Every morning since May 9th I've established a routine of waking up by 5:30am, feeding the dog, having a snack of skyr and homemade granola, and then sitting down to translate Aristotle for at least an hour and a half, accompanied by a mug of jasmine pearl tea and contemplative music from the likes of Bach and Palestrina. It's almost a sort of meditation, especially at that early hour when the world is so quiet.
Translating is hard work. On a typical morning I translate a mere fifteen or twenty lines of Aristotle's knotty Greek, weighing each word and phrase in an effort to bring out, to the best of my abilities, the sense of the original. Later in the day, if I don't have too many other commitments, I will add a second translation session in the afternoon; those are good days, although every day I make progress. So far I've translated about 15% of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics.
In parallel with this translation work, I continue to perform background reading in ancient Greek history, religion, and philosophy so that I can write a proper "prelude" to Aristotle's "fugue". While doing so today, I discovered that in his introduction to The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot Matthew Sharpe quotes as follows from Hadot's 1960 essay "Jeux de langage et philosophie" (apparently a somewhat Wittgensteinian reflection on language games and philosophy):
We can thus never completely understand a philosophy expressed in a foreign language, above all because it belongs to a linguistic system which is extremely different from our own. Yet, at the same time, it reveals to us a vision of the universe which is absolutely different from our own and which serves to complete our own perspective. This is why the translator must do violence to his own language in order to introduce the distinct traits of the other language into it.
Allow me to share a few thoughts.
First, in my experience the difference is not merely linguistic, but encompasses a vast canvas of culture, history, art, literature, religion, lifeways, political economy, and never-quite-stated assumptions that everyone who used the language took for granted. Gaining even a surface familiarity with all of that is the task of a lifetime, and I cannot claim to have done it even for the ancient Greeks.
As to doing violence, I try to avoid too much of that because I am, shall I say, a moderate, peaceful person (e.g., I've pulled back from translating ἀρετή as "thriving" and instead I'm now rendering it as "excellence"). Sometimes it's not so much a matter of introducing Greek traits into English as of finding ways to express in natural-sounding English what I take to be the thoughts behind the Greek; indeed, this is more difficult than producing Hellenized English or the sort of linguistic contortions that Martin Heidegger indulged in. It's a truism that a perfect translation is a virtual impossibility, like the Stoic sage who comes along only once every 500 years. Although there is truth in the truism, that doesn't mean one shouldn't make the attempt, and some translations are better than others along many dimensions (accuracy, readability, naturalness in the destination language, etc.).
The other day my best friend complimented me on my translations as well as on the extended "recastings" I've attempted in the "preludes" that have resulted from my encounters with the likes of Nietzsche, Thoreau, and Epicurus. I do think I have something of a knack for this, in part because I strive to get inside the thinker's head by deeply absorbing the spirit of their worldview over the course of years. Much time and attention is required for this kind of intellectual and spiritual osmosis, but I feel it's worth the effort.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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