Humboldt, Translation, Film, and The Odyssey

 Wilhelm von Humboldt (born right around the corner from where I live) who gave me the idea (which is certainly not original to me) that the meaning of a work can be thought of as the summation of all the possible faithful translation, or something like that. Humboldt  believed that every language embodies a distinctive Weltansicht (world-view), not merely a different vocabulary. Thus no translation can completely reproduce an original. Yet every good translation reveals some aspect of the original that other translations leave hidden. Therefore, a plurality of translations is not a defect but an approach toward the inexhaustible richness of the work. Barbara Cassin, a Humboldt scholar, beautifully summarizes this by saying that Humboldt preferred "a pantheon, not a church" of translations: that is, a whole collection of worthy translations rather than one canonical version.

   So Homer's Odyssey. Fitzgerald reveals one Homer; Lattimore another; Wilson, Mendelsohn, Lombardo, and Johnston still others. None simply replaces the others. Each lets certain aspects of Homer become visible. Taken together, they approximate the original more closely than any single translation could. In that sense, the "meaning" of Homer is not exhausted by any one English text. It is disclosed through the dialogue among them. 

 That idea is the source of my wanting to connect metaphysics and translation: reality itself may be like the original text. Every philosophical or theological tradition is, in a sense, a translation of reality into a conceptual language. No single translation captures everything but comparing faithful translations enlarges our understanding. (I also got this idea from Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of rival Homer translations in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Chapter Two.) There is also a quotation from Humboldt that points in this direction: "Objective truth always rises from the entire energy of subjective individuality." That is, we approach truth not by eliminating perspectives but through the disciplined interaction of different, faithful perspectives.

    This is one of the reasons I enjoy reading several translations of the Odyssey. I am not merely comparing English styles. I am trying to engage in what Humboldt would regard as a philosophical exercise: allowing the original to disclose itself through multiple faithful acts of understanding. That is my reason for owning four translations, not just to come different translators’ prose. (I was privileged to study Greek for three years – with wonderful instructors at the University of Kentucky classics department, whom I will never forget – before having to change universities for financial reasons. I struggled through Xenophon, Plato, and Herodotus, but had to leave just when I would have had a seminar reading Homer. Bitter! Perhaps a retirement project.)

. . .

   The making a movie of an ancient poetic tale is also a kind of translation, not from language to language but from medium to medium, from the printed word – itself a translation from the original oral tale – into the medium of moving pictures, the carrying of meaning, structure, tone, and experience from one medium into another ("an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems," Roman Jakobson).

    There are major challenges to such an undertaking. Words become images, for example. Homer tells us what characters think and what the narrator judges important. Film must show them through facial expressions, gestures, camera angles, music, and acting, since it can't just tell us things. An inner conflict that occupies twenty lines in Homer may require only a glance or may be impossible to convey fully.

     Narration has to be translated into action. The Odyssey contains long speeches and stories within stories. Odysseus recounts his adventures to the Phaeacians; characters constantly narrate past events. A filmmaker must decide whether to preserve these speeches, use flashbacks, or replace narration with direct action. Curious to see what Nolan does.

     Of course, the poetic language is mostly lost. Much of Homer's beauty lies not simply in the story but in the language itself: similes, repeated epithets ("rosy-fingered Dawn," "resourceful Odysseus"), rhythm, and formulaic expressions. Film has no direct equivalent. It must create beauty through cinematography, music, lighting, and editing.

     Something that disturbs me about all translations from word into film (moving pictures) is that the imagination becomes fixed. Every reader imagines a different Cyclops, Ithaca, or Penelope. A film must choose one appearance, one voice, one face. Something is gained in vividness but something is lost in imaginative openness. I almost feel like this is an colonization of the imagination unless one has first read the work before seeing the movie. Even then the picture/image is so powerful that it can repress one’s own imaginings. This has partly happened to me with the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. Gandalf and Aragorn, I am partly losing my imagining of the characters as they are being replaced with Ian McClellan and Vito Mortgensen’s.

    Of course, it is impossible to keep the pace of the written poem. Homer lingers over scenes, speeches, and rituals that modern audiences may find slow. A film usually compresses, omits, or rearranges events to sustain dramatic momentum. This will be lost.

    I am curious what will happen in the film when ancient values meet modern audiences. The translator of a text decides how foreign or familiar to make Homer. A filmmaker faces the same dilemma. Should Odysseus appear as an authentic Bronze Age warrior, accepting slavery, revenge, and divine intervention? Or should he be reshaped into a modern psychological hero with contemporary moral sensibilities?

      The gods pose special difficulties. Athena's interventions, divine disguises, and Olympian politics are perfectly natural within the poem's world. On screen they can easily appear childish, implausible, or unintentionally comic. Directors must decide whether to portray them literally, symbolically, psychologically, or omit them altogether.

    The background music will have to replace the meter of the poem. The rhythm of dactylic hexameter helped carry the oral performance. Film cannot reproduce this rhythm directly. Instead, music, editing, and visual rhythm become functional equivalents. A huge transformation.

    And every adaptation is an interpretation. Just as every translation emphasizes certain aspects of the original, every film foregrounds particular themes. One director may present The Odyssey as an adventure story, another as a meditation on homecoming, another as a psychological journey, another as an anti-war narrative. There is no neutral adaptation.

 

    There is no such thing as a completely faithful translation or adaptation. Every act of translation necessarily involves interpretation because different languages, and even more radically so, different media, possess different expressive resources. The translator or filmmaker must constantly decide what is essential to preserve and what can or must be changed. It is like a negotiation, as Umberto Eco put it. Thus a film adaptation is not simply based on The Odyssey. It is a new reading of the Odyssey, just as Emily Wilson's translation, Lattimore's translation, and Fitzgerald's translation are different readings of the same poem. One might even say, borrowing Hans-Georg Gadamer's language, that each adaptation is a new fusion of horizons: Homer speaks again, but through the possibilities and limitations of a different art form and a different historical age.

 

 

Works

 

Eco, Umberto. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. Translated by Alastair McEwen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003.

 

(Eco's central claim is that translation is never a matter of producing identical meaning. The translator is constantly negotiating among competing values.)

 

 

Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” On Translation, edited by Reuben A. Brower, Harvard UP, 1959, pp. 232–239.