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Robert Fagles
May. 2nd, 2015 08:35 am<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
INTERVIEWER
Can you give us a metaphor for the role of a translator with regard to his poet: we have prison; we have marriage; we have ghost and medium?
FAGLES
Let me tackle them all and give each one a twist, if I may. Being a translator is to be a prisoner, all right, a prisoner of Homer, which is not such a bad thing after all. I mean, if you’re a “lifer” with Homer, Homer has the gift of setting you free, on occasion, releasing you into a larger form of utterance than you’d ever imagined for yourself. Was the next metaphor a marriage?
INTERVIEWER
Yes.
FAGLES
Marriage. It is a kind of marriage, often on the rocks, I must say, when the days go hard and the work won’t come and you can’t hear Homer for a moment. But it can be a good marriage too, I think. I remember the line in praise of marriage that Odysseus says to Nausicaa—“two minds, two hearts that work as one.” That, too, can be the relationship between a translator and his great original if you’re lucky. What was the other? Ghost . . .
INTERVIEWER
Ghost and medium.
FAGLES
Ghost and medium. Indeed, you’re a kind of ghostwriter. I remember George Steiner’s bon mot: “when a translator looks behind him what he sees is a eunuch’s shadow.” I’m a little unclear about the physiology here but I surely know the feeling. You’re bloodless, to some extent. A ghostwriter for the great master, it’s true. Yet you’re also like those ghosts in Homer’s underworld. You’re sipping the magic blood that can animate you, give you a voice in fact. So it’s a kind of necessary dying, as Keats would put it, “dying into life.”
But my favorite metaphor for the relationship is that of actor and role to play. You need to perform Homer, in your own day and age. I’m always asking myself, If Homer lived in the nineties, how would he say this or that? Well, given the limits of our language, not to mention our sensibility, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned the “wine-dark sea” or “the dawn with rose-red fingers,” let alone a one-eyed cannibal or a witch that turns men into swine or, most miraculous of all, a marriage that survives twenty years of separation! But, at the same time, Homer might insist on those miracles even in the nineties. And so, as an actor with a role to play, you experience a kind of contraction and a kind of release as well. And if you feel the limits and the liberation fully enough, you stand a chance, as the good cliché would have it, of “bringing Homer home.”
-- Robert Fagles at The Paris Review
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
INTERVIEWER
Can you give us a metaphor for the role of a translator with regard to his poet: we have prison; we have marriage; we have ghost and medium?
FAGLES
Let me tackle them all and give each one a twist, if I may. Being a translator is to be a prisoner, all right, a prisoner of Homer, which is not such a bad thing after all. I mean, if you’re a “lifer” with Homer, Homer has the gift of setting you free, on occasion, releasing you into a larger form of utterance than you’d ever imagined for yourself. Was the next metaphor a marriage?
INTERVIEWER
Yes.
FAGLES
Marriage. It is a kind of marriage, often on the rocks, I must say, when the days go hard and the work won’t come and you can’t hear Homer for a moment. But it can be a good marriage too, I think. I remember the line in praise of marriage that Odysseus says to Nausicaa—“two minds, two hearts that work as one.” That, too, can be the relationship between a translator and his great original if you’re lucky. What was the other? Ghost . . .
INTERVIEWER
Ghost and medium.
FAGLES
Ghost and medium. Indeed, you’re a kind of ghostwriter. I remember George Steiner’s bon mot: “when a translator looks behind him what he sees is a eunuch’s shadow.” I’m a little unclear about the physiology here but I surely know the feeling. You’re bloodless, to some extent. A ghostwriter for the great master, it’s true. Yet you’re also like those ghosts in Homer’s underworld. You’re sipping the magic blood that can animate you, give you a voice in fact. So it’s a kind of necessary dying, as Keats would put it, “dying into life.”
But my favorite metaphor for the relationship is that of actor and role to play. You need to perform Homer, in your own day and age. I’m always asking myself, If Homer lived in the nineties, how would he say this or that? Well, given the limits of our language, not to mention our sensibility, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned the “wine-dark sea” or “the dawn with rose-red fingers,” let alone a one-eyed cannibal or a witch that turns men into swine or, most miraculous of all, a marriage that survives twenty years of separation! But, at the same time, Homer might insist on those miracles even in the nineties. And so, as an actor with a role to play, you experience a kind of contraction and a kind of release as well. And if you feel the limits and the liberation fully enough, you stand a chance, as the good cliché would have it, of “bringing Homer home.”
-- Robert Fagles at The Paris Review
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
