My first experience with translation was watching Doraemon while my grandmother translated what the characters were saying from Cantonese to English. While I can’t remember if I was listening to her or watching the animated blue cat fly around the screen, I can vividly recall the pause between when a character spoke and when my grandmother would repeat it in English.
Living in Australia and coming from a multicultural background, the act of translation has been a large part of my life. It’s gone from being a barrier to communicating with my family, to something that just sits in the background of everyday life.
Recently, translation for me has become more of a transformation. And, though I’ve only recently noticed it, aspects of transformation/translation were present in the first books of my reading journey.
When I look back on my childhood books, I realise that good literature is never neutral.
Most of my morality is drawn from children’s books: from the How to Train Your Dragon novels, which delved deeper into issues of slavery and the corruption of power than their film counterparts, to the world of Emily Rodda’s Deltora Quest, which fascinated me with its vivid fantasy world and vibrant descriptions of mystical creatures.
Both books had the main storyline of rebel protagonists overthrowing an evil, totalitarian regime to restore freedom to the world. The themes of rebellion and the idea that a good leader must understand their subjects didn’t provoke younger me to draw connections to the real world just yet, but the values that the texts taught were ingrained in my mind.
As I became more aware of the world outside of myself, I found what the stories warned me about on the front page of newspapers. I realised that the books I adored had shown me the real world but given me fresh eyes.
Defamiliarisation is a translation (or transformation) of the familiar into the unfamiliar. In my beloved fantasy novels, the world as seen by the author was translated into a book. I read it, picked up the ideas, and was eventually able to see the world in the way that the authors did.
As a young reader, I was drawn to books with main characters that were odd or different from the world, and found a place outside of the regular world, where they belonged. I waited for my letter to (Australian?) Hogwarts, or for a minotaur to show up on the College back oval, which would set off a chain of events leading me to travel to Camp Half-Blood. (I could only imagine how I would cross the Pacific Ocean, and what sort of logic would allow me to have a godly parent and my two biological parents.)
Now, I’ve noticed that I was primarily reading for escapism. But as I grew older, my desperation for another world morphed into the need to discover more about the real one.
My interest in classical literature started in my history class, sitting through the slow pacing and endless lists of the Iliad to reach the mythical monsters of the Odyssey. Reading ancient myths felt like travelling from the shore of modern literature back out into the ocean where we all began. Like Odysseus, I’ve gone on a journey across the world, though it took significantly less time than twenty years.
Through the vessels of books, I traversed the ocean of human experience, finally making my way across the sea and through history.
On my journey, I discovered that authors and readers could be separated by barriers that weren’t only distance, pages and time. Homer’s epics were written in Ancient Greek – they were meant to be told in that language out loud, to a crowd of people that would hiss at every punch and cheer at a hero’s triumph. Homer’s crowd of people was far from my 2023 wide reading time, and I wondered whether the sentiment of his epics got warped by the seas of time, appearing distorted through the water.
The integrity of the connection between the reader and original text is made shaky through translation. Without knowing the language of a text, you can never fully appreciate it in the way it was made. But, translated texts themselves add something new into the union between reader and author.
The Greek plays are seen as some of the most deeply human ancient writings of all time, which have played a part in their many and widely debated translations. The two copies of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia that I own, translated by Sarah Ruden and Anne Carson, differ wildly in terms of tone, style and overall message.
Ruden’s view of the Oresteia is simple – she depicts the events as they occur, looking into the text to present what she sees as the most accurate version of the Oresteia. Like the other translators that have come before her, Ruden’s translation of the Oresteia attempts to make the distortions of the original text clearer for a modern reader.
If Ruden’s translation looks into the text, Anne Carson’s “non-foundational [An] Oresteia” uses it as a scrapbook. Carson blends all three ancient writers and adapters of the Oresteia together and imbues it more fully with the modern language of today. This results in a writing style that’s unorthodox for classical writers, but incredibly emotional for readers. What results is quotes such as “I suffer terrible things/well, you screwed up”, but more importantly, quotes such as “I’ll take care of you/It’s rotten work/Not to me, not if it’s you”, the emotions of which couldn’t be grasped by a traditional translation.
While strikingly different, both translators’ interpretations of the Oresteia are accurate. Their texts, which they only see to be the most accurate reflection of the original plays, are just their view of the ripples in the water – they are biased by their perspectives and experiences.
Like translators, each one of us reads a different version of a text, regardless of language. While Ancient Greeks may have loved the Iliad for its use of local places and dramatic battles, I can’t stand the Catalogue of Ships because all the place names are indistinguishable to me.
We read texts. We see the ripples in the water, and it reflects our world back at us.
The author of a text could be considered the original translator of a work, transmuting the idea of a story into written words. But the reader is just as much a translator, too. The author encodes a text with meaning, and the reader decodes it – while some parts of the text are lost in translation, even more are gained.
