latin abridgement, which he then ex?panded for the pleasure of Henry VIII's courtiers. Here is a passage from Diodorus's Book iv, Chapter 17?trans?lated by George Booth, three centuries later, in a fairly literal sense:
Then Hercules destroyed the wild beasts in the deserts, and made Africa so quiet and improvable, (which was before full of hurtful creatures), that every part was fit for tillage and plant?ing of fruit-trees; the whole country productive of wine and oil. In short, he so improved Libya (which, by reason of the multitude of wild beasts, was before uninhabitable), that no country in the world afterwards exceeded it for fertility and richness of soil.
This is clumsy writing, but not clumsier than Dio?dorus's. If asked myself to translate the original for ordinary readers, I should (like Poggio) cut out repeti?tions and integrate the sense at half the length:
Hercules then freed Libya, deserts and all, of the wild beasts that overran it; thus reclaiming an immense acreage for farming and fruit growing. In fact, the country has since yielded more wine and oil than any other in the world.
Skelton's readers must have been extraordinarily relaxed; non-religious books in English were few, and time hung always heavy on their hands through the long winter evenings. He could turn Diodorus into courtly entertainment by amplifying him with rhetorical flourishes to twice his original length, and to five times mine:
But Hercules having pity on the miserable depopulation and lamentable destruction of so noble a country, devised the means for to deliver them of this mischief. He animated him?self to pourvey a redress, and by reason of this prudent policy he utterly destroyed all the wild beasts aforesaid and saved the country from all danger of the wild beasts aforesaid. And so all the coast adjacent he set in quiet and made them convenable and commodious to be inhabited, in making the soil apt for to be sown with all manner of grain, to plant and graft all manner of trees bearing fruit, to order their vines and improve the ground with such economical feats of husbandry that the ground was encrassate and enfatted meetly for the fructuous increase of their oils. Thus Hercules destroyed all the wild beasts and worms and so enprospered the region of Libya, that it flourished in worldly felicity and prosperous wealth more than any other realm of our knowledge or experience.
The translator's first problem is: what exactly does the reader need? Is it the literal text, in as faithful an English rendering as possible; or is it something a little more readable? If he needs a literal text, then Booth's version preserves most of Diodorus's felicities and clumsinesses. If he wants mere factual information, laid out in good order for his hasty eye to catch, then give him my version. If he wants fantastic chimney-corner enter?tainment in a rush-strewn mediaeval hall, give him Skelton's.
When my own books are translated into foreign lan?guages, I much prefer to have this done by someone who writes his mother tongue well?that is, someone who thinks clearly?than by an expert on English literature. The clear thinker may make minor errors of translation, but will seldom commit me to a crude, illogical or ludicrous statement. Suppose, for instance, that he were French and I had made Lord Vere de Vaux ride out to the chase on his favourite steed, a flea-bitten grey. . . . He would hesitate to render this son cheval gris ronge de poux. Recognizing that it must be an English idiom, he would consult a dictionary of decent size and find that mouchete describes a horse of that peculiar coat. I never mind my sentences being cut and, some years ago, had only amicable feelings for the Finnish translator of Count Belisarius who wrote: 'I propose to omit three chapters, the contents of which are familiar to every Finnish reader.' And I am grateful to my younger daughter who has just edited a speech of mine for delivery at the Madrid Ateneo and made the English jokes sound Spanish; or, if that proved impossible, provided her own.
I have translated Marcus Apuleius's Golden Ass. He wrote a very ornate North African Latin, parodying the extravagant Greek with which street-corner story?tellers of Miletus in Asia Minor used to impress their simple-minded audiences. William Adlington translated it into comparably extravagant Elizabethan English; and his version is still preferred by the Loeb Classics editors.
Sic infortunatissimae filiae miserrimus pater, suspectatis caelestibus odiis et irae superum metuens, dei Milesii vetus- tissimum percontatur oraculum et a tanto numine, precibus et victimis, ingratae virgini petit nuptias et maritum.
Whereupon the miserable father of this unfortunate daughter, suspecting that the gods and powers of heaven did envy her estate, went into the town called Miletus to receive the most ancient oracle of Apollo, where he made his prayers and offered sacrifice, and desired a husband for his neglected daughter.
Since the stories need no rhetorical stiffening, I have translated them for the general public in the plainest possible English:
Her poor father feared that the gods might be angry with him for allowing his subjects to make so much of her; he therefore went to the ancient oracle of Apollo at Miletus, and after the usual prayers and sacrifices, asked where he was to find a husband for a daughter whom nobody wanted to marry.
This translation had two curious sequels. The Austra?lian government pronounced it obscene, and banished its importation, unaware that Adlington's less intelligible version had been on sale in Australia for a hundred years, and that The Golden Ass, when first printed in the fifteenth century, had been edited by a Catholic bishop. Next, a Stockholm publisher bought the Swedish transla?tion rights.
As a rule, I translate authors for whom I feel a strong
liking: Apuleius, Suetonius, or Homer Once, however,
I rashly offered to translate Lucan's Pharsalia, and hated every minute of it. Lucan had written this as a poem; but when Robert Frost defined poetry as 'what gets lost in translation', he was not referring to literary epics where the poetry is lost before the writing begins. I found the task could be decently undertaken only in prose; even so, to disentangle Lucan's meaning from his rhetorical artifice was most wearisome. He often strained sense almost to breaking point, as when he wrote:
. . . excepta quis morte potest? secreta tenebis litoris Euboici memorando condite busto, qua maris angustat fauces saxosa Carystos et, tumidis infesta colit quae numina Rhamnus, artatus rapido fervet qua gurgite pontus Euripusque trahit, cursum mutantibus undis, Chalcidicas puppes ad iniquam classibus Aulin.
This has been translated in Bohn:
. . . The secret recesses of the Euboean shore thou shalt possess, buried in a memorable tomb, where rocky Carystos straitens the outlets of the sea, and where Rhamnus worships the deity hostile to the proud; where the sea boils, enclosed in its rapid tide, and the Euripus hurries along, with waves that change their course, the ships of Chalcis to Aulis, hostile to fleets.
'Thou' refers to one Appius Claudius, whom the Pythoness at Delphi had ironical
'Appius, you are indeed fated to take your solitary ease in Euboea: by being buried in a sequestered but famous tomb near the quarries of Carystos. It will face across the narrow sea towards the town of Rhamnus in Attica, sacred to Nemesis, the goddess who punishes human ambition. In between lie the so-called Hollows of Euboea, where the sea is disturbed by the rapid, constantly-shifting current from the Straits of Euripus: a current which sets the ships of Chalcis adrift and swings them across to Aulis in Boeotia?that fatal shore where long ago Agamemnon's ships assembled before sailing for Troy.'
Since this is what the passage means, surely it should be so rendered? Why let sentences remain obscure, just because a few Latinists may nod appreciatively at the references to Agamemnon's marshalling of his naval forces against Troy; to the Goddess Nemesis's temple at Rhamnus; and to the asbestos quarries of Carystos?
Footnotes distract the eye and should, whenever pos?sible, be brought up into the text. Here another moral question arises: how far can one's readers be trusted to catch recondite allusions in a foreign language? What, for instance, is the English for Monsieur de Paris Vaura? Should one translate: 'Monsieur de Paris (*Footnote: the Paris executioner) will have him'? Or should one avoid the footnote with 'He's heading for the guillotine'? Or with the more colloquial 'Jack Ketch will get him'? although Jack Ketch used the noose, not the blade? How far can one safely underestimate the general reader's general knowledge?
When translating Alarcon's Nino de la Bola, written in nineteenth-century Spain, I was doubtful whether to re?tain the entire text of this passionate novel, or cut at least thirty pages of sentimental rhetoric that add noth?ing to the story. I cut. When translating the Iliad, I omitted one or two post-Homeric interpolations that spoil the narrative: for instance, the later events at Patroclus's funeral games which had not been announced by Achilles's heralds, and are not eighth-century in mood. And I rearranged the Catalogue of Ships in easily understood groups, according to the peoples, cities and islands that sent contingents. Homer repeats certain formal phrases of which one tires after awhile: