'Twas Ever Thus
Every generation has its Homer. That is each has a translator of the great writings of antiquity that touches the reader like the work of a living genius. The older generation now alive will go down to the grave clutching Richmond Lattimore's "Iliad" -- "The finest translation of Homer ever made into the English language." For me, Homer's English voice will be that of Robert Fagles.
You cannot compare them to pick a winner, except in terms of fidelity to the Greek, which is not the point. A generation passed between Lattimore and Fagles. You need a contemporary translator to tease the story up out of the depths of time, like a clever old pike in a pond, to bring it dazzling and alive into the light of the present.
No work is as difficult and as thankless as translation. When a character speaks in a certain accent that ancient listeners would recognize at once as "Spartan" (by its flattened vowels, something as a Scottish accent is to English), you instantly click into certain expectations about him or her. The ancient author can communicate a whole cultural identity in a single word. How do you convey that in modern terms, in a world where nobody knows Spartans from Trojenz?
It's also true that old translations can be living classics in their own right. Keats reached back past Pope's "Odyssey" to George Chapman's robust Elizabethan translation. And in the 20th century Ezra Pound was delighted by the stunning, almost medieval Scots-English version of the Aeneid by Gavin Douglas, a work as dark, cold, and brine-soaked as a Scottish seacoast.
Now there's a new history of the Peloponnesian War, ripe for our times, by Victor Davis Hanson, fair-haired historian of the neo-cons and bête noire of the Bush-bashers.
His work is not at all a translation of Thucydides. Yet no history of the war can be written without walking in the Greek exile's footsteps. Hanson's book is called A War Like No Other : How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
But as this review makes clear, the book is at the same time a statement that the clash of the Greeks was, at the same time, a war like a great many others, even if we've forgotten that:
Stan Getz? Yeesh, what an image.
In interviews, Hanson is more explicit about the parallels he sees:
You cannot compare them to pick a winner, except in terms of fidelity to the Greek, which is not the point. A generation passed between Lattimore and Fagles. You need a contemporary translator to tease the story up out of the depths of time, like a clever old pike in a pond, to bring it dazzling and alive into the light of the present.
No work is as difficult and as thankless as translation. When a character speaks in a certain accent that ancient listeners would recognize at once as "Spartan" (by its flattened vowels, something as a Scottish accent is to English), you instantly click into certain expectations about him or her. The ancient author can communicate a whole cultural identity in a single word. How do you convey that in modern terms, in a world where nobody knows Spartans from Trojenz?
It's also true that old translations can be living classics in their own right. Keats reached back past Pope's "Odyssey" to George Chapman's robust Elizabethan translation. And in the 20th century Ezra Pound was delighted by the stunning, almost medieval Scots-English version of the Aeneid by Gavin Douglas, a work as dark, cold, and brine-soaked as a Scottish seacoast.
Now there's a new history of the Peloponnesian War, ripe for our times, by Victor Davis Hanson, fair-haired historian of the neo-cons and bête noire of the Bush-bashers.
His work is not at all a translation of Thucydides. Yet no history of the war can be written without walking in the Greek exile's footsteps. Hanson's book is called A War Like No Other : How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
But as this review makes clear, the book is at the same time a statement that the clash of the Greeks was, at the same time, a war like a great many others, even if we've forgotten that:
Hanson’s Peloponnesian War lacks heroes. Pitched battle takes second place to skirmishes, raids, night attacks, and terror campaigns. We hear of cruelty, butchery, and cannibalism: This is not the glory that was Greece, but a Mediterranean chamber of horrors. The reader thinks of such disillusioned World War II novels as Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five or Malaparte’s neglected masterpiece, The Skin.
This may seem like strange territory for Hanson, who is not only a classical scholar but a journalist. He is a neoconservative advocate of an aggressive American foreign policy that is not afraid of using force in the interests of spreading freedom and democracy. But the paradox is more apparent than real. Hanson is too shrewd a student of warfare to imagine that “the romance of a good nineteenth-century fight,” as he puts it, is likely to be on offer today. In Iraq and Afghanistan, in every airport and in the London Underground, and in hundreds of unseen alleyways and mountain passes, we are locked in the dubious battles of a dirty war. Hanson’s account of fear, fire, and terror (to cite some of his chapter titles) is a tale for the times. Yet if there is a mournful quality to Hanson’s meditation, the book is no lament: like Stan Getz playing Burt Bacharach, Hanson makes art out of loss. How sad that war has lost its mythic appeal, now, let’s get on with it; that is how we might read the book’s message.
Stan Getz? Yeesh, what an image.
In interviews, Hanson is more explicit about the parallels he sees:
Everything we have seen in the present global war — slaughtering schoolchildren in Beslan; murdering diplomats; taking hostages; lopping limbs; targeted assassinations; roadside killing; spreading democracy through arms — had identical counterparts in the Peloponnesian War. That is not surprising when Thucydides reminds us that the nature of man does not change, and thus war is eternal, its face merely evolving with new technology that masks, but does not alter its essence.
More importantly, Athens' tragedy reminds of us of our dilemma that often wealth, leisure, sophistication, and, yes, cynicism, are the wages of successful democracy and vibrant economies, breeding both a sort of smugness and an arrogance. And for all Thucydides' chronicle of Athenian lapses, in the last analysis, rightly or wrongly, he attributes much of Athens' defeat to infighting back at home, and a hypercritical populace, egged on by demagogues that time and again turned on their own.
So the war is also a timely reminder about the strengths — and lethal propensities — of democracies at war. And we should remember that when we hear some of the internecine hysteria voiced here at home — whether over a flushed Koran or George Bush's flight suit — when 160,000 Americans are risking their lives to ensure that 50 million can continue to vote.
