INTRODUCTION 23
Those prophets who spoke magical words were not literary clods. Not if they
were to be heard. To make a work heard again, the translator must re-create
that cunning of art. Then a text can move pleasantly from foreign obscurity
into the light of our own familiar tongue.
Religious scholars have the ancient tongues to bring meaning to obscure
alphabets. That is their enormous virtue and power. Sometimes they are sci-
entists seeking information transfer, a dream of absolute denotation, which is
clearly incompatible with the connotative richness of scripture. Sometimes
they are scholar artists in the act of translating, which is ideal, as in the in-
stances of Lattimore and Alter.
In contrast to the mainly dim renderings of religious texts, the last century
saw classical literatures converted into vital contemporary speech. Robert
Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and Robert Fagles, all meticulous scholars,
have in distinctive ways given us splendid versions of Homer; and Fitzgerald
has carried Virgil's Aeneid from Latin—the marble language, as Borges called
it—into a resonant English poem. They have made Greek and Latin classics
thrilling to read. Like the Bible translators, they translate largely the sacred—
but the pagan sacred, not the Judeo-Christian. They renew Homer's bible
and Hesiod's theogony, Aeschylus's sacramental drama and Sappho's prayer
poems to Aphrodite. Those ancient religions of the Greeks are other, their
creators infidel, but that was long ago, and those works that have survived the
fires of iconoclasm are no longer a threat or rival heresy. So the translator is
free. In contrast to later Bible translations, still profoundly affected by a his-
tory of verbal piety, classical literature introduces no authority of faith for its
translator poets to contend with and resolve. The Bible did find a way into
nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, decisively and influentially, but
not through any new versions. It was the venerable King James Version that
held sway and passed into the hearts of Blake and Whitman, and Hopkins,
Eliot, and Thomas.
There is no single secret of literary translation. In fact there are many ways,
and none of them includes the notion of perfection, since perfection pre-
sumes a perfect transfer from one tongue to another, ofa = b. Language is much
too rich, on too many cognitive and aesthetic levels, to be reduced to the per-
fection of a formula of equality. Only in purely denotive, physically measura-
ble matters—ten acres of land, ten tons of pure iron ore—is exact translation
possible and required. Even the slippery notion of "exact equivalence," fash-
ionable in contemporary translation circles, is deception. The ways of transla-
tion have diverse linguistic and aesthetic variables, and for literary purposes