ON “TRANSLATION AS EMPIRE” IN TRANSLATION AND EMPIRE

As Robinson (1997:48-49) points out, Herodotus (c.484-430/20 B.C.) deals with the issue of translation in the second book of his Histories, written in the mid-fifth century B.C. Robinson’s emphasis on translation in the intercultural communication between the Egyptians and the Ionians and Carians is striking:

Herodotus tells the story of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, one of the twelve kings who had made a mutual non-aggression pact: when he accidentally fulfilled an oracle saying that whoever drank from his helmet would become sole monarch of Egypt, the other eleven stripped him of his powers and banished him to the marsh country. Burning with resentment, he plotted revenge but could not act until a company of sea-raiders from Ionia (Heredotus’ country) and Caria were forced by bad weather to land on the Egyptian coast. Psammetichus made friends with the raiders, using their help to defeat and depose the eleven kings. Thus far the story is a fairly familiar one from the annals of empire: the banished king finds foreign allies and returns to overthrow his enemies at home. Because the foreign allies must somehow be rewarded, and the reward must be in proportion to the king’s regained throne, the result is the salutary breakdown of isolationist boundaries and the establishment of intercultural communication that leads to translation.(ibid 1997:49)

This is one of the first intercultural communications in written history, which leads to translation. Psammetichus granted land to his allies in return for their military help, and in addition to that, he sent Egyptian boys with them back home; they were assigned with the task of learning the language of the Ioanians and Carians: Greek. In those times, Greece can said to have been “quite primitive” (ibid 1997:49), and these boys, who would become the first Egyptian interpreters were the first to affect Greek culture.
This is an example from ancient times, which shows that a culture affects another culture through language, and when this kind of communication takes place, the significance of translators and interpreters can never be underestimated. This can also be seen as an example showing the power of translation. Psammetichus might have been grateful to his allies, but was that the only reason why he sent Egyptian boys to be put at their service? He had already given them land. Given the facts that he was a king, thus a man of politics, and that he had managed to regain his throne after having convinced the Ionians and Carians to help him, it can be argued that putting these boys at their service was a clever move to learn more about them, which would lead to taking advantage of their presence, in other words, one of the first examples of the desire to colonize in history (Robinson 1997:49).

Robinson argues that Horace and Cicero have usually been interpreted out of context (ibid 1997:50); however, what they had not said have usually been seen as what they had said. In order to understand what they really meant, without doubt the era they lived in has to be taken into consideration:

Throughout the history of translation theory, especially but not exclusively in Europe, later thinkers would quote Cicero and Horace out of context in order to consolidate what was gradually becoming dominant – indeed ultimately the only acceptable – approach to translation: translating the meaning of whole sentences, not of individual words. The Ciceronian and Horatian catchphrases, “I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language” (Cicero) and “nor trouble to render word for word with the faithfulness of a translator” (Horace), are quoted or alluded to in virtually every treatise or passing remark on translation in Europe until our own day – and almost invariably in a context alien to the thrust of Cicero’s and Horace’s own arguments. (ibid 1997:50-51)

What they advised was not to translate word-for-word; nevertheless, many have tended to come to the conclusion that this meant just the opposite; “to translate sense-for-sense”, a term coined by Jerome, who lived more than 300 years after Horace and Cicero. To make things clear what we need is “a larger context of Horace’s remarks”(Robinson 1997:50):

It is a hard task to treat what is common in a way of your own; and you are doing more rightly in breaking the tale of Troy into acts than in giving the world a new story of your own telling. You may acquire private rights in common ground, provided you will neither linger in the one hackneyed and easy round; nor trouble to render word for word with the faithfulness of a translator. [...] (cited by Robinson 1997:51)

Here, two questions are important: who the addressees of Horace’s text are, and what he is really focused on. Horace is addressing story tellers - not translators - who tell mythological stories of the old times. “In this context Horace is specifically warning writers not to stick too closely to the original” (Robinson 1997:51). Although Horace’s addressees are not translators, he is talking about something which a translator would be interested in: two different cultures. Greek and Roman cultures are what he refers to as “common” and “own” respectively. “He is calling upon Roman writers not only to establish their originality vis-a-vis the original text but to appropriate Greek culture for imperial Rome”(ibid 1997:51). What they are called upon to do is reproduce Greek stories through replacing Roman elements with those which are Greek. In order to become the new super power in cultural terms as well as in military terms, Romans strive for taking advantage of the cultural elements of the previous super power. As Robinson puts it, “What was once Greek and ‘common’ will now become Roman and ‘private’ – the private property of a Roman writer who is thus no longer indebted to the perceived superiority of Greece” (ibid 1997:51). In other words, as a result of the “Roman Appropriation”, the Greek would be alienated from the stories their own culture had once produced. According to Copeland, the Roman respect for Greek culture was nothing but a result of “the desire to displace that culture, and eliminate its hegemonic hold, through contestation and hence difference” (cited by Robinson 1997:52).

Horace and Cicero were the first writers in the “postcolonial project” of appropriating “Greek culture, literature, philosophy, law”, but this “Ciceronian/Horatian tradition” was followed by many others such as Pliny the Younger, Quantilian and Aulus Gellius. Nevertheless, Quantilian and writers who lived centuries after him such as Augustine and Jerome were focused on something else: “The importance of appropriating (or colonizing) Greece for Latin culture remained, and in fact was expanded in the Christian Middle Ages to a concern with appropriating ‘pagan’ Greece and Rome for the ecclesiastical Latin culture of the medieval church” (Robinson 1997:53). This would be possible through injecting Christian elements into a non-Christian text as if it were written by a Christian writer. Any work by any writer regardless of the time he lived in (in Christian or non-Christian times) would be “appropriate” to this end. Works of Ovid, Plato, Virgil or Homer could be turned into works of Christian writers (ibid 1997:53). As Robinson has stated, “a good example of this concern with the medieval Christian reader’s doctrinal needs, rather than with the author’s intention or source text meaning its historical context, is the fourteenth century French work Ovid Moralisé [...]”(ibid 1997:53). From an objective point of view, to moralize Ovid means to turn Ovid into a writer who is a devoted protector of the ecclesiastical church, to moralize Ovid means to take advantage of Ovid in order to justify the moral values of Rome and Christianity. How Jerome describes this process of translation is worth attention:

“Time would run out if I were to mention all those who have translated according to this principle. Here it is sufficient to notice Hilary the Confessor as an example of the rest. When he turned some homilies on Job and several Psalms from Greek into Latin, he did not bind himself to the drowsiness of literal translation, or allow himself to be chained to the literalism of an inadequate culture, but, like some conqueror, he marched the original text, a captive, into his native language.” (cited by Robinson 1997:55)


In his letter to Pammachius, due to the fact that talking about all religious people who are immensed in their studies of appropriating Greek culture would cause “time to run out”, Jerome just gives the example of a priest (a confessor, to be exact) who, just like the others, is against word-for-word translation from Greek into Latin. Jerome finds the other culture inadequate, and they just use what they deem necessary from that inadequate culture. Translating in order to captivate the other culture is the skopos of all Roman religious men in those times, and Jerome’s way of describing this process enables us to see how translation can be used in order to captivate the other, and how the translator was considered a soldier to march and gain victory over the other culture.

REFERENCE: Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire, St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester 1997.