craven.fr

While we're on the subject of books, I've recently gotten around to finally reading a random find I picked up in a used bookstore in Montreal, a gem of a book called The Translator's Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice. What was so curious about this book was that it was in the Penguin classics series: one of the most mainstream, widespread series of paperback translations out there. A collection of essays by the translators seemed like a fascinating 'behind the scenes' glimpse into what for me had seemed like a very impersonal, corporate series of paperbacks—especially since this book's reason for existing—a tribute to one of the series' long-time editors who had died suddenly—was so personal and 'in-house'. I was amazed that Penguin would even have put out such an obviously non-commercially viable book, and since I was able to pick it up in the bargain bin for nearly nothing, I didn't hesitate to buy it, even though I knew I wouldn't have time to read it anytime soon.

So The Translator's Art has come with me across two continents, sitting unread but always cherished as a prized find. I knew I had found a rare treasure with this book, but I was saving reading it until I could savour it properly, the way an œnophile saves an old bottle of a fine wine until just the right occasion. I mean, just a quick glance over the table of contents was sufficient to see how far up my alley this book was going to be: "On Translating Sanskrit Myths" by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, "Classical Prose at its Extremes" by Walter Hamilton, "Translating 'the Sound of Water': Different Versions of a Hokku by Bashō" by Noriyuki Yuasa, "Translating the Mabinogion and Early Irish Tales" by Jeffrey Gantz... I don't know what they were smoking when they decided to publish this as a Penguin paperback, but I sure love that they did!

At last the time has come for me to read this book, and although I couldn't have known it, this was the most perfect time imaginable in my life for me to have read it. Not only the essays, but the story of Betty Radice's life itself was just as edifying (to be clear, I had never heard of this person beforehand). It is rather like an episode of 'This American Life'—only in this case focusing on an English housewife who kept her translation of Pliny under her bed and worked on it any time she had a spare moment for a period of over ten years as she balanced her love of the classics and Oxford education with the challenges of cooking, cleaning, and changing diapers. There do not seem to be many people who, after university, continue to read the Latin and Greek classics out of a love for them, and so in reading her story I could relate quite a bit.

The same is true of many of the essayists. By and large the essays were smart insightful treatises on translation—some of the most erudite stuff I've read in a long while, in fact. But they also provided glimpses here and there into the translators' lives. Literary translators are pretty much exclusively working out of love for their subject matter. Many are teachers and academics, but others, like myself, had unrelated careers while still cultivating their love for literature and language on the side: W.G. Shepherd makes only one oblique reference to ""my job (I mean that by which I make a living)", when writing about his translation of Horace. I could just picture Betty Radice's doctor, seeing her reading the Odyssey in the original Greek while nine months pregnant, suggesting that she read something 'a little lighter'. Or Barbara Reynolds, who always kept a few pages of the Italian epic Orlando Furioso on a clipboard with her, so she could work on it on the bus, while standing in line—any time she had a spare minute. ("Ask me some questions, love" offered one bus driver, who mistook her for a pollster!)

Many of their attitudes, too, were ones I could relate to. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, in particular, remarked that she once felt as I often do, "I don't want to write a translation for anyone stupid/lazy/uneducated enough to make use of a translation." Peter Green's essay on translating Ovid is a must read for anyone thinking about translating Latin poetry. And Trever Saunders and Walter Hamilton's tales of translating from Latin and Greek were wonderful insights into the kind of life that I sometimes daydream about. And more than one author acknowledged Roy Campbell's aphorism that "translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive" :-) I was lucky in that most of the essays are about translating Latin and Greek, so this fell in perfectly with my recent enthusiasm for improving in these languages.

In sum, this rare little ultra-niche book was even more than I had hoped it would be. A real case of just the right book finding its way to just the right person to be read at just the right time.