Imbolc Valentine Moon
Finished the Deucalion and Pyrrha story in the Metamorphoses. This is Ovid’s flood narrative, one he shares with other classical writers, the Enuma Elish and, most famously in our culture, Genesis. Unlike the other long passages I’ve translated I’m stopping here and returning immediately to the beginning. My goal this second time (third in the case of some of the verses) through is to work on polishing, creating as pleasing an English form for Ovid’s work as I can. This will force me into the nuances of translating rather than the brute force, literal work I’ve done up until now.
(Léon-François COMERRE (1850-1916)
My pace has picked up though it’s not yet where I want it, but I’m still very much focused on the grammar and the syntax, trying to produce a faithful and mostly literal translation of Ovid’s Latin. This is a distance from a good English translation for several reasons. The range of meanings for each word. The syntactical demands of Latin and English. Certain grammatical constructions that don’t appear in English or become clumsy when translated. The fact that Ovid wrote for an audience with far different background knowledge and expectations of poetry than ours. The meaning of the work in its own time and the inevitable distortion of it when read in ours. And so on.
None of these are insuperable. There are many translations of so many works. Yet each does a certain violence to the home text, wrenching it out of its natural medium and forcibly inserting it in another. Translating is both art and skill. I’m finally getting the skill necessary to give the art a try.