People who can't write shouldn't. At least not for publication. Dialogue (or monologue, as the case may be) is notorious because idiom shifts and is never easy to capture even by those for whom the idiom is natural. That's why Mark Twain's achievement is so remarkable: his characters, particularly in Huck Finn, are detailed, dialectically distinct, and still believable so many years later. If you compare anything from that book with the scrapped episode on the raft, which Twain printed in Life on the Mississippi as a taste of the character and language of keelboatmen, you'll quickly see the difference between an immature effort and the real thing. Here's a sampling:

"Whoo-oop! I 'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansas!--Look at me! I 'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!--and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!"

I defy you to find anything as awkward or unnatural in Huck Finn or any of Twain's later works. This should go some length to establish just how difficult it is, even for a good writer, to produce dialogue that feels real.

And I say this because it has been a common practice for some time to insult successive generations with translations for the 'now generation.' I use that ridiculously dated phrase for a reason, and that is to point up the kinds of silly things translators of classical texts will do in a vain effort to 'speak to the kids.'

One of the worst examples I can think of at the moment is Peter Green's oddly racist turn in a piece from the Roman satirist Juvenal. Green, by the way, was translating during a high point in the civil rights movment, publishing his translation in 1967. Satire II.23 reads 'loripedem rectus derideat, Aethiopem albus,' which says simply, 'the upright may laugh at the bowlegged, the white man at the Ethiopian.' Green rendered this 'It takes a hale man to mock a cripple and you can't bait niggers when you're tarred with the same brush.'

The problems here should be clear. Aethiops didn't have the connotation that Green injected into the passage. This was clearly an effort to make the passage 'relevant,' but it's dishonest to suggest that Roman attitudes were the same or even that the passage suggests the open display of mockery. The word he chose is fraught with a very specific cultural history, and the metaphor employed seems unwarranted in light of the fact that the Latin had no metaphor. It was a simple statement of social reality, best translated by a simple statement.

It's not that the racist sentiment is entirely lacking, but the translation is entirely misleading in its effort to be 'with it' and translate idiom far beyond the information given.

This is especially troubling when we consider that the poem is essentially an indictment of Rome for taking a passive role on the world stage while putting up a false front, and this indictment comes by way of a lengthy mocking of the passive partner in homosexual sex, particularly men who pretend to be straight.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Juvenal treats homosexuality as a sickness and has pity on those who are openly effeminate while feeling disgust at those who are not, as though being gay were incompatible with a 'manly' spirit. Also in the interest of full disclosure, it's still open for debate whether Juvenal personally held these views -- it is, afterall, satire.)

Green's over-translation of Aethiops is contrasted with his 'under-translation' elsewhere.

Witness the lines which precede that quoted. Juvenal expresses his distaste for people who put on shows of culture but lack any real learning, measuring their intellect by owning 'intellectual' things like busts of Aristotle or books by Cleanthes, an obscure Stoic. 'Frontis nulla fides,' he cries: 'the surface can't be trusted.' A modern professor might translate that line as 'don't believe the hype!,' instructing her students to imagine Public Enemy's Flavor Flav as the speaker, though students today won't know Public Enemy's music. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Juvenal asks if any area of town is lacking in such disgrace, then seems to turn on one imagined listener to say, 'You've got a problem with disgraceful things when you're one of the best known ditches among the Socratic catamites?' It was a greater reproach among the Romans to receive than to give, and Juvenal here uses a powerful metaphor in conjunction with a bare insult: cinaedus ('catamite,' 'pathic') is a derogatory term, but notissima fossa, 'best known ditch,' dehumanizes the target and says metaphorically that countless men have dug deep into him. That's the power of metaphor, and it needs to be retained with it's original power.

What does Green do, Green who made the racism racier than it was? He softens Juvenal by writing 'the most notorious dyke among all our Socratic fairies.' What's dyke doing there, if not to be mildly clever, and why fairies, unless to be contemporary? A dike (for which dyke is an alternate spelling) is usually a raised embankment, though it may refer to a ditch. All the force is gone. I suspect he chose the word because with this spelling it can refer to gay women, but the image which Juvenal intends, that of frequent sexual penetration by several men upon one, is completely eroded and replaced by a banal English phrase that hardly amounts to insult.

Further, why say 'nigger' for Ethiopian but render rectum as 'passage' and avoid rebuking those who clunem agitant, i.e., 'keep their asses busy,' by writing 'to cock his dish like a perfect lady'?:

... sed peiiores, qui talia uerbis
Herculis inuadunt et de uirtute locuti 20
clunem agitant. ...

'But they're worse who rail against such things with Herculean speech and apart from their virtue in word (i.e., not in deed) keep their asses busy.'

'To cock his dish?' Green's version is nonsensical, but in it we see one of the most grating effects of the tranlations of modern professors: the conversational conceit. 'Perfect' is a favorite word, especially of translators of Green's generation. It felt to them like something a person would actually say when mocking someone: 'well, isn't he the perfect. little. soldier! Ha HA!'

The problem is that people who do talk like that are annoying, not funny. Good writers will only annoy when they want to.

But this is another generation, and professors must keep publishing inaccurate adaptations that speak to no one because tenure demands that they publish or die. Funnily enough I had no intention of blogging about Peter Green or Juvenal, but that one example came to mind. My real target was very different, and much more contemporary, but the issues are essentially the same.

There's a new translation of three plays by the early Roman comic poet Plautus, and this one is, again, aimed at the 'now generation.' It's been reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review receiving mixed marks by a Dutch scholar who admits to being puzzled by much of what he reads there but agrees in principle with the philosophy behind the edition.

He quotes the translation, by USC classicist Amy Richlin, and actually calls it 'daring':

"Bowman (to himself): 'The dude who first set out to go on the road of love without no dough, / this guy had to go through way more shit than all them Labors of Hercules. / Man, I'd rather duke it out with the lion, the snake, the deer, that A-rab mummy,/ the birds that swamp in ancient Greece, or even with the Incredible Hulk,/ than with Love; that's why I'm goin nuts and tryin to borrow some dough, / but folks I ask don't know how to say nothin to me but "ain't no way"'."

This small sample immediately shows some of the major characteristics of Richlin's daring approach: Plautus' Latin is not neutrally rendered as if it were no different from classical prose of the highest standards. Instead it is radically transposed into fully modern forms, in this case a rap text, with all the stylisticelements and effects that go with the genre, even down to the level of orthography. There is nothing dull or purely academic in these lines, but the text is lively and entertaining: Plautus has unquestionably been freshened up.

The 'dull' and 'purely academic' translation he's refering to is that of the Loeb Classical Library, which is overly wordy but easier to read because it doesn't insult the intelligence of the reader:

"Enter Toxilus, in low spirits, from the forum. 'The lover that first set out on the highways of love with an empty purse went in for harder labours than Hercules. Why, I had rather wrestle with the lion, or the Hydra, or the stag, or the Aetolian boar, or the Stymphalian birds, or Antaeus, than with Love. Such a devil of a time as I'm having, just looking for a loan--and the people I ask, all they know how to answer is "Can't be done"'."

I'll just quote the Latin for those who are wondering, with my own translation, which I think is both more faithful, more readable, and more lasting than Richlin's already passée pass at youth-speak:

Qui amans egens ingressus est princeps in Amoris vias,
superavit aerumnis suis aerumnas Herculi.
nam cum leone, cum excetra, cum cervo, cum apro Aetolico,
cum avibus Stymphalicis, cum Antaeo deluctari mavelim,
quam cum Amore: ita fio miser quaerendo argento mutuo, 5
nec quicquam nisi 'non est' sciunt mihi respondere quos rogo.

Whoever, lovesick and destitute, first set out in search of love outdid the suffering of Hercules' through his own. The lion, the snake, the deer, the Aetolian boar, the Stymphalean birds, Antaeus -- I'd rather get mixed up with them than with love. I've got a hard enough time looking for money; no one I ask knows how to say anything but 'got none.'

Is that boring? It's at least accurate and readable. I don't think anyone, teenager or not, would prefer Richlin's faithless and unaesthetic adaptation, which actually absolves college students of looking up mythological references by replacing them with comic book characters and -- what's this? An 'A-rab' mummy?

That one isn't even in the Latin: it's substituted by the translator for the Aetolian boar. Are we seeing here a kind of injection of 'relevance' into the text? The dumb kid who, shucks, just don't know nothin' 'bout this crazy world, gettin' hist'ry and jography all mixed up 'cuz he's too busy eatin' Big Macs and playing video games, and bummin' change, dude? There may be something to that, because Richlin is interested in Roman conceptions of what she has called 'slave geography' in a paper related to the work that went into this translation, and has renamed the plays with titles like 'Iran Man' and 'Towelheads.' -- Shades of what Green did to Juvenal.

Modern attitudes about modern attitudes about the Middle East seem to be injected into the opening lines of the play and confused, possibly in a bit of commentary about the ignorance of both Romans and Americans: afterall, 'the Other' is all others. Of course this is guesswork. But what else could the 'A-rab mummy' mean, written as though spoken in the 'redneck' dialect?

Aside from oddities like this, the speech reads like so many comedy bits about yuppie parents trying their damnedest to speak the lingo of their kids (if you've seen Better Off Dead with John Cusack you know what I mean). The truth, professor? It's painful to read, and if your students think it's 'cool,' they're lying. Or they're unrepresentative.

But let's return to the review. Did he say daring?

What in the world is daring about schlocky tripe dressed up in artificial and outmoded idioms? We should be glad this particular translation wasn't attempted in the 80s when the translator's 'rap' style would have gone something like, [stage direction: Toxilus enters with ghetto blaster] 'Well my name's T-bone, and I'm here to say, that love is whack in e-ve-ry way!' The kids'll love it!

That's got nothing in common with classical prose, but neither has it anything to do with Plautus. Richlin's version is little better, and it's far from daring. It's downright pedestrian.

To be fair the reviewer has some reservations, and they're sensible:

R.'s book seems intended for an educated, American, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking audience of 2005 that is also thoroughly familiar with Hollywood movies and cartoons, TV and show business, and mass culture in general. But what will an audience make of this material ten years from now? Or how will it appeal to a non-American audience today?

I'd take issue with the 'educated' part, but okay. As it turns out, the translator apparently does cite Public Enemy, as I jokingly suggested earlier. The problem? I'm 29 and thoroughly familiar with Public Enemy, but my friends in the lower to mid-20s have only the slightest familiarity with the group if they have any at all. What young audience will get it? She argues though, as translators often do, that the plays should be translated and adapted often. So maybe in ten years someone will adapt Richlin's translation with references to Eminem to make it 'relevent' to the next generation of 30somethings.

The reviewer aptly asks, 'do we have to translate every play of Plautus in a thousand different versions for every possible audience in every country and age? That would be impractical, to say the least.'

Now the question is, should we begin translating Shakespeare to keep him relevant?