Practicing the Art of Losing Nothing in Translation

Robert Fagles’ new translation of “The Iliad” opens with rage-- the word he’s certain is perfect, the English equivalent he believes Homer would have chosen to launch his epic poem.

Fagles reads his line aloud, in a deliberate melodic meter: “Rage--Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles . . . . “

Is rage correct? Why not anger, the choice of previous translators?

“Here is this enormous poem,” says Fagles, “the founding epic poem of the West, 15,693 lines of Greek and what’s the first word? Menin. We get mania from it. It means wrath, rage, really. How you get that first word in Greek to be the first word of English is tremendously important. I sweated over it.”

Edith Grossman agonizes over works far removed from ancient Greece. She has translated the last two books of Colombian Nobelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a task complicated by the 19th-Century Spanish he used for his 1989 novel about Simon Bolivar, “The General in His Labyrinth,” and eased by the fact that, unlike Homer, Garcia Marquez is available if she gets stuck.

For instance, in “Labyrinth” Garcia Marquez used the word caplan, a puzzler for Grossman. None of her Colombian friends knew what it meant. Garcia Marquez said it was an old-fashioned term for Satan. “I went through all the old terms for the devil,” she says. “Finally, I decided on Old Nick. You just have to do what’s right for the rhythm of the sentence.

“How do you explain to anyone, without sounding precious, that it takes you a day to choose a word? Or that I can spend a half hour on a comma decision,” she says.

Without translators, readers in most countries would be bereft of Homer and Garcia Marquez. They wouldn’t know the Bible, Cervantes, Camus, Tolstoy, Mishima and Solzhenitsyn. Yet, when translators have done their work with the most skill, they are invisible. They receive rare jacket credit, little recognition and relatively low pay.

Publishers generally pay a flat fee of so much per thousand words. Living authors have the option of sharing their royalties--generally 1% or 2% of their own earnings--with their translators.

Most translators say they do it for love, not money or fame.

Fagles, chairman of Princeton’s Comparative Literature Department, has immersed himself in ancient Greek for 35 years and labored on “The Iliad” (Viking) for eight years.

His decision to take on “The Iliad” seemed natural. He had translated the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, whose fierce characters came out of Homer’s great first work of war.

“Going back to ‘The Iliad,’ ” says Fagles, “was like going back to the great original. Homer’s was a world I wanted to inhabit.

“I wondered 10,000 times, ‘Could I ever (translate) this?’ ” he says, “but never ‘Why am I trying?’ ”

Not only was Fagles trying to create a contemporary poem, but he was following two comparatively recent and acclaimed translations by Richmond Lattimore (1951) and Robert Fitzgerald (1974). He could also hear the echoes of Alexander Pope’s 1720 translation in rhyming couplets.

“In many ways,” Fagles says, “it’s a most humbling activity. You can never reach the depth and height of Homer. But at the same time, it’s a very arrogant activity. It’s sort of the ultimate chutzpah.

“It’s a superimposition of one’s self,” says Fagles. “You hope not to distort him, but to bring him to life.”

More than making his translation readable, Fagles wanted to make the 2,700-year-old poem an oral opus. Homer, he says, was a performer who acted out his poetry. To give the sense of a spoken work, Fagles used a loose, six-beat line and leaned on monosyllabic words to fuel its forward drive.

“If this were meant to be performed in public,” he says, “it was meant to be listened to, not read. Pope said, ‘Homer makes us hearers, Virgil leaves us readers.’ I want to make you a hearer.”

Fagles hopes his translation makes Homer more accessible than ever and leaves readers (and hearers) spellbound. “Francine du Plessix Gray said Homer is a talismanic incantation,” he says. “I must increase that spell. Encountering Homer ought to be rapture, a state of possession.”

Fagles remains possessed. After a few months’ rest, he will start translating “The Odyssey.”

Neither rapture nor possession comes to mind when Richard Pevear thinks of past translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.”

Pevear was amazed that prior translators went beyond their call of duty to create what he calls inferior “Karamazovs.” He says they ignored Dostoevsky’s style and word play, smoothed his deliberate awkwardness and wrote what they assumed he meant to say when he was being purposely obtuse.

So, along with his Leningrad-born wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear says he has righted the wrongs. “We are the only ones who have translated it,” Pevear says brashly, in a phone interview from his home in Yerres, France.

“The others didn’t. If they say they really translated it, I’d take them by the hand and show them what they didn’t do.”

The road to such a harsh judgment began when Pevear read an earlier English translation of “Karamazov.” Volokhonsky, knowing Dostoevsky in his native language, walked by and looked at the volume. “My God,” she said, “this is terrible.” She and Pevear wondered if they could do a better job.

“I said, ‘Who’s going to publish it?’ ” says Pevear. “Then I thought, ‘Everybody reads Dostoevsky.’ I thought it might be possible to do another.”

So the couple set to work, with a small advance from North Point Press and, later, with a $36,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

Thanks to the grant, they moved from Manhattan to Yerres.

When they received the grant, Pevear, a graduate of the University of Virginia, had been earning his living as a cabinetmaker. Before Dostoevsky, he had published two books of poetry and translated some minor writings from French and Italian. He reads Russian, but not well enough to translate literature.

Volokhonsky made the first translation of “Karamazov” into English, a literal draft, with commentary on words, phrases, nuances, and diction. Pevear then typed a polished literary version from her English.

“We go through it together and I type a second draft,” Pevear says. “Then we correct it. I read it aloud and she follows with the original and makes final adjustments and changes.”

Pevear says his wife’s Russian deftness is only one part of their edge over previous translators. “I’m a writer,” he says, “not a scholar.

“I don’t believe in smoothness,” he says. “I think it’s an optical illusion that if it reads naturally, it must be good, because if Dostoevsky wrote smoothly, it wouldn’t be Dostoevsky at all.”

To illustrate the unneeded repairs one translator, Constance Garnett, made to “Karamazov,” Pevear notes a passage where brother Alyosha testifies for brother Mitya, on trial for murdering their father. Throughout, Pevear says he kept Dostoevsky’s intended repetition of the word he translated as precisely.

After Alyosha punctuates his testimony four times with the word precisely, Dmitri leaps to his feet, shouting, “Precisely!” Garnett uses “just so” for Dmitri’s cry.

“Pevear’s translation is a lot better,” says Michael Holquist, a professor of comparative literature and Slavic literature at Yale University. “In Pevear, you have to confront the stylistic complexity of Dostoevsky. Theirs is a marvelous vehicle to rethink Dostoevsky.”

Pevear and Volokhonsky are now working toward February completion of their English rendering of “Crime and Punishment,” part of a three-book deal with Random House for translation of more Dostoevsky novels. (Random House’s Vintage imprint will also publish the paperback version of their “The Brothers Karamazov.”)

Edith Grossman was in the right place at the right time. When Gregory Rabassa, the acclaimed translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Latin American writers, was unavailable to turn “Love in the Time of Cholera,” into English, publisher Alfred A. Knopf held auditions. Several translators produced segments of “Cholera” in English, and Grossman’s 20-page entry won.

Grossman’s passion for the Spanish language began in high school, inspired by a teacher she liked. She majored in Spanish in college and graduate school, and found her love for Latin American Spanish in the poetry of Pablo Neruda.

“Cholera,” published in the United States in 1988, became a bestseller, catapulting Grossman out of the obscurity of translating lesser-known Spanish authors. When the time came last year to translate Garcia Marquez’s new historical novel, “The General in His Labyrinth,” she was asked.

“The General in His Labyrinth” follows Simon Bolivar, the Latin American liberator, in the last days of his life. Garcia Marquez portrays Bolivar as a flawed dreamer, profane womanizer and ruthless militarist.

Grossman, who teaches a course on Bolivar and George Washington at New York’s Dominican College, says Garcia Marquez’s Bolivar was not entirely the Bolivar she knew, saying it “horrified” her.

“ ‘Cholera’ expanded through the last word; it wasn’t a downer,” she says, curled up on a couch in her Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. “But ‘The General’ traps you in that labyrinth. It’s like as his body shrinks, you’re shrinking with it.”

Unlike Fagles and Pevear, Grossman translated an author with whom she could consult by telephone and in letters.

Like Fagles and Pevear, Grossman is a poet, sensitive to the choice and nuance of words, skills crucial in balancing two languages. But it is work that cannot fly by speedily.

“It’s very consuming, more exhausting than your own writing because you’re responsible to the existing text,” she says.

Translators become the ultimate readers, absorbing the writer’s words more deeply than almost anyone else. Does Grossman, with two Garcia Marquez novels translated, believe she knows the writer?

“He confounds me because he keeps changing,” she says. “He changes so much from book to book. One of the fascinating things about him is he never stays in one place.”

For Grossman, Pevear and Fagles, the life of a translator, despite its near-anonymity, remains an impassioned one.

“Who am I to impersonate that great original Homer?” Fagles asks aloud. “Well, I had a yen and a hanker and a sense of kinship.”