Translations as Analogies and Wilson's "complicated man"

 

Many apparent paradoxes about translation arise from the mistaken assumption that a translation must either be identical to the original or entirely different from it. There is a well-known (in translation circles at least) Italian saying: Traduttore, traditore – to translate is to betray. A translation betrays the original because it is not identical to the original. If this is the standard, then translation is impossible. In a lecture on her approach to translation, Emily Wilson uses the ship of Theseus to illustrate this paradox about identity through change. The story comes from ancient Greece and is reported most famously by Plutarch in his Life of Theseus. After Theseus returned from Crete, the Athenians supposedly preserved his ship as a memorial. Over the years, as planks decayed, they were replaced one by one. Eventually every original plank had been replaced. This led philosophers to ask: Is it still the same ship? Nothing in a translation of the Odyssey is left from the original and yet it is still referred to as Homer’s Odyssey. But that a translation has nothing in common with the original can’t be right either. Words are equivocal when the same word has two completely different meanings: a bank to deposit money in vs. the bank of a river to picnic on. None of the translations of the Odyssey that I have read are “equivocations” of the original.  The paradox vanished once identity is replaced by analogy. 

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 Translation is a form of analogy, preserving meaningful similarities while accepting unavoidable differences. I would illustrate the concept of analogy by the analogical meaning of words like good. A good knife is sharp; a good argumentative paper is well-written, well-structured, well-argued; a good teacher is someone who knows their stuff, knows how to communicate it, and inspires love for the subject. Good means something importantly different in each of the three uses. But the word is not equivocal; there is a core similarity, something like a thing being good when it fulfills its purpose and is what it should be. Different but in the essential aspect the same. This illustrates analogical meaning. 

   There is also analogical comparison, one thing being understood through comparison with another. To exemplify the logic: Is there a stronger or weaker analogy between analogy between sex worker and massage therapist? Both take money to perform a bodily service – to that extent the analogy is strong. More moderately, both may be self-employed or have a boss. Both may involve emotional response to some degree. More similarities and I could go on. Is the analogy thus strong? That is disputed. The most obvious difference is that the one involves sex, the other doesn’t. Is that of major significance? That depends on how you understand sex. For most of us it is something intimate, private, deeply connected to our subjectivity. It comes with mutual attraction. It comes with obligations like caring about any physical or emotional consequences. Etc. Thus it is not a possible commodity. Thus the analogy is weak. But if it is intelligible that sex means nothing more than a message to someone else, if that is possible (which I strongly doubt), then the analogy would be strong. The disagreement involves deeper conceptual, moral, and worldview differences as well as different people with different life histories. So it is a complex matter. 

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   These different examples share a common structure. In both cases understanding depends upon recognizing similarities within differences. The term "good" applies analogically to different kinds of things because each exhibits excellence appropriate to its nature. Likewise, an analogy such as "a sex worker is like a massage therapist" highlights certain shared features while (arguably) highlighting essential differences. In neither case are we dealing with strict identity or complete unrelatedness. Analogical thinking occupies the middle ground between the two, and in this, I just will assert here, it shows the structure of reality. 

     Translation has the same structure, being neither identical to the original nor unrelated to it. As an analogy, it preserves certain features – deemed essential – while neglecting others deemed accidental or, more painfully, less essential. The question is therefore not whether a translation is the same as the original, but whether it preserves the similarities that matter most, the most essential ones. Which is a question of interpretation. Which is why the translation has to be steeped in the original, its language and world. Has to have “wisdom” in this sense. 

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    An amazing amount of attention has been devoted to Emily Wilson’s  translation of the first line, which I will compare to Richmond Lattimore’s. The Greek adjective polytropos – a rare Greek word that many now know due to this attention – encompasses a range of meanings that no single English word can fully capture: resourceful, versatile, cunning, adaptable, wandering, and difficult to define. Perhaps also it can refer to being tossed around by fate. The word is built on tropos ("turn"), and the poem presents Odysseus as someone who is also turned about by external forces.

   Thus Wilson argues that the word prepares the reader to expect twists and turns (i.e. complexity) from the story that follows: a complicated protagonist in a complicated world. Her "Tell me about a complicated man" loses the literal imagery of many turnings or many ways. But it preserves what she takes to be the essential aspect of Odysseus himself, in addition to his fate: his, well, complexity. The phrase communicates to a modern reader that this is not a straightforward Hollywood hero but a character marked by contradictions, ambiguities, and multiple dimensions. Odysseus is brave and deceptive, loyal and unfaithful, noble and ruthless, and in this respect "complicated" captures something genuinely important about him. Would Homer’s audience have experienced these tensions as tensions? I feel like they might have, but who knows? 

    The cost, however, is that the word loses some of the associations with wandering, turning, and practical resourcefulness that are present in the Greek (these are indicated in other parts of the translation). It also introduces a modern psychological connotation that is not contained in polytropos itself. Here indeed a lot is asked of the reader, namely, to bracket out these modern associations.

   Wilson's choice was also not purely semantic, as I heard her explain in a lecture. She set herself the task of producing a fast-moving six-beat line that would provide modern readers with an experience analogous to the forward momentum of Homer's verse. (This is what I like best about her translation.) Her problem was not simply finding the closest dictionary equivalent of polytropos but finding a word that worked within a larger poetic structure of rhythm, pace, and readability. Indeed, translation choices must satisfy multiple demands simultaneously. Trade-offs are involved. A translator may sacrifice some lexical precision to preserve meter, narrative energy, or emotional impact. Once such constraints are taken into account, Wilson's choice appears less like a simple reinterpretation of a Greek word and more like a judgment about how best to preserve the overall effect of the poem. One can argue about it. One can prefer another solution. It is arguable. It is not an obvious mistake made in the service of ideology in spite of what the culture warriors are preaching about it.  

          Different translators make different judgments about which aspects of this complex meaning are most important to preserve.  Richmond Lattimore's translation, "Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways," attempts to preserve the semantic structure of the Greek as closely as possible. His phrase preserves the sense of multiplicity contained in poly- and hints at the wandering and many-sided character of Odysseus. It has a nice alliteration and rhythm. At the same time, it remains deliberately open-ended. The reader is not told exactly what kind of "many ways" are meant. Are they journeys, strategies, disguises, or traits of character? The ambiguity remains, much as it arguably does in the Greek. The advantage of Lattimore's choice is its fidelity to the range of the original term. Its disadvantage is that many contemporary readers may find the phrase somewhat obscure or merely decorative. 

    I like it. It might be my preferred solution of the four translations I know but that is perhaps because I can fill in the vagueness of the term with my reading of the poem. The risk Wilson takes is giving a more concrete but narrower interpretation of the word. But there is no right or wrong answer as there is in doing a math sum. It is a question of making difficult judgments.

      The difference between these translations comes down to whether the solutions are stronger or weaker analogies to the original. The strength of an analogy depends upon judgments about what is most essential and what is more accidental in the realities being compared. The question is not whether Wilson's phrase is identical to polytropos – an impossible standard – but whether the similarities she emphasizes are more essential than the features she leaves behind. That is the only question, and it is a damn complex question (too complex for the simple-minded culture-war mentality). Translation controversies do often function as philosophical and literary-critical debates in disguise, sometimes heated, exposing competing assumptions about history, morality, politics, textual interpretation, and human nature. That is what makes it so interesting, minus the unfortunate attempt of culture warriors to high-jack it. one of the great things about reading great works is that you can leave all that behind you. What a tragedy would it be if one could not read a translation of The Odyssey without being dragged into a culture war that is almost wholly located in Plato's shadowy cave, i.e., is itself a form of ideology (false consciousness). (True, this false consciousness is a distortion of deeper problems that reasonable people of good will can see differently, just as reasonable people of good will can see the Wilson choice of "complicated" differently.)      

    The real question is not which translation is literally the same as Homer, but which aspects of Homer each translation succeeds in carrying across and which aspects it inevitably leaves behind. You have to read both to know the answer. I love all the translations I know: Fitzgerald and Lattimore from old, more recently Wilson and Mendelsohn. All interesting variations on a fascinating theme. All together give you a more complete picture of the original, like different perspectives of a sculpture will give you a better idea of the sculpture as a whole.

   A Homer scholar who has spent most of their lives with Greek can notice things that I cannot. But that does not mean that I am incapable of appreciating Homer or forming intelligent judgments about translations. We can notice readability, tone, rhythm, emotional force, and whether a translation helps us see aspects of the work we had previously overlooked. And my Greek is good enough to compare some passages and see whether choices are plausible and defensible. But it is not good enough to adjudicate every scholarly controversy. For that I would be inclined to defer to someone like my former professor Robert Rabel, who is steeped in Homer. 

   Sometimes I feel it is like listening to a Bernstein and a von Karajan performance of a Beethoven symphony. You have to be steeped in classical music to be able to follow a critical discussion of the differences – I couldn’t. You know both performances sound a bit different and perhaps you know which sounds better to you. But both can be enjoyed. The analogy is imperfect, since translators alter the words whereas conductors perform the same score, but it captures an important truth: appreciation does not require mastery, and disagreement among experts does not prevent ordinary readers from enjoying, debating, and learning from different interpretations.