Apuleius' The Golden Ass in Translation and Adaptation Brian Earl

240 Pages·2015·1.01 MB·English

by  Brian Earl

Apuleius’ The Golden Ass in Translation and Adaptation
Brian Earl

Advisors: Professor John Schafer and Professor Brian Bouldrey
Interdisciplinary Senior Thesis
Departments of Classics and English
Northwestern University
April 24, 2014
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Table of Contents
I. Introduction 3
II. The Golden Ass 43
a. Liber I 44
b. Liber II 64
c. Liber III 88
d. Liber IV 109
III. Stylistic Changes in Translation 129
IV. The Golden Ass: An Adaptation 141
a. Part 1 142
b. Part 2 168
c. Part 3 192
d. Part 4 218
V. Acknowledgments 240
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Introduction: On Translating Books 1-4 of The Golden Ass
Lector intende: laetaberis.
—Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 1.1
I. The Duty of the Translator
In my experience, Latin classes often encourage understanding a text in its original
language. Translation is a crutch for students who lack fluency, treated almost as a dirty word—
we’re not translating Latin, we’re reading it. Nobody cares if I sing of arms and a man, but
arma virumque cano—that’s another story. But reading Latin in Latin only succeeds when
everyone discussing the text possesses some level of fluency; when we wish to share the text
with someone who can’t read the language, we must somehow convey the author’s work in
words accessible to the new audience—and for many Latinists, this “somehow” presents a great
challenge. We might paraphrase or summarize, offer a stiff and robotic word-by-word
recounting, or flounder for any words at all. We might describe the essence of the text or dart
around the original meaning, but we almost always fail to give our non-Latinist friends the same
experience of reading the original. Often, the best we can do is simply to describe our
experience, but hearing that Dido’s lament is moving and powerful is not the same as being
moved by her powerful words.
Yet sharing an alien text is one of the great joys of learning a foreign language. Just as
the astronomy student would share the discovery of a new planet with her friends without using a
name like Kepler-20f, or the biologist would explain the fascinating mechanisms by which the
body functions in everyday language, so the classicist is eager to communicate the works of
Greece and Rome via translation, leaving behind the original Greek and Latin. Translation, in
the words of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “endow[s] a fresh nation, as far as possible, with one more
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possession of beauty” (65). As Friedrich Schleiermacher states, translation “bring[s] two people
together who are . . . totally separated from each other . . . [into the] immediate relationship . . .
of author and reader” (39). He later describes translation as “the difficult and impossible art of
merging the spirits of [two] languages into one another” (53). Translation is about sharing art
and beauty, about connecting people who are otherwise separated by time and distance.
The experience of translation perhaps rewards the translator even more than the reader.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observes that translating a text is one of the most intimate ways to
read (398). John Felstiner adds, “In translating . . . critical and creative activity converge” (94).
As a creative writer, translating The Golden Ass has made me consider Latin and English more
closely than I ever have in the past. When translating, I must think about how words function
grammatically, and how changing a grammatical construction changes the meaning; what words
really “mean” given their connotations, etymologies, and change in usage over time; and how
larger units of meaning—sentences, paragraphs, chapters—affect the reader’s experience of a
text. Such things are somewhat instinctive when working in a single language, but working with
two languages forces direct analysis of these concepts, and as a result, my own writing has
become more careful, nuanced, and deliberate. The translator is as much an artist as any other
writer, for finding elegant solutions to the complex problems translation presents is deeply
imaginative work.
With all this in mind, the translator faces certain duties. How can he best create, present,
and preserve this art? Vladimir Nabokov says the translator’s chief duty is to provide as literal a
translation as possible, “to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the
text” (134). Anything less than this sends Nabokov into “spasms of helpless fury”:
A schoolboy’s boner is less of a mockery in regard to the ancient masterpiece than its
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commercial interpretation or poetization. . . . The term “free translation” smacks of
knavery and tyranny. It is when the translator sets out to render the “spirit”—not the
textual sense—that he begins to traduce his author. The clumsiest literal translation is a
thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase. (127)
I—and more importantly, scholars and translators who are much more knowledgeable and
skilled than me—disagree. Octavio Paz, for instance, argues that “literal translation . . . is not
translation” (154). But why? Why is Nabokov incorrect? Wouldn’t a translator want to aim for
“absolute exactitude”? No: among other reasons, literal translations will inevitably fail to
capture the mood and tone of an author in a way that is accessible to the new audience.
Mood and tone—the experience of reading something—define a text; rendering this
“spirit” of a text is a necessity, not a denigration. Readers will remember few, if any, specific
words and phrases after completing a novel, but they will recall how they felt, whether they
laughed or cried or recoiled in disgust. John Dryden, who prepared a translation of Ovid’s
Epistles in 1680, proposes that this is what must be preserved in translation above all else; “the
sense of an author, generally speaking, is to be sacred and inviolable” (21). It is not the
individual words that matter so much as the feelings they convey. Yes, while a literal translation
is often sufficient for these purposes, the literal translation is not an end in itself, and when it
fails, the translator must know how to appropriately depart from the original text. Dryden
expands on these thoughts:
Words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be removed; customs are changed,
and even statutes are silently repealed, when the reason ceases for which they were
enacted. As for the other part of the argument, that [the author’s] thoughts will lose their
original beauty by the innovation of words; in the first place, not only their beauty, but
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their being is lost, where they are no longer understood . . . I grant that something must
be lost . . . in all translations; but the sense will remain, which would otherwise be lost,
or at least maimed, when it is scarce intelligible. (28)
The translator must modernize the text at the expense of individual words; failure to do so will
result in the greater losses of beauty, intelligibility, and experiencing the text in the way it was
meant to be experienced. Walter Benjamin agrees with Dryden’s sentiments, arguing a
translation should produce an “echo of the original” (77). Translation is not copying or
recreation; it is creation in a new form. An echo is not speech, but something entirely different,
sound waves reflected off a distant surface—yet an echo can have the same effect on the ears it
touches.
Nearly as important as preserving the author’s sense is preserving the original images,
whether in plain narrative or in figurative language. The translator should not add to or
embellish the author’s imagery any more than he should subdue or replace it. Why speak of the
setting sun when the author describes the sky growing darker and darker? Why say someone
walked like a wounded deer when the original says someone tottered unsteadily? In Reading
Rilke, William Gass compares fifteen different translations of Rilke’s writing. He scathingly
criticizes the translators (including himself) when they fail to preserve Rilke’s images (67). At
the same time, he interrogates the English translations for connotations that might subvert the
imagery; the word “terrifying,” for instance, has different colors than the German schrecklich.
Gass goes to great lengths to preserve as much of the original as he can—sense, mood, tone,
image; he deliberates about each and every word in his translation.
In this translation of The Golden Ass I prescribe to all these duties—conveying the text
faithfully, preserving the sense and image of the original, presenting the author so that the
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modern audience appreciates him as much as his ancient audience did. But my chief aim,
however, is to create something artistic. “The hallmark of bad translations,” writes Benjamin, is
the tendency to impart only information without striving for any new artistic ends (71). Paz,
likewise, describes translation as “a literary operation” (157). And so, I want my translation to
stand on its own, to provide pleasure to the reader, to be my own small contribution to what the
powers-that-be call “art.”

II. The Methods of Translation
No translation can exactly recreate the mood and meaning of a literary work, but it can
approximate it. How? It is not just a language we must translate when working with Latin—it is
an entire culture. Separated by an ocean and two thousand years, how can we recreate a text so a
modern American audience will appreciate it? The translator’s most important skill is his ability
to make careful, informed decisions. Lydia Davis succinctly quips, “No choice is simple, even
one that seems simple” (62). The translator must be able to recognize the sort of decisions he
makes—even the instinctive ones—and articulate and justify each and every choice.
Dryden describes the various strategies for approaching a translation project. “All
translation,” he writes, “may be reduced to . . . three heads.” These heads are
metaphrase, or turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into
another . . . paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by
the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his
sense; and that too is admitted to be amplified, but not altered . . . [and] imitation, where
the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from
the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion . . . taking only some
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general hints from the original. (17)
These are the translator’s tools: metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation. They are three distinct
vehicles that transport the reader from one place to another—like automobiles, ferries, and trains.
Transferring from one to another in a single trip can be inconvenient, frustrating, or downright
impossible, and so it is better to pick a mode and stick with it. Schleiermacher, who favors
metaphrase, writes that imitation should never be combined with the other methods, for doing so
turns the entire translation into “mere imitation, or to a still more repulsively conspicuous and
confusing mixture of translation and imitation that throws the reader mercilessly back and forth
like a ball” (51).
However, sometimes a journey necessitates merging methods. Just as someone driving
from Milwaukee to Detroit will either need to take a long and circuitous route through Illinois—
with potentially brutal, unforgiving traffic in Chicago—or else take an expensive but relaxing
ferry across Lake Michigan, some passages will prevent translators with similar dilemmas. A
direct translation (metaphrase) might be clunky, confusing, or arduous to read, when a
paraphrase presents a smoother, more elegant route, but at the cost of the original language. In
such instances, the translator might choose to mix methods rather than religiously sticking with
one, just as the driver might decide the easiest journey involves paying the extra fare for the
ferry. Indeed, in many cases metaphrase and paraphrase complement each other quite well.
Like automobiles, ferries, and trains, metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation each have
advantages and disadvantages; depending on the goal of a particular translation, one method may
prove more effective than the others. Metaphrase provides the most “literal” translation of a
text—every word in the original will have something that corresponds to it in the translation, and
there will be no additions. This allows the reader to understand what the original text “says”
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more than any other method, and the reader will be able to draw their own conclusions about the
text free from interpretive actions from the translator. So why not exclusively use metaphrase?
One problem lies in that what is idiomatic in a foreign language might not make sense in
the new tongue. Some idioms transfer perfectly—the Latin verb replicare (to turn/fold
back/over) can be used with thoughts; in English, we can also say “I turned these thoughts over.”
Other idioms, however, do not translate well—Latin speakers would say there was a manus
(hand) of robbers, but in English, we would say a “group” or a “band.” In some instances of
idiomatic trouble, the translator can integrate any method of translation fairly seamlessly into his
work. A metaphrase will reproduce the original text faithfully, though the phrase might strike
the readers’ ear as odd or nonsensical (e.g., the Danish use the idiom “to take off the clogs”); a
paraphrase would describe or explain the idiom (“to die”); and an imitation would choose an
idiom from the target language to replace the original (“to kick the bucket”).
The problems of metaphrase extend beyond figures of speech—a translation based solely
on metaphrase will struggle to capture the mood and tone of the original. Roman authors and
American authors have different styles of writing. As an inflected language, Latin has much
more flexibility regarding where words can fall in sentences. This allows authors to place
subjects, objects, and verbs in various positions to add or subtract emphasis. Literary Latin—
including that of Apuleius—is marked by long, twisting sentences, using copious nested relative
clauses; subjects, verbs, and objects are often separated by a surprising amount of space. On the
other hand, American English favors short, clear, concise sentences, which Davis points out in
her essay on translating Proust, whose verbosity rivals that of Apuleius (58). As Edward
Seidensticker states, “An English sentence hastens to the main point and for the most part lets the
qualifications [adjectives, relative clauses, etc.] follow after” (143). Latin does not do this,
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sometimes beginning with descriptions before revealing the subject, and often delaying the verb
until the very end of a clause or sentence. While a modern writer can mimic some of Latin’s
emphatic choices, such word order will be unusual in English, making the sentence stand out
compared to its counterpart in the original. The translator will inevitably modernize and
normalize the word order of sentences; retaining the original word order would be unsustainable
for more than a sentence or two, reading like utter gibberish.
When faced with cumbersomely long sentences, the metaphraser has two options: break
up the sentences into smaller chunks to adapt to a more modern style; or retain the old sentence
length at the risk of leaving the reader lost and confused, needing to reread passages over and
over again to track the flow of meaning. The Romans were accustomed to their characteristically
long sentences, and so they would not have had much trouble following them, keeping track of
subjects, verbs, and other crucial information. So, if the metaphraser chooses to retain original
sentence divisions, the reader will have a much more difficult time following the text than the
original audience (though to be fair, even the Romans would have had to stop, think about, and
reread the most convoluted Latin sentences). Benjamin warns, “A literal rendering of the syntax
. . . is a direct threat to comprehensibility” (79). However, if the metaphraser chooses to break
up the long sentences into more digestible chunks, he sacrifices fidelity to the original. In either
case, the metaphraser will be able to translate what the text means, but not the exact experience
of reading it.
Unsurprisingly, the fundamental differences between two languages determines how
effective metaphrase can be for translation. When languages differ not only in vocabulary but in
style and the way words function, translation becomes more difficult; Seidensticker writes:
The farther apart the languages, the more real the contradiction [between the duty of