EMILY WILSON

Dec 31, 2024

A few guiding principles of my translation practice:

1. If the original uses a traditional poetic verse form (or several such forms), the translation should find a way to honor and echo this feature – for instance by using a traditional meter in the translation. Something important is lost if you render regular traditional metrical verse in one language into prose or free verse in English.

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2. If you’re doing a re-translation, it’s a waste of everyone’s time — yours, your publishers, your potential future readers — unless you can offer a fresh perspective of some kind. You’ve taught several different American translations of Homer/ Euripides/ Seneca/ Sophocles/ et al. to undergraduates, as well as texts in the originals, over the many decades you’ve been working in this beautiful lush green field. You’ve seen what works and doesn’t work in the classroom, and you don’t need to provide more of what already exists. There are dozens of possible valid ways to convey the stylistic features of a text in another language. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Make it new. If every English translation of Euripides is strange or “ancient-sounding” in the same ways, Greekless or Latinless readers won’t get a real sense of the alien world of these texts. Some translators and readers think the only way to for a translation to be engaging for the young is if it’s full of predictable American slang or clichés; but this isn’t true. Everyone, including the young, deserves to learn new things and explore alien worlds. Offer something different. It’s OK to experiment. Turn things upside down. Reorient what’s strange and what’s familiar. Make room for surprise.

3. If the original makes you laugh, cry, feel excited, get goosebumps, feel puzzled, etc — the translation should try to create those effects on its readers.

4. The translation should not feel slower or more boring than the original. Nor faster. Keep pace.

5. Be deliberate about what’s difficult. If you’re translating Sophocles, the imagery and double meaning should often feel riddling and enigmatic: the difficulty is essential to the poetic effect. If the original is clear to a fluent listener/ reader of the original, the translation should also be clear. This will take a great deal of work. Overwriting, muddle and clunk are very easy to achieve, as anyone who has graded student papers knows. Try harder.

6. You love stylistic maximalism, poetic ornament, literary allusion, bombast, at least sometimes. If you’re translating Seneca, you can pull out some of those stops. You can do it on your own time in non-translation poetry and fiction writing, if you want. But if the original text is grand or sublime in a different way, the translation should echo that. You love Milton — but aiming for sub-Miltonic fireworks will not get you closer to the sound of Homer in English. Being sub-Spenserian will be even worse, much though you love Spenser. The ps. Longinus text “on the sublime” is illuminating about how at least one ancient reader thought about the sublimity of Homer. The author argues that simplicity of style, combined with great thoughts and strong emotions, can contribute to to hypson – and warns against the unHomeric frigidity of overwriting. Learn from this. “Let there be light” is sublime.

7. If the original has multiple characters or perspectives, don’t make them all sound the same.

8. If the original has moral or ideological tensions or complexities, those should be legible in the translation. And what great works of literature have no such complexities? Translate the ambiguities. Aim for negative capability. Don’t join all the dots. Hope that future readers of your work may use it, reinvent it, push against it to create their own poems, plays, translations. Allow for more. Make room.

9. Work with and against your readers’ possible expectations. If readers may expect this text to be boring or archaic or simple-minded, and those things aren’t true of the original, think through how you can enable them to see something else.

10. Translation is reading, of the most intense kind. Read and reread the original until you’re breathing it, tasting it, dreaming it. Even if you’ve been reading it for 30 years already, know how much there always is to see on each rereading. Be grateful that you get to be here with these texts every day.

11. Translation is writing, of the most intense kind. Your first draft will never be good enough. It takes many hours and some kind of magic to bring a text to life, whether it’s a translation or an original poem. Stay with it, and maybe your thirtieth draft of the same few lines will start to breathe on its own.

12. Translation is difficult. This is not primarily because it’s difficult to read other languages. People who are bilingual aren’t automatically brilliant literary translators. Rather, it’s impossible fully to recreate every essential feature of a text – even the simplest and most boring of texts, let alone a whole magnificent ancient epic – in an entirely different language and an entirely different cultural context. You will fail, of course. You will never be able to apply all your principles successfully in every passage, line, word or syllable. But the project – of devoting your life to these great texts, of bring them to life in new ways for new generations – is always worth it. Keep going.

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