Found in Translation

In a scene in Homer's Odyssey, Ulysses is observed telling the men courting his wife something that can be lonely translated to, “Of all the creatures that breathe and move upon the Earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man”

The actual quote when looked at in English in the longer, unsimplified version goes somewhat like, "Nothing feebler does earth nurture than man, of all things that on earth are breathing and moving. For he thinks that he will never suffer evil in time to come, so long as the gods give him prosperity and his knees are quick; but when again the blessed gods decree him sorrow, this too he bears in sore despite with steadfast heart; for the spirit of men upon the earth is even such as the day which the father of gods and men brings upon them. For I, too, was once like to be prosperous among men, but many deeds of wantonness I wrought, yielding to my might and my strength, and trusting in my father and my brethren. Wherefore let no man soever be lawless at any time, but let him keep in silence whatever gifts the gods give. Aye, for I see the wooers devising wantonness, wasting the wealth and dishonoring the wife of a man who, I tell thee, will not long be away from his friends and his native land; nay, he is very near. But may some god lead thee forth hence to thy home, and mayest thou not meet him when he comes home to his dear native land. For not without bloodshed, methinks, will the wooers and he part one from the other when once he comes beneath his roof.” You see how much the very context of the quote changes when placed in this manner, how it talks about young, warm blooded men who are easily led astray by the attractions of the materialistic world. It talks about weak will, rather than physical weakness. This is a prime example of how translation can ruin the very basis of a piece of work by taking the verbatim meaning of a sentence. similarly, last year, in my coursework, I had the pleasure of studying Chief Seattle’s speech. However, in the text that we handled, the translator had clearly stated that due to the large number of times the speech has been translated and the vast illiteracy regarding native American languages at the time the speech was spoken, a lot of the speech was lost in translation and what we today look upon as the meaning of the speech and the context of the situation may not be related to the original speech and context at all.

This had me shaken to my very core. I love reading myths from different religions and cultures, both biblical and pagan, and folklore from all around the world. But what is the point if I am not even reading what the author wanted to tell me? What if one day something I have written today gets translated and the meaning that they take bears no similarity whatsoever to what I had actually wanted to convey?

But then I read books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull and found new meaning to the text very time I read it. And this started happening with other genres as well, and not just with me. As mental health awareness increased in the twenty first century, people started theorising that perhaps, all the seven books of Harry Potter are a figment of the overactive imagination of an abused orphan who wants to live in a world that he actually matters in.

And to come to the crux of the matter, I realised that every reader has his or her own interpretation of all pieces of art, let alone literature. Regardless of the language or medium they experience that place of work in, their own moods and experiences will determine how they perceive it, and how they translate it from artist’s language of thoughts to their own, that in reality, art imitates life in the way that it is perceived depending on the reality and life that the observer exists in, rather than the one of the artist’s existence, that somewhere, somehow, rather than losing the essence of literature in translation, we find our own identity.