Translating Thucydides

Abstract

Translating Thucydides JEREMY MYNOTT Ihave recently finished a new translation of Thucydides for the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought.1 Prompted by that experience, I have been reflecting on Thucydides as a voice with contemporary “relevance,” and reflecting also on the ways in which a translation can and should affect our sense of this. It was very striking to me when starting this project to see how little other recent translators of Thucydides have had to say about the problems involved in their endeavors. After all, it takes years of quite hard work to translate a text like Thucydides, in the course of which one is continually confronting not only particular difficulties in the text but also general questions about what in principle it might be like to produce a good translation of Thucydides. Yet the most translators do in the short prefaces they are conventionally allowed nowadays is to give a brave smile and a wave and say that it has all been really rather difficult but very worthwhile in the end, and then to make just one methodological statement, which is almost formulaic in its recurrence and brevity, to the effect that they have sought to produce a version that is both “accessible to the modern reader and faithful to the original.” There are few hints that there might be any real tension between these objectives or any larger issues raised by them. Now, I suppose the motivation for this reticence is largely an admirable professional modesty about the role of the translator, compared to that of the author who originated the work and the scholar whose task it is to explain and interpret it. But this does risk encouraging a level of naivety in the readership about what it is for something to be a translation, arion 21.1 spring/summer 2013 particularly in a relatively unsophisticated (or monoglot) student or general readership; and this apparent modesty may in the end even imply a certain unconscious presumption, or even arrogance, about the role of the translator as the privileged intermediary in the process and the authentic voice of the author. The American critic Susan Sontag describes her experience as a young woman brought up in the American southwest voraciously reading her way through the world’s literature. She proceeds from American classics to British ones and then, in an almost imperceptible transition, and still reading in English, to the classics of European literature and in particular Russian literature. She knew of course that she was then reading foreign authors, but she says, Had I recognized an awkward sentence in a novel I was reading by Mann or Balzac or Tolstoy, it would not have occurred to me to wonder if the sentence read as awkwardly in the original German or French or Russian, or to suspect that the sentence might have been “badly” translated. To my young, beginning reader’s mind, there was no such thing as a bad translation. There were only translations—which decoded books to which I would otherwise not have had access, and put them into my hands and heart. As far as I was concerned, the original text and the translation were as one. Question: who is the greatest Russian author of the 19th century ? Answer: Constance Garnett.2 And that was just the criticism made by the Russian/American author, Joseph Brodsky, who complained that Englishspeaking readers could barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky because they weren’t reading the prose of either one. They were reading Constance Garnett. I want to suggest by contrast that all translators of Thucydides are unavoidably also interpreters, as Hobbes himself recognized in so describing his translation on his original title page. I will say something about the special difficulties posed by this text and some of the solutions I have adopted. But this will be far from a self-serving exercise. Anyone who translating thucydides 50 has completed a translation of Thucydides will have a lively sympathy with all his or her predecessors, who constitute a very small guild in need of some solidarity, if not an actual support group. And in any case, I want to say...