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The Latin review everybody is talking about is close to my heart: my public face as a medievalist* is largely as a translator, & I have lots of opinions in the task as an art and a proficiency....
*In that anybody knows or cares who I am... :)
*In that anybody knows or cares who I am... :)
In OE translation especially, proficiency is deemed enough, & myriads of translations are produced with NO new insights. Only repeating "truisms" of a field shot through with misprision & bad faith (imperially, racially, religiously)
A great example of this is the famous line from the "Wanderer": "Wyrd bið ful ared!"
VERY few translations do anything contrary or new with that line. Almost none.
VERY few translations do anything contrary or new with that line. Almost none.
DESPITE, good work done to challenge the notion of wyrd as FATE (& all its glurgy Germanic implications) or on the meaning of "arædan" (not a common word, means read everywhere else it appears). Even the concept of the elegy itself or what kind of resolution the poem urges.
The trajectory may show that translators of OE have been skittish of trying new ideas & go for what scholars won't fault them for. So no new knowledge is produced.
And, finally, and you know I'm going to say this, but the standard translation style is wack. Style and poetry are suppressed for outdated ideas about OE voices (which prob. mostly to conform to 19th c ideas about what religious writing should sound like)
Accuracy is only one concern, and Venuti teaches us OVER AGAIN (what medieval people knew & loved) that it is impossible, and faith is only one of the concerns at play.
So yes, training is essential, and the perfect balance of calor verbis and context, but also being comfortable with interpretation as a vital aspect of the task. Daring to interpret.
I would like to push back however on the privileges that implies: that translation is a task that only an older, well-established scholar can afford to do. Absolutely I reject that.
We need translations for a new world.
We worry about language (& should) but rarely use it to free ourselves & our field.
We worry about language (& should) but rarely use it to free ourselves & our field.
That's all: that's the tweet
