The “Iliad” as if in “clear and eloquent (musical) English” contest
Somebody at Simon & Schuster, Inc. has dreamed up “The ‘Iliad Greek Translation’ Contest.” In short, the contest is to produce the “best translation of Iliad, 3.380-420” in English. The “Grand Prize winner will receive copies of The Iliad, translated by Stephen Mitchell . . . and one Skype session with Stephen Mitchell (up to 60 minutes in length), based on his schedule and availability.” The losers may just purchase the book for themselves, which may be the intention of the contest, or they may check out the local library’s copy, or may ask for it as a gift.
To submit your entry, you must have email, must be “14 years of age or older,” and must not be an employee or a relative of an employee of the publisher or even someone living in the household of an employee or an employee’s relative. If you meet those qualifications (and a geographical qualification that I note at the end of this post), then you have until “11:59:59 pm ET on May 15th, 2012.”
Your entry “will be judged by Stephen Mitchell on or about May 16, 2012.” He will judge it “based on the following equally-weighted judging criteria: (a)adherence to original version of the Translation, (b) eloquence and (c) artistic quality.” You “are not required to have knowledge of the Greek language to participate (though it may be helpful),” and your translation into English “may be as free or literal as [you one of the] entrants wish.” Or, as the promotional announcement says, Mitchell will evaluate your entry “on the basis of the clarity and eloquence (music of the English).”
If that’s not entirely clear to you, well then just go to the official rules of the contest and then back to the promotional announcement rules. Be careful when following the first step of the official rules (i.e., “1. How to Enter. Log onto http://www.iliadbook.com [‘Site’]“) because at the moment the iliadbook.com site is redirecting would-be entrants strangely to the American Tourister luggage website. And be careful when visiting the promotional announcment rules because, although much Greek help is given to those who don’t know Greek, at the moment the translation given at the end (i.e., “2] Literal translation”) does not quite end with all of the passage that is to be translated for the contest (i.e., 418-420 for the “literal translation” is not yet shown for the Iliad, 3.380-420, which is the entire bit to be translated).
HT to rogueclassicism, who notes: “Sadly (and somewhat bizarrely to me, given that the prize is a class Skype session), the contest is only open to people in the 50 states of the US and DC.”
BLT 
What?? What does “(a)adherence to original version of the Translation” mean? Note that “Translation” in the rules is a defined term that is explained thus:
So what is the “original version of the Translation”? Does it mean the first draft of the Translation? Or the Greek? Or one of the material given in the instructions: “1) the Greek text, 2) an interlinear translation, [or] 3) a literal translation, with alternatives.”
Because, if it is the latter, and Stephen Mitchell does not know Greek, how can he judge the translation? All he can judge is “adherence to the cribs used by Mitchell to judge the translation.”
LOL, Theophrastus. You are tempting me to post a comparison of Mitchell’s version and others’ translations of 3.380-420.
Theophrastus:
Speaking of translating into Greek, can you recommend a good Greek-English New Testament interlinear and Greek New Testament dictionary? My wife just asked what I wanted to see under the Christmas tree, so…..I thought I would be daring. 🙂
Theophrastus:
What Is your basis for saying Mitchell does not know Greek? I believe you are correct, but he avoids admitting it.
Russ: I can’t recommend interlinears in general — I think they impede language learning. Also, printed interlinears have largely dropped by the wayside — most people are using Bible software.
But if you definitely want a printed interlinear, you can find a simple one tied to the NRSV here or one that is tied to non-Catholic translations (NIV/NASB) here. The latter is particularly interesting since it features an amazing interlinear translation by Robert Mounce as well as parsing information, and is usually considered the best of the bunch.
“NT Dictionaries” are usually called “Greek lexicons” and you can find many of them by searching “greek lexicon” on Amazon. There are a very wide range — some are prestigious and complete and expensive, and others have basic definitions show many declensions of words and are easy to use. I don’t know what you are looking for here, so maybe it is best to use the “look inside” feature of Amazon and find one that has the features you need.
Herbert: See his interview here:
Stephen Mitchell left out that he typically has these notebooks prepared by others or mechanically (from Perseus.) I have met him, and I know a fair number of people who know Mitchell well — he does not know Greek.
Theophrastus, thank you so much!
Mitchell is very slippery. Brown says, “You do have Greek. You know Greek.” Mitchell does not respond yes or no. Instead he goes into the notebook bit, in such a way as to lead listeners to think the “awful, clunky, literal version” he refers to is a literal version he translated from the Greek.
I think he gave the game away–unintentionally–in a piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, here. There, he refers to the notebook routine, and discloses his five-line first draft of what turned out to be six lines in his published Iliad. The five-line draft is lifted, largely verbatim, from A.T. Murray’s prose translation, which is available on Perseus and in book form (Loeb Classics). To reach his final version, Mitchell disguised his reliance on Murray, by poaching phrases from other published translations, and inventing a few phrases, none of which has a basis in the original Greek. The sequence of drafts he published in the WSJ indicates that Mitchell did not “translate” any part of the passage in question. It is a small sample, but it is the only passage I know of for which Mitchell has disclosed his first draft, and in the WSJ he calls it an “example” of his method.
Isn’t this plagiarism? Or at minimum a sham claim of “translation”?
I don’t suppose you’d know how to get a look at one or more of those notebooks…?
Herbert: I had not seen that article, and I believe you are exactly right.
Here is another example of Stephen Mitchell’s translation style, from his translation of Psalm 148:
You hardly need to be a scholar of Hebrew to suspect that this is more interpretation than translation.
a sham claim of “translation”?
more interpretation than translation
To me, this is much more the issue than is whether Mitchell “knows Greek” (or “knows Hebrew” for that matter).
Richard Pevear, for example, does not “know” Russian, and yet his translations of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s works have won not a few awards. So how does he do it? He works with Лариса Гиршевна Волохонская (i.e., his wife, aka Larissa Volokhonsky):
(They’ve also translated into English from French, Greek, and Italian. How well do they know these languages?)
Similarly, David Bellos, despite not “knowing” the source language won the very first Man Booker International Prize for translating from Albanian into English various novels by Ismail Kadare. Bellos says that Albanian is “a language I do not possess beyond phrase-book level.” And he explains further (on page 67 of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?):
Mitchell’s collaboration cannot be with a native speaker of Homeric Greek (or with a reader whose mother tongue is biblical Hebrew). And yet his description of how he works (on page lxi of his Iliad) isn’t so different from the way award winning translators Pevear and Volkhonsky and Bellos work. He does admit he doesn’t know some Greek:
Notice the problem: “my hearing created what I wanted to hear.”
This is in stark contrast to what Willis Barnstone suggests. Barnstone wants the author to speak through his translation. In a number of works, Barnstone has recited the story of Robert Fitzgerald asking Ezra Pound for advice in translating the Odyssey: “I was thinking that the way to do it would be to hit the high spots, to translate what I could translate, so to speak, and let the rest go.” Pound simply replies: “Oh no, let Homer say everything he wanted to say.” Even though Mitchell can eventually figure out, doing his homework, what Homer is saying, the real problem is that he gives Homer no real hearing. Mitchell admits to us his readers:
Now, that is real interpretation, claiming that Homer’s noble sounds have little to do with what and how he has said what he’s said.
A few corrections and comments:
(1) it was not Bellos who one the first Booker International prize, it was Ismail Kadare. [link] Note that one of the other contenders was Stanislaw Lem who was also translated into English “through French.”
(2) I do not know Pevear’s Greek or Italian translations. I do know his translation of The Three Musketeers, which was done without the help of Volokhonsky. I must say Dumas’s French is not difficult, so I suspect that Pevear could handle it without the help of any assistant.
(3) I respect Mitchell’s right to reinterpret the Iliad; he is certainly not the first to do so. However, he should not be calling it a translation. More to the point, his insulting other translations (“the music of these verse translations never had the interest or the power that I knew was in story”) seem churlish. Perhaps his complaint of “missing music” is directed to Lattimore (but I like Lattimore and find it to be a work of genius). But how can he make that complaint against Herbert Jordan or Stanley Lombardo or Robert Fagles or even Alexander Pope?
Thanks for the correction [and the link, which leads to Kadare’s acceptance speech, translated by Bellos, from French? to English]. Notice Kadare’s allusion, in his final sentence, to where he and his audience are: in “far distant Scotland, … to undertake a visit tomorrow to where my imagination first dwelt, to a house which, more than any other edifice, fired my passion for literature: the castle of Macbeth, Thane of Glamis and Cawdor.” Very interestingly, Bellos, in his recent book on translation, re-tells the story Kadare tells (in his “memoir-novel, Chronicle in Stone) of his considering Macbeth to be “the founding experience of his own life in literature.” The fascinating thing is that the experience came through a translation of Shakespeare, whom Kadare had never read in English.
On Pevear, elsewhere you and I have already noted that he does not translate the French (although he does the Russian) of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. (Well, let me correct that statement. Pevear does translate the French but in footnotes for the English reader! I just checked.)
Sounds like you’d put Mitchell with Greg Nagan (whose The Five Minute Iliad and Other Instant Classics: Great Books For The Short Attention Span a friend of mine gave me to give me a long laugh, and it worked). Nagan asserts:
J.K. Gayle –
You put your finger on it: “sham claim of translation.”
In the case of Mitchell’s Tao Te Ching, for one, he forthrightly admitted that he could not read the original, called his work a “version” (not a translation), and acknowledged basing his version on previous translations.
He took a different tack on his Iliad, although his piece in the WSJ, linked above, shows that his first draft was copied from the Murray translation, without acknowledgement.
Like Theophrastus, I support Mitchell’s right to do a reinterpretation of the Iliad, provided he calls it that.
Thanks for the hearty laugh I got from the Nagan quote! And now, of course, one may say that “Mitchell’s Iliad has been likened to that of Greg Nagan, of which Nagan himself said:. . . .”
Adaptation is a completely valid form of artistic expression. When a movie director adapts Shakespeare by setting it, say, in a World War II-like time frame. And adaptation from a non-English work is also completely legitimate and can be thrilling.
So I would not compare Stephen Mitchell to Nagan, but rather (to use a biblical example) to Eugene Peterson. (However, I think Mitchell is a better writer than Peterson.)
However, even though Mitchell’s translation of the Iliad may or may not have artistic merit (I have only read part of it, and have not yet formed a judgment); his work is quite a distance from translation as I perceive it, and I think his churlish remarks about all the existing translations (many of which are artistic while being scholarly) seem wildly out of place.
Herbert, I believe I was just quoting you saying, “sham claim of translation.” But I did put the scare quotes around “translation” to describe what I think Mitchell is up to when he elides Homer’s text so badly, so much.
Theophrastus, Yes Nagan is not doing what Mitchell is doing. The former makes us laugh, on purpose. Peterson and Mitchell? Well, at least Peterson translates the whole text, if he embelishes, etc. and writes with his own voice and not the authors’ and so forth.
Your comments inspired this post: You Be the Judge: Part I, “Iliad” Translations
J.K. – Wow! I love the contest! Thank you for taking the (considerable) trouble to set that up. And may the gods who hold Olympus let the comments come rolling in!