Why (Re)translation Matters

Paul Reitter discusses the aesthetic and cultural value of “retranslating” classic texts.

By Paul ReitterSeptember 19, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Literary Criticism

WHAT DOES A translator do? She addresses herself to a text written in one language and brings it into another language. What does a retranslator do? The same thing, except that here a restriction applies. You can’t retranslate unless the text you address yourself to has already been brought into the language of your translation, whether just once or many times.

Put like this, the difference between translation and retranslation seems slight. It’s certainly proven easy to overlook, though not in the sense that people mistake retranslations for first translations. Open a retranslation and you’ll likely find in the front matter some claims about how the retranslator went her own way, a feature that’s been around since at least the 17th century. When critics write about a retranslation, about the actual work of the retranslator, we get further comparative framing. But talking about how a retranslation differs from previous translations of a text and talking about how the act of retranslation differs from translation are, well, two different things, and it’s the second one that gets ignored, even in theories of translation. You can understand why: since retranslation is a mode of translation, most truths about translation will hold for retranslation too. Still, retranslation deserves better treatment. Not only does it occupy a central place in the world of translation—Emily Wilson’s rerenderings of Homer are the most-talked-about English-language translations of the past decade—but retranslation also has its own special dynamics and rewards. It works and matters in its own ways.

Part of what draws me to retranslation, for example, is its conversational dynamic. I enjoy the process of engaging with and adding to other takes on a primary text. Since I come to retranslating from literary scholarship, it’s the writing dynamic I know. However, retranslation is also thrillingly unlike literary scholarship—when I retranslate, I join a conversation not by producing a scholarly text about a primary text but rather by producing a new version of the primary text itself.

The conversational dynamics vary with all sorts of circumstances, such as the quality of the existing translations. And, of course, retranslators don’t all approach their work the same way. Some even maintain that they avoid looking at the existing translation(s) of their source text (the text they’re retranslating, that is). But this is often hard to do since the texts that get retranslated tend to be classics, which have an ambient presence. Introducing her 2017 translation of the Odyssey, Wilson recounts a scene from her childhood: at age eight, she played the role of Athena in a school production of the poem that was no doubt performed in English. We can’t say how her rendering of the Odyssey would sound if the text hadn’t been translated into English before 2017 and hers was the first English translation rather than—I don’t know—the 60th. However, Wilson herself has made it clear that she developed one of her signature strategies in response to a common stylistic choice she doesn’t like.

She used “ordinary,” “straightforward,” “largely simple” language because, as she put it, she wanted to “mark the fact that stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric.” Although this line isn’t presented as a statement about how retranslation works, that’s what it amounts to, and it is in fact a striking statement. Wilson isn’t just underscoring that she tried to avoid un-Homeric language, which we would expect her to do; she’s also telling us that, with her translation choices, she attempted to say something about an existing Anglophone tradition of Homer translation. She wanted to produce language that aligns with Homer’s in such a way as to reveal that the language of many previous translators is deeply un-Homeric.

This exchange through retranslation won’t stop anytime soon. Due out early next spring, a new rendering of the Odyssey by the celebrated classicist Daniel Mendelsohn appears to have taken shape, at least in part, as a response to translation priorities that look a lot like Wilson’s. Here is how his approach is described on its publisher’s website: “Mendelsohn eschews the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, focusing instead on the epic’s formal qualities.” Friedrich Nietzsche once said that you can tell a lot about a society by looking at how it translates classic works, and, indeed, retranslation gives us our own version of a classic text—the proverbial “translation for our times,” imprinted with our own conventions and values. But we shouldn’t expect the people who make up a given society to agree about the conventions and values that guide retranslations of foundational texts.

Some magnificent retranslations depend on existing translations directly, using them as vital resources rather than making them into objects of critique. Take August Wilhelm Schlegel’s rendering of Hamlet, which was published in 1797 and stands alongside Martin Luther’s rendering of the Bible in the pantheon of revered German translations. Schlegel was an aesthete’s aesthete: the poet Heinrich Heine memorably depicted him lecturing in kid gloves at the University of Bonn, attended by a liveried footman who refilled his glass of sugar water. And like other German intellectuals of his ilk, Schlegel regarded modern England as a commercialized, “superficial,” mostly “stupid” place with an “impure” language. Hence, he found it hard to devote himself to English, and his command of it was shaky, even though he had a prodigious gift for learning foreign languages—he could read Coptic, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, to name a few. How did Schlegel manage to translate Shakespeare so well when he pretty much refused to write anything in English for fear of embarrassing himself, remarking, in French, that he hadn’t “mastered” it sufficiently for that? He retranslated: he relied on his linguistic brilliance, his gifts as a poet, and existing German Shakespeare translations.

You could say that Schlegel wouldn’t have needed the existing translations if he had just mastered English more completely. But that amounts to saying he wouldn’t have needed the existing translations if he had been a different person with a different outlook, a point that holds for quite a few great authors who flourished as retranslators.

A translation that has become a classic in its own right, like Schlegel’s rendering of Hamlet, creates pressure. Would-be German retranslators of the play know that their efforts will be measured against that standard. Successful previous translations can, however, make for a certain freedom. Where such translations exist, a retranslator knows that her prospective audience has some familiarity with the work she is rendering anew. She doesn’t have to introduce the work to an audience that hadn’t had access to it. So, she can experiment without having to worry quite so much that confused readers will give up after a couple of paragraphs or concerned editors will push her to change course. Perhaps she will be more inclined to do things such as leave some terms untranslated, which is how many lovely words—for example, “cherub”—made their way into English.

But retranslations also undo familiarity. In this, they are like classic works, since many classic works productively defamiliarize, challenging us to rethink established perceptions. The twist here is that, through defamiliarization, retranslations challenge us to rethink our perceptions of classic works. With its traveling salesman who wakes up to find himself transformed into a “monstrous vermin” and then wonders how he will catch his train, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) evokes the strangeness of an everyday form of socialization. However, if you keep reading the novella in the same translation, its strangeness will become familiar. Now a new translation arrives—or, rather, a new retranslation—and it preserves aspects of the German text that the earlier translations missed or didn’t prioritize. The retranslation will make the strangeness of Kafka’s story less familiar—or, to repurpose a phrase that Wilson uses in a different context, “newly strange.”

There’s an old saying that classic works should be retranslated every 50 years or so. It is probably more a call for refamiliarization than defamiliarization: in other words, the thinking behind the saying likely turns on the idea that older translations sound too foreign—on the idea, the old and durable idea, that translations don’t age well. As recently as 2011, Enrico Monti, a scholar of translation, suggested that, whereas “‘originals’ get wrinkles which makes them all the more charming, the age-related imperfections of translations have a definite propensity to render them grotesque.” (Discussions of translation have featured a lot of gendered language and imagery.) But the two classic attempts to theorize retranslation go in a different direction. Writing in the early 19th century, Goethe claimed that only a retranslation can hope to reach the point of achieving true “identity” with a source text. Nearly 200 years later, Antoine Berman developed similar thoughts, speaking of an unsurpassable “grand translation” that can only ever come about as a retranslation.

This teleological approach doesn’t really resonate with me. I prefer to think of retranslation as something more along the lines of an ever-evolving conversation, as being, in part, a conversation in and through translation that should go on for as long as the source text matters. But I appreciate Goethe’s and Berman’s nearly mystical enthusiasm for retranslation and, above all, their efforts to understand how it works. Let the conversation continue.