Chances are many of you already read Jeff Trachtenberg’s WSJ story on the competitive market for literary classics in translation Friday morning, but I’ve been thinking about it over the weekend, because there’s some points that’ve been sticking with me with regard to the grumblers like poet/translator Allen Mandelbaum, for example, doesn’t think there’s a need for any new translations of Virgil’s Aeneid and “questions whether the new version [by Robert Fagles] will be an improvement.” Of course, Mandelbaum has a rather hefty stake in this, as his translation has been one of the better-regarded over the last thirty years, but people have been waiting for the Fagles with some eagerness. Viking publisher Paul Slovak, who’s putting out the Fagles, has a ready retort—”Times change, and there is a sense that every generation can find a new translation that speaks to them”—but I think there’s a little more to it than that. Looking past the reader to the text, I think it may be a sign of the endurance of these works that they’re continually firing the imagination of translator after translator, and that it’s important for somebody to come along every now and then and reassume the engagement.
So when CUNY literature prof André Aciman complains that the new translation of Proust’s Within a Budding Grove has been changed to In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, I have to laugh a little. “Do you know what that means, because I don’t,” he demands, to which I would have retorted that CUNY must be some sort of monastery, because its meaning seems perfectly clear to me. Aciman also “notes that the novels of Henry James and Jane Austen haven’t been rewritten for younger generations.” Of course, that’s a false dichotomy—retranslation is not the same thing as rewriting—but it also overlooks the fact that just about everything Jane Austen wrote has been adapted for the movies in the last decade, along with a smattering of James.
And that’s where my “re-imagination is all to the good” theory runs against one of my deepest ingrained prejudices: my firm belief that we don’t need a remake of The Wicker Man, especially not if Neil LaBute is going to turn it into a critique of matriarchy. Which I’m still not prepared to give up, even though everything I believe about translation suggests I should. Not sure how I’m going to reconcile that…