Versions and translations

As I said, the free book from the Poetry Book Society was Christopher Logue's War Music, a version of Homer. Or, depending which bit of the cover you read, 'Logue's Homer - War Music' or 'Christopher Logue - War Music - Homer'. Or even, once inside, 'War Music: An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer's Iliad'. It is, we're told on the inside of the front cover, 'less a translation than an adaptation', and in the author's introduction 'a dramatic poem dependent on the Iliad'.

This anxiety about what it is exactly is emphasised by the editor's introduction, which discusses early on the misinterpretations of the book as a 'translation'. It seems unfortunate to wrap it in this confusion as it is presented to the reader: perhaps it would be more effective just to clearly reiterate what it is, rather than remind people of what it isn't, or try on different explanations for size. But the editors are clearly tackling a tricky area: people's persistence and inventiveness at misunderstanding translations is remarkable.

To my mind this is both frustrating and unnecessary. I'm rather bored at the introduction to countless books of poetry in translation rehearsing the same fairly basic ideas about the extent to which it's possible to translate poetry, but why it's beneficial, mentioning a few august precursors (often Pound) and the usual humble statements about the difficulty of the process and debts to previous translations. It's a bit like if all collections of rhyming verse had an introduction explaining what rhyme was, its pros and cons and so forth. I think much of the kerfuffle about translation springs from conflating two simple ideas.

There are a range of ways of rendering a poem in translation, from a literal transcription to a 'version', which takes more liberties, to a 'response', which renounces any specific obligations to the original. Each of these have their merits and different purposes: the key is in distinguishing them, for which purpose, presentation is key. War Music, despite drawing attention to confusions, is actualy relatively clear on this point. Anyone using it to crib their Greek translation homework would well deserve the ridicule they'd get for references to Bikini atoll, and so forth.

There is, of course, a distinct (if related) debate about which approach to translation get closest to the original. This is different from claiming that closeness to the original is inherently desirable. But one way of thinking about this question is in terms of two axes. One is the degree of fidelity to the form of the original (shown most obviously in the choice of verse or prose translation). The other is fidelity to the content, the extent to which you say the same thing, with the same inflection and associations. Ideally, for the closest translation possible, it will score highly on both axes (I'm aware that Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society would have thrown me out of class at this point...).

However, reducing the formal fidelity can increase the fidelity to meaning. Viewed like this, the debate centres on what trade-off is worthwhile to achieve these ends. There are some potentially interesting discussions about how significant particular details within these trade-offs. But hopefully, it's clear that this is a very different debate to the one about whether the closest version is preferable.

War Music is very much a version, rather than a translation, and it's none the worse for that.