part0008

R uminating about literary translation is an ancient habit. A primary idea has been that the aesthetic of the original should shine in translation. If that old news were remembered, we might stop here. But for more than a century most versions of religious scripture have retained a formulaic, archaizing lexicon. Sadly, when the source is both religious and supremely literary, as are the canons of major religions, the aesthetic disappears in the transfer, whether out of religious faith or academic purpose. The voice, the song, the whisper go unheard. They are not treated as the holy scripture of Homer or Dante.

To maltreat Homer and Dante as the Bible has been hurt would be heresy.

To be sure, religious translation has enjoyed supreme moments. There was the plain and immeasurable beauty of the Tyndale New Testament (1536) and the holy strength of the King James Version (1611). The James, or Authorized, Version was accomplished by some forty-seven scholars, who had been instructed to revise earlier versions. With Tyndale as their main source and genius as their guide, the Authorized’s scholars remade the English language and letters forever. Then, in the shadow and authority of the magnificent King James, came imitations and corrections and a plunge to the pedestrian. Anonymous teams in the Bible industry invented a compromise English, without written or spoken precedent, but the greater readership either held to the Authorized Version or ceased reading the Bible altogether. Early in the twentieth century, the reigning poet and critic T. S. Eliot denounced Gilbert Murray’s wooden versions of the Greek classics, but there was no similar regal figure to demand new, vibrant versions of sacred scripture.

Finally, late in the twentieth century came a change in climate and publishing ventures. There appeared the lovely translations of Richmond Lattimore’s New Testament and Robert Alter’s Genesis and 1 and 2 Samuel. Their example—of great erudition, of fresh fidelity to the complexity, range, and beauty of the word—has proved that Bible translation need not be a weak mirror of a vital past. There is every reason to expect a turn to the larger task of doing the whole Bible in a version, or versions, worthy of the past and our time. “Seamus Heaney’s ‘Beowolf’ rises from the dead,” wrote Richard Eder in his review of Heaney’s new translation the Old English epic. Eder concluded (perhaps prophetically), “Translation is not mainly the work of preserving the hearth—a necessary task performed by scholarship—but of letting a fire burn in it.” 1 Much scholarly translation of religious scripture sees the English version fundamentally as a crib or gloss for reading the source text. These tools are laudable for reading and understanding a foreign page. Facing-page editions are attractive, and the interlinear pony serves as a dictionary for a quick return to the source tongue. Word-for-word versions are a good initial step to converting a foreign page, but verbal misery enters when the student or scholar thinks that the English pony captures the poetry of Horace. An extreme example of literalism is that of Aquila, a second-century proselyte Jew from Pontos, who spent his life retranslating the Hebrew Bible into Greek to replace the Septuagint. He reproduced every word and idiom from the Hebrew and followed Hebrew syntax whenever possible. Of course it was authoritative, sacred, and unreadable. When today the “you” in sacred texts is translated as “you (sing.)” and “you (plur.),” Aquila from Pontos has returned, and he is not singing.

In rendering ancient languages into English, each age has its own speech and demand for a natural reading experience. Most important, if the original is worth transferring to English, it must be rich in sound and sense and sovereign in art. If scripture or myth, it has survived because of its breath and its style. Those prophets who spoke magical words were not literary clods. Not if they were to be heard. To make a work heard again, the translator must re-create that cunning of art. Then a text can move pleasantly from foreign obscurity into the light of our own familiar tongue.

Religious scholars have the ancient tongues to bring meaning to obscure alphabets. That is their enormous virtue and power. Sometimes they are scientists seeking information transfer, a dream of absolute denotation, which is clearly incompatible with the connotative richness of scripture. Sometimes they are scholar artists in the act of translating, which is ideal, as in the instances of Lattimore and Alter.

In contrast to the mainly dim renderings of religious texts, the last century saw classical literatures converted into vital contemporary speech. Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and Robert Fagles, all meticulous scholars, have in distinctive ways given us splendid versions of Homer; and Fitzgerald has carried Virgil’s Aeneid from Latin—the marble language, as Borges called it—into a resonant English poem. They have made Greek and Latin classics thrilling to read. Like the Bible translators, they translate largely the sacred—but the pagan sacred, not the Judeo-Christian. They renew Homer’s bible and Hesiod’s theogony, Aeschylus’s sacramental drama and Sappho’s prayer poems to Aphrodite. Those ancient religions of the Greeks are other, their creators infidel, but that was long ago, and those works that have survived the fires of iconoclasm are no longer a threat or rival heresy. So the translator is free. In contrast to later Bible translations, still profoundly affected by a history of verbal piety, classical literature introduces no authority of faith for its translator poets to contend with and resolve. The Bible did find a way into nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, decisively and influentially, but not through any new versions. It was the venerable King James Version that held sway and passed into the hearts of Blake and Whitman, and Hopkins, Eliot, and Thomas.

There is no single secret of literary translation. In fact there are many ways, and none of them includes the notion of perfection, since perfection presumes a perfect transfer from one tongue to another, of a = b . Language is much too rich, on too many cognitive and aesthetic levels, to be reduced to the perfection of a formula of equality. Only in purely denotive, physically measurable matters—ten acres of land, ten tons of pure iron ore—is exact translation possible and required. Even the slippery notion of “exact equivalence,” fashionable in contemporary translation circles, is deception. The ways of translation have diverse linguistic and aesthetic variables, and for literary purposes these registers, from literal to license, from close to imitation, are the subject of books and essays. As for method, closeness need not be a literary travesty, and great creative freedom may arise from the deepest understanding of the source text. In this the scholar may seem to have an advantage. But the next step is to re-create from the source, and there the writer enters. If the scholar and writer artist are one person, it is ideal. However, even the most erudite non-artist scholar, apart from creating a gloss, can only do harm to the aesthetic of the original. Likewise, if the writer artist disdains knowledge of the source text, the result may be lovely but will not go beyond imitation. A frequent solution is to put scholars and writers together, which is exactly what occurred when the forty-seven men assembled to prepare the King James Version. Some contributed Hebrew, others Greek, others the sonorous word, and the result was that grand collaboration. Sometimes one person is both artist and scholar, as Robert Fitzgerald for Homer and Virgil, and Richard Wilbur for Molière’s verse plays. More commonly an informant and a writer collaborate intelligently as one voice.

Pragmatically, there must be a meeting between the original creator and the writer who re-creates. When Robert Fitzgerald went to Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, where Ezra Pound was imprisoned, and asked the older poet how to render Homer into English, Pound said simply, “Let Homer speak.” It takes great courage to let the original author speak through oneself, the translator. There is always the temptation to listen obliquely or selfishly, and to convert the ancestor’s voice completely into one’s own. Some follow this temptation and produce masterpieces. Chaucer nobly practiced this art when he turned a Boccaccio tale into Troilus and Criseyde and Pound transformed the Chinese poet Li Bai into Cathay . More recently, David Ferry’s translation of Gilgamesh , based on the work of earlier scholars, is a thoroughly felicitous achievement. The other Fitzgerald, Edward of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, in 1859 published his free adaptation from the twelfth-century Persian mystical poet. Selecting certain verses of the sequence, he arranged them in a new order. His work is praised as a classic of English literature, standing on its own, escaping the scarlet-T label of “mere” translation. It achieved the dignity of an original. So too the King James Version has for centuries been popularly received as “original scripture” containing the exact chapter and verse of “gospel truth.”

John Wyclif (1320–84), a master at Balliol College in Oxford, was the first to transfer the gospels into the modern vernacular. With impoverished preachers, who were called the Lollards, he took the gospels in English to the people. In 1401 Archbishop Arundel denounced Wyclif as heretical, fuming, “The pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine.” Arundel further wrote in his report to papal claimant John XXIII in 1421, “This pestilent and wretched John Wyclif, of cursed memory, that son of the old serpent . . . endeavoured by every means to attack the faith and sacred doctrine of Holy Church, devising—to fill up the measure of his malice—the expedient of a new translation into the mother tongue.” 2 The scholar’s death saved him. Some associates were burned alive for their unauthorized vernacular renderings. Wyclif lay safely in the earth until 1424, when his bones were dug up, burned, and thrown into the River Swift.

Étienne Dolet (1509–46) translated the Bible into French, but it was for translating Plato in such a way as to subvert the notion of immortality that he was tried for heresy and taken to the stake. However, in his Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre (1540), he did leave us five important rules of translating, of which the final one applies to all good writing: “The translator must achieve harmonious cadences, he must compose in a sweet and even style so as to ravish the reader’s ear and intellect.” 3

William Tyndale dared to translate the New Testament into English. It is fair to say that he established the English language for the Bible: the King James Version of the New Testament is in large part Tyndale’s phraseology. Tyndale’s prose is clear, modern, minimally Latinized, and with unmatched narrative powers. Everything is fresh, including the use of very common words, unelevated for religious respectability.

For “his cunning counterfeit,” which Bishop Wolsey called “persiferous and most pernicious poison,” he was arrested. It is good to remember that the word once had so much power to disturb. Sir Thomas More ranted alliteratively against this “devilish drunken soul,” who challenged the hierarchy with his English phrases, which the lowest figure of society would receive without mediation of Latin or clergy. In what amounted to a poem of rage, More pronounced that “this drowsy drudge hath drunken so deep in the devil’s dregs that if he wake and repent himself the sooner he may hap to fall into draff that the hogs of hell shall feed upon.” 4 More specifically, More wrote, “Tyndale has wilfully mistranslated the scripture, and deceived blind unlearned people by teaching what he knows to be false. His life is of likelihood as evil as his teaching, worse it cannot be. He is a beast who teaches vice, a forewalker of antichrist, a devil’s limb.” 5

Yet none of these attacks could erase Tyndale’s genius of plain word and humble ideal, nor hush his plea for a candle and a Hebrew dictionary to continue his heretical translations as he lingered for nearly two years in his lightless cell. Tyndale’s hope for a new audience coincided with that expressed by his admired Erasmus, whose work Exhortations to the Diligent Study of Scripture Tyndale translated in 1529:

I wold desire that all women should reade the gospell and Paules episteles and I wold to God they were translated in to the tonges of all men so that they might not only be read and knowne of the scotes and yrishmen But also of the Turkes and the Sarracenes. . . . I wold to God the plowman wold singe a texte of the scripture at his plow-beme. And that the wever at his lowme with this wold drive away the tediousness of tyme. I wold the wayfaringeman with this pastyme wold expelle the weriness of his iorney. 6

Tyndale’s translation of scripture into the everyday English was to expose the faithful to a forbidden text, a deed as heretical as revealing a proscribed gnostic scripture or of affirming the prime authority of Hebrew Scripture, which was routinely called “the corrupt original.” For his crime, on October 6, 1536, William Tyndale was taken to the stake, strangled by the hangman, and burned.

An epilogue to Tyndale’s death and his unfinished labor of Bible translation came with the King James Bible, which accomplished under royal command what William Tyndale courageously desired to do on his own. The preface to the James concludes with a line redeeming not only the vernacular version but the notion of the word as light, the logos as phos, which is also the spiritual essence of gnosticism: “Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light. ”

These little books constituting The Gnostic Bible are a privilege to transfer into English. Though heterogeneous, they have a common flame of belief, a mythical memory of creation and gods, and a poetry that goes through all forms. The purpose of cosmic tale, exegesis, and sermon is to convert you, the ancient and now modern reader; to bring you along to a secret knowledge available within you. These scriptures have a generosity of spirit, and while they are not immune to issuing religious warnings, light overcomes darkness, and spirit rises internally above the confines of its earthly body. These are texts written by passionate philosophers and allegorizing exegetes. In these disparate groups, from China to Provence, who held that we are sparks of light caught in a perishable body, there is a constant excitement of the new and a freedom to invent and to contend with all dark error. The Cathars, the last major gnostic speculation, recalled and reinvented scripture, and their troubadours composed and sang with satiric fun and shocking candor—all while the swords of the Albigensian Crusade (1209) prepared to extinguish them.

Now these ancient heresies, preserved in a variety of versions, survive as profound, powerful utterances. From the first-century Gospels of Thomas and John and the Book of Baruch to the twelfth-century Gospel of the Secret Supper, these copied and recopied and translated scriptures have haphazardly come down to us. Buried by a cliff in Egypt or discovered in an Inquisition archive on the Cathars, they are as fresh as outrage. We have a world literature of cosmogonies and diatribes, delicious songs of Solomon from the Syriac, essential metaphysical speculation, and the cunning whisper of the spirit. They are not ordinary. They are for your eyes to hear.