Introduction
Dante: 'The Crossing' (Seeing Things)
Dante: first stanza of 'Inferno'
Anything Can Happen (District and Circle)
Rilke: After the Fire (District and Circle)
Rilke: The Apple Orchard (District and Circle)
Cavafy (District and Circle)
J C Bloem (The Spirit Level)
Jan Kochanowski (Laments)
The Cure at Troy (A version of Sophocles' Philoctetes)



Introduction

In the sections which follow, apart from the sections 'After Liberation,' 'Laments' and 'The Cure at Troy,' I use these sub-sections:

A. Original, with information about the source.
B. Discussion of Seamus Heaney's translation or version: general issues and detailed issues.
C. My translation.
D. Discussion of my translation.

In my discussion of translations of the first stanza of Dante's 'Inferno,' I give a further section, 'Notes on other translations.'

J C Bloem's poem 'Na de Bevrijding' is in copyright, like, of course, Seamus Heaney's translation ('After Liberation,' in 'The Spirit Level') and all the other published writing of Seamus Heaney. For this poem, I give the whole of my translation, followed by the last two lines and the first line of the original Dutch and Seamus Heaney's translation of these lines. Then I discuss some phrases in the original and in Seamus Heaney's translation.

I discuss the translation of only four lines of Jan Kochanowski's 'Treny III' and mainly a single aspect: the translation of repetition. My knowledge of Polish is much more restricted than my knowledge of the other languages here. I studied Polish before visiting Poland and spoke Polish whilst I was there, but only for simple, everyday purposes. The Polish of 'Treny' is Renaissance Polish: the book was published in 1580.

So far as I'm aware, of the languages in his translations, Seamus Heaney has effectively no knowledge of Classical Greek, Modern Greek and Polish. I believe that his knowledge of German and Dutch is very limited, or less than limited. He's translated from Irish, but has only a very modest knowledge of the language. I know that he studied Latin for years and even if he hasn't studied Italian thoroughly, it may well be that he has a fair grasp of the language. It isn't in the least uncommon for poets to offer translations from languages they haven't studied, of course. This is a handicap which is sometimes overcome very successfully, sometimes not in the least. On this page, I examine the results, the virtues and faults of Seamus Heaney's translations.

In the case of 'The Cure at Troy' I provide a continuous discussion, but only of the opening (except for some comments on the ending), not the whole play - as far as line 143.

As a first approximation, there are 'faithful translations,' 'improved translations,' 'versions' and 'unfaithful, unimproved translations.'

Faithful translations should above all be at the service of the original. They should observe 'the ethics' of translation. If the original becomes obscure or paradoxical or makes use of repetition, the translation should in general be obscure or paradoxical or make use of repetition. If the original uses repeatedly the word, in the source-language, for 'say' but not 'declare' or 'state' or 'speak' (available in the source-language but not used) then the translation should use 'say' consistently, and not give the illusion of variety by translating the one word by 'say,' 'declare,' 'state' and 'speak.' Faithful translators should serve the text and do the best they can for the text, but not by 'improving' it. Producing a faithful translation is far from straightforward. A 'faithful' translation of a word or phrase may be misleading. There may be a great gulf between the world view of the original and the world view to which the new translation belongs. Faithful translators need to know the language of the original well, although not exceptionally well.

'Versions' use the text as a starting point. Faithfulness to the text isn't required. Seamus Heaney's 'Mycenae Lookout' ('The Spirit Level') is an example. This is the least problematic of the translation-types. Writers of versions need not know the language of the original at all. I discuss on this page 'Anything Can Happen,' a 'version' which uses an ode by Horace as a starting point but not 'Mycenae Lookout' in 'The Spirit Level,' which uses Aeschylus' 'Agamemnon' as a starting point but diverges from the original to a greater extent than 'Anything can Happen.' I discuss 'Mycenae Lookout' on the page 'Criticism of Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man' and other poems.' In all the poems I discuss on this page, the original is more directly relevant than in the case of 'Mycenae Lookout.'

The most problematic is the 'improved translation.' The word 'improved' here refers not to an improvement on the original but an improvement on the 'faithful translation.' The improved translation is intended to have fidelity to the original - usually less fidelity than the faithful translator's - but it's the product of a mind with distinct literary strengths not usually found in faithful translators. Improved translations of an original with literary quality are intended to be literary works in their own right, like the original, and like 'versions.' Most poets with a reputation as poets have seen themselves as improvers or producers of versions rather than as faithful translators. I think that improved translation needs some knowledge of the language of the original, as much knowledge as a faithful translator's, preferably, but often, improved translators do without.

The last type is the 'unfaithful, unimproved translation,' which lacks the devotion to the original of faithful translations and the literary qualities of improved translations and versions.

Dante: The Crossing (Seeing Things)

A. Original Dante, Inferno, Canto III, lines 82 - 129.

Ed ecco verso noi venir per nave
un vecchio, bianco per antico pelo,
gridando: 'Guai a voi, anime prave!

Non isperate mai veder lo cielo:
i' vegno per menarvi a l' altra riva
ne le tenebre etterne, in caldo e' n gelo.

E tu che se' costì anima viva,
pàrtiti da cotesti che son morti.'
Ma poi che vide chi' io non mi partiva,

disse: 'Per altra via, per altri porti
verrai a piaggia, non qui, per passare:
più lieve legno convien che ti porti.'

E 'l duca lui: 'Caron, non ti crucciare:
vuolsi così colà dove si puote
ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare.

Quinci fuor quete le lanose gote
al nocchier de la livida palude,
che 'ntorno a li occhi avea di fiamme rote.

Ma quell' anime, ch' eran lasse e nude,
Cangiar colore e dibattero i denti,
ratt che 'nteser le parole crude.

Bestemmiavano Dio e lor parenti,
l' umana spezie e 'l loco e 'l tempo e 'l seme
di lor semenza e di lor nascimenti.

Poi si ritrasser tutte quante insieme,
forte piangendo, a la riva malvagia
ch' attende ciascun uom che Dio non teme.

Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia,
loro accennando, tutte le raccoglie;
batte col remo qualunque s' adagia.

Come d' autunno si levan le foglie
l' una appresso de l' altra, finr che 'l ramo
vede a lat terra tutte le sue spoglie,

similemente il mal seme d' Adamo
gittansi di quellito aduna ad una,
per cenni come augel per suo richiamo.

Così sen vanno su per l' onda bruna,
e avanti che sien di là discese,
anche di qua nuova schiera s' auna.

'Figliuol mio' disse 'l maestro cortese,
'quelli che muoin ne l' ira di Dio
tutti convegnon qui d' ogne paese,

e pronti son a trapassar lo rio,
ché la divina giustizia li sprona,
sì che la tema si volve in disio.

Quinci non passa mai anima buona;
e però, se Caron di te si lagna,
ben puoi sapere omai che 'l suo dir suona.'

B. Discussion of Seamus Heaney's translation (in 'Seeing Things,' with title 'The Crossing.')

To begin with a detail, but a detail which has a linkage with plausibility and characterization and which reveals some of the fascinating difficulties of translation. The best known lines in this extract from Canto III of 'The Inferno' are about Charon, who orders the damned to get into his boat

And beats with his oar whoever drops behind

in Seamus Heaney's translation. ('beats' is 'batte' in the original.) Sean O' Brien's translation of the same line is

And clubs the laggards with his dripping oar:

In general, I like Sean O' Brien's translation very much, but this line is one of the less successful. Without commenting further on the 'dripping' oar, which isn't in the original, 'clubs' isn't the best choice of word. Clubs and similar weapons are much shorter than oars but more important, clubbing the laggards is too extreme. Charon is trying to make them hurry, to get a move on. Later, we're told that before one batch has disembarked on the far side of the river, another batch has gathered on the near side, waiting to be ferried across in its turn. Charon has to work with urgency. Charon perhaps doesn't have the time for beating either, and by injuring the damned, they are less likely to hurry, more likely to cause problems for the terrible logistics of Hell, here approximating to a hectic industrial production line. (In my translation, I try to suggest a production line by using 'assembled there' of the damned waiting to be ferried across the Styx.) Later, I discuss the obvious point - is there any need for plausibility here?

Seamus Heaney's 'beats with his oar' suggests a succession of blows. Collins English Dictionary for 'beat' : 'to strike with or as if with a series of violent blows; dash or pound repeatedly (against).' The oar needed for propelling a boat containing many people would be unwieldy (I write as an ex-rower) and very difficult to use for beating, for repeated blows. (In the story 'Black Peter,' Sherlock Holmes showed the extreme difficulty of using a harpoon by trying it himself at a butcher's. Trying to use a long and heavy oar to imitate beating is an exercise which needn't be attempted, unless someone is very curious.)

Very violent action isn't required by the character of Charon. His eyes alone give him a fearful appearance and his words to the damned are harsh, but he's also a figure of fun. Vergil, Dante's guide, finds it very easy to shut him up. He's formidable only in part. Osmin in Mozart's opera 'Die Enführung aus dem Serail' his similarities with Charon. Osmin's words are often cruel, just as Charon's are 'crudele.' In a letter to his father, Mozart refers to 'the stupid, surly, malevolent Osmin but Osmin is blustering and sometimes ridiculous too. 'Blonde can manipulate Osmin with ease' (David Cairns, 'Mozart and his Operas.')

So, for various reasons, I think that 'batte' calls for less severe action in translation than clubbing or beating. Anthony Esolen in his translation, a fairly literal translation which I like very much, uses 'smacks' but 'to smack' is 'to strike or slap smartly, with or as if with the open hand' (Collins English Dictionary.) This isn't a suitable word to describe hitting with an oar.

'Thwacks' would have the advantage that it describes hitting with something flat and the part of the oar which would be used in hitting is flat, but this is a nuance which many readers will be unaware of, and 'thwacks' isn't often used in contemporary English. In my translation, I use 'whacks,' which is without the th- sound, not a 'visceral' or 'sinewy' sound but an awkward sound in 'thwacks,' I think. An oar is well adapted to giving a 'whack,' a single, resounding blow, but not to beating or clubbing.

Dante's 'Inferno' is full of grotesque and bizarre events, people and animals. Are these considerations of plausibility and implausibility relevant? I'm sure that they are. This is a world which is still subject to {restriction}, for example {restriction} imposed by characterization. It makes perfectly good sense, for example, to consider the different characterizations of Vergil, the guide, and Charon. They're markedly different. What would be plausible words or actions for one would be completely implausible for the other.

Hölderlin's poem 'Lebenslauf' has the lines,

Herrscht im schiefesten Orkus
Nicht ein Grades, ein Recht noch auch?

Even in most crooked Orcus
does not a straightness, a rightness rule?

where 'Orcus' is the Roman name for Hades. In Hades and Hell, despite the differences from our own world, a straightness, a rightness - and plausibility - rule, to an extent.

After this discussion of the translation of a single word, I turn to the translation of whole lines. Here, Seamus Heaney is sometimes very diffuse.

Polysyllables are far more common in Italian than English, which has such a store of one-syllable nouns and other parts of speech. A translator may sometimes use more syllables than are strictly necessary to achieve a certain end, to convey a nuance, for example, but generally, lines in English with less syllables than the Italian are in order. They are more likely to convey the directness of Dante's Italian.

In some places, such as its first line, 'The Crossing' is diffuse and simply uses, not too many polysyllabic words but too many syllables in total. Here, the original is preceded by the line number. Seamus Heaney's translation is given in the line immediately following. The number of syllables in the original line and his translation are given in in brackets.

Despite the fact that 'nave' has 2 syllables and its translation, 'boat,' has 1, there are more syllables in the first line of 'The Crossing' than in the original:

82. Ed ecco verso noi venir per nave (11)
And there in a boat that came heading towards us (12)

This is a particularly diffuse (and ineffective) line in 'The Crossing:'

118. Così sen vanno su per l' onda bruna, (11)
They go away like this over the brown waters (12)

In the next example, it may seem that Seamus Heaney's translation is 'syllabically' faultless, but he should certainly have used the monosyllabic 'ports' instead of 'harbours.' Although 'porti' can mean harbours or ports, harbours are where boats and ships dock, even though they put to sea again from the harbour. Ports are far more places of transit. Dante is to go there 'per passare,' to be carried from there to another destination.

91. disse: 'Per altra via, per altri porti (12)
He said, 'By another way, by other harbours (12)

In the next example, Seamus Heaney uses only one syllable less than the original, even though the original has 'isperate' (4 syllables) and the word he uses to translate it, perfectly correctly, 'hope' has one. His use of 'heavenly' was unnecessary. It's not in the original and doesn't convey the total loss nearly so effectively - the loss of the ability to see any skies.

85. Non isperate mai veder lo cielo; (12)
O never hope to see the heavenly skies! (11)

There are no mechanical ways of arriving at an estimate of the success of a poem, including a translation-poem, and certainly not by counting syllables, but poets, and translators whose translations are in metre, have to have an acute awareness of syllables, they should keep track of syllables very carefully, even if they rarely count the actual number in a line.

Too many or too few syllables give a {restriction} on the metrical success of the poem and such linked issues as the urgency, momentum, unhurried ease, contemplative inwardness, calmness, degree of diffuseness and other qualities of the poem. The success of a poem depends upon the choice of words, the placing of words - and its punctuation, just as the success of a drawing, its emotional depth or dramatic impact, is completely dependent upon the marks on paper or another medium, broader or narrower marks, the very fine differences of weight which can be applied, the placing of these marks.

I give an example of the linkage between syllable count and success - not just metrical success - in my discussion of Seamus Heaney's Digging. One word may seem to have no advantages over another word as regards meaning but different syllable counts may well give one of the words great advantages in a translation. Sometimes the word which is closer in its nuance to the original being translated should be rejected simply because its syllable count is unsuitable for the purpose. (I leave out in this simple account a consideration of the distribution of stresses in the words.) Sometimes both the meaning and the syllable count of one word are preferable to those of another word. This is the case for 'ports,' which Seamus Heaney didn't use in line 91, preferring 'harbours,' which was much less suitable.

Poets, poet-translators and translator-poets sometimes consider only the effect of adding or removing words or changing the placing of words but poets have to be intensely aware of syllables. Even though they can only modify the number of syllables in a line by adding or removing words (unless they divide a word between lines, as in 'exact- / -ness' instead of 'exactness / ...' or ' ... / exactness' ) the syllables should often be the focus of attention. Prose writers have to be aware of syllables too, but not to nearly the same extent.

'The Crossing' gives rise to many more reservations than the ones already mentioned. These are a few.

In the next example, 'his God' suggests a Dante who believes 'the modern polytheism' which recognizes that different people recognize or worship very different gods, not 'the medieval Christian monotheism,' according to which there is only one God, and those who recognize or worship very different gods are heretics, and may well find a place in the Inferno.

107. ... a la rive malvagia
ch' attende ciascun uom che Dio non teme.
... the accursed shore that waits
For every man who does not fear his God.

In the next example, 'levan' means 'raised,' 'lifted,' not 'fall off:'

112. Come d' autunno si levan le foglie
As one by one the leaves fall off in autumn

The dialogue is sometimes stilted, for example in this line (it follows the mention of harbours) :

92. verrai a piaggia, non qui, per passare:
You shall reach a different shore and pass over.

To include this translation in 'Seeing Things' was surely a mistake. There are very many translations of the complete 'Inferno,' more than fifty. A conductor who gives to the listening public another recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has to give a version which is exceptional. A conductor who gives to the listening public not just a single movement of the symphony but part of a movement is doing a disservice to music. The musical structure of the symphony, such as the exposition, development and recapitulation of movements in sonata form in the first and last movement, with their tonal contrasts, don't allow any serious interpreter to excerpt in this way. The 'Inferno' is one of those works with a particularly highly organized and significant structure, of course. Sean O' Brien in the introduction to his translation (his translation of Canto III lines 82 - 129, the lines which make up Seamus Heaney's 'The Crossing' is at a much higher poetic level than 'The Crossing') writes of the Commedia in his 'Introduction,'

'It is soon apparent that the Commedia as a whole is a work of remarkably thorough and intricate design: a complete imaginative world ... The design can be seen at the level of cosmic order, where Dante adapts the Ptolemaic universe of concentric spheres to the purposes of Christianity, maintaining an exact congruence between the material universe and its moral significance and creating a poetic counterpart to the theology set out by Thomas Aquinas ...

'Dante also builds in the astrological zodiac, with constellations used as timepieces by Virgil, Dante's guide, who maintains a very strict schedule for the journey. At a less explicit level, there is also a complex system of numerological symbolism ... '

There are other organizing principles as well, but Seamus Heaney has ignored all of them by lifting these lines out of their context. His extract ends at line 129. Canto III ends at line 136, with the wonderful line 'e caddi come l' uom cui sonno piglia.' His decision to stop at line 129 is incomprehensible, although if he had continued to the end of the Canto, the objections to his procedure would remain.

There are circumstances, of course, in which the publication of extracts from the Inferno can easily be justified, but not here, in 'Seeing Things.' His own original work in the volume was ample, the volume wasn't so slim that it needed any translations to give it greater bulk.

C. My translation

And look! Heading towards us by boat,
an old man with white and ancient hair,
roaring: 'Woe betide you, twisted souls!'

Abandon hope of seeing the sky.
I'm here to lead you to the far shore,
to eternal darkness, heat and ice.

And as for you - yes, you! - living soul,
away from those others who are dead!
But when he saw that I wouldn't budge,

he said, ' Other ports, another route,
will carry you to that shore, not here.
A light conveyance will be your boat.

'Stop worrying yourself,' said my guide.
This is willed there, where anything can
be done which is willed. Demand nothing.

Then at once the hairy jaws fell quiet,
the boatman's of the black and blue swamp,
whose eyes still darted with rings of flame.

But those exhausted and naked souls,
with all their colour drained, ground their teeth
after they had heard his callous talk,

hurled blasphemy at God, their parents,
the human race, the place, time and seed
of their conception and of their birth.

Then all of them assembled there with
bitter tears, on the accursed bank
awaiting those without fear of God.

Charon the demon, with eyes that glow,
summons every one into the boat,
whacks with his oar the ones who are slow.

As the autumn leaves are lifted off
one after the other, till the bough
sees all its treasured leaves upon the ground,

in just the same way Adam's bad seed
fling themselves from the shore one by one -
hawks returning to the master's hand.

So, they sail across the murky burn,
and before they've disembarked out there,
a new crowd has gathered in its turn.

'My son,' explained the gracious teacher,
'everyone who dies beneath God's wrath,
from every country, gather here,

and they are quick to cross the flood,
since divine justice lashes them on
so what brings terror is what they would.

Not one good soul ever comes this way;
and so, if Charon ever complains,
you know how to work out what he says.'

D. Discussion of my translation

Dante's lines generally have 11 syllables. Even though there's variation, I see every reason for attempting to convey the great regularity which exists in the original. In my translation, every line has 9 syllables. This is near to the syllable count of lines in iambic pentameter, but what's counted in lines in iambic pentameter are strong stresses, not syllables, of course. In my discussion of metre I give my reasons for diverging from an analysis in terms of metrical feet, such as those of iambic pentameters.

I find that lines of 9 syllables are well suited to translating the original hendecasyllabic lines of the original. Seamus Heaney's syllable count is surely inflated, given that English poetry uses fewer syllables than Italian. Although I use absolute regularity here, some flexibility would be called for in more extended passages. Almost always, though, the variant lines would have 8 or 10 syllables.

Generally, contemporary translators use lines which are shorter than Seamus Heaney's and sometimes much shorter.

In his translation, Steve Ellis, uses short lines, tetrameters. Robert Pinsky varies the length of lines very much. Sometimes they are very short, as in these lines from Canto 8:

' ... O Master, say:
What does this beacon mean?
And the other fire -
What answer does it signal?
And who are they
Who set it there?

 I translate

Non isperate mai veder lo cielo:

Abandon hope of seeing the sky:

This echoes the famous line earlier in the Canto (line 9):

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch' intrate.

Which is translated, but not by me, as 'Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.'

I translate 'qualunque s' adagia' as 'the ones who are slow,' instead of using a word such as 'laggard,' on account of the linkage with the musical term 'adagio,' for an indication of slow tempo, a term now embedded in English. (I was also thinking of the pony in Thomas Hardy's 'At Castle Boterel' which 'sighed and slowed.')

The 'burn' in 'So, they sail across the murky burn,' is strictly a stream, not a river, made wider by poetic licence, as 'sail across' makes clear. 'burn' is linked by sound with 'turn.' I make use of full rhyme and para-rhyme in this translation but resist any temptation to make use of terza rima. The mechanical effect of terza rima in English, or at least the English of Dante translations, is too obvious.

Dante: first stanza of 'Inferno'

A. Original 'Inferno,' Canto I, lines 1 - 3

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.

B. Discussion of Seamus Heaney's translation

Seamus Heaney's translation:

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road has been lost sight of.

This is poor. In the first line, the image-terms 'middle,' 'journey' and 'life' are made far less effective by clutter and clumsiness: 'in the,' 'of the,' 'of our.' The repeated 'of' is particularly obtrusive:

In the middle of the journey of our life

the second line, 'astray' anticipates in a completely unnecessary way the third line, which makes it completely clear that Dante is now lost or 'astray,' In the third line, there's the culpable, unrhythmic clumsiness of 'has been lost sight of.' Old-fashioned stylistic rules such as 'never end a sentence with a preposition' are sometimes broken very effectively, but not here. This third 'of' compounds the effect of the first two occurrences. The sound linkage between 'astray' in line 2 and 'straight' in line 3 isn't an effective linkage: the sibilant sounds are prominent and distracting.

Not all sound-linkages of individual letters are equally effective in poetry, surely, but the subject hasn't been thoroughly studied. Some sounds lend themselves better to the prolongation which alliteration and similar sound-linkages give, for example 'm:' m-m-m. Some others are far less suitable and I think the 's' sound falls in this category. Referring to the 'ancestor' of 's,' the Greek 'sigma,' Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote that 'Sigma is an unattractive, disagreeable letter, very offensive, when used to excess. [as in sound-linkages of the letter, I'd claim.] A hiss seems a sound more suited to a brute beast than to a rational being.' [I wouldn't agree with this.] Quoted by David Fredrick in 'Haptic Poetics,' 'Arethusa,' Volume 32.

Seamus Heaney's translation is unrhythmical prose-poetry. After line removal:

'In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road has been lost sight of.'

C. My translation

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to in a dark forest,
where the road I should follow was lost.

D. Discussion of my translation

I use 'midway' instead of 'halfway' because 'half' has associations of mathematical exactness, to an extent. I use 'forest' instead of 'wood' because wood suggests something too small, the experience of being lost in a wood less significant than being lost in a forest. I use 'road' instead of 'way' to give a linkage of sound between the hard 'd' of 'road' and the hard 'd' of 'should.' (The sound linkage is more understated than the sound linkage in 'right road' in Steve Ellis's and Robert Pinsky's translations which I give below.) The hardness of sound can suggest the hardness of the road - now lost. On contrasts of length in the translation, see my discussion of extension-contrast in the page on 'Metre.'

I think that my translation is without the distracting awkwardness, even if sometimes a very slight awkwardness, in many of the translations quoted below. This is a poem of tremendous drama, force and scope which begins with such quiet simplicity. The Inferno gives comparatively few contrasts between repose and dramatic momentum within its great length. The significant contrasts are block-like, between the Inferno on the one hand and the Purgatorio and Paradiso. It's essential that the opening of the Inferno, which is in contrast with so much of what follows, should have a smoothness in translation - a smoothness which is in the original. By line 5, there's roughness and harshness.

Before translating the lines, I was preoccupied with complexities, but the complexities contributed to the translation, to my choice of 'forest' rather than 'wood,' for example. The lines of the original seem to have simplicity, but cultural experience, our own individual experiences, set up expectations and make the lines resonant in a way almost impossible to convey. My view of the lines is influenced by what Basil Lam writes about the opening of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 59 No. 3, 'Beethoven's introduction, unlike Mozart's [a reference to the 'Dissonance' Quartet in C, K. 465] deliberately obscures not only tonal structure but rhythm also. The direction Andante con moto is surely ironical, for motion is notably lacking in nearly thirty bars of 3/4 almost devoid of crotchet movement. Here is music for Dante's image of being lost in a dark wood, unable to find the right way.'

There are different experiences of being lost: the experience of being lost in a strange city, usually no more than frustrating, the experience of being lost in a hostile wilderness, more often than not terrifying, and the experience of losing our way in life.

The dark wood is more than simply dark, even if 'dark' is the most adequate translation of 'oscura.' The associations are too many for 'dark' or any other single word or phrase. I think of the Germanic forests, much more extensive and much darker, or so it seems, than English forests. Kenneth Clark, 'Landscape into Art:'

'Already in the fifteenth century artists began to feel that landscape had become too tame and domesticated, and they set about exploring the mysterious and the unsubdued ... it would be a mistake to suppose that they were similar to the Gothic novelists or the men of 1830. Horace Walpole wrote from the absolute security of Twickenham; to Grünewald, Altdorfer and Bosch the menaces of life were still real. They had seen villages burnt by passing mercenaries, had experienced the barbarities of the Peasants' War and the subsequent wars of religion. They knew that the human mind was full of darkness, twisted and fiery [compare the 'twisted souls,' in my translation of the lines from Canto III] and they painted an aspect of nature which expressed these dark convolutions of the spirit ... They are what we now call 'expressionist' artists ... Expressionist art is fundamentally a northern and an anti-classical form ... It is forest born, and even when it does not actually represent fir trees and undergrowth - as in German painting it almost invariably does - their gnarled and shaggy forms dominate the design.' Dante's wood isn't northern and doesn't include fir trees, but it may be very difficult to prevent the mind from assimilating and combining.

Mozart's opera of damnation, but much more than damnation, 'Don Giovanni' is a rich source of resonance and expectation for me: the shattering chords of the opening, the shifting and uneasy passage which follows, the momentum of the last Act which sees Don Giovanni descending into hell, defiantly. Gustave Doré's illustrations for the 'Inferno' are another source of resonance and expectation, either enhancing or interfering with reading of the original for the purposes of translation.

Notes on other translations

These notes don't amount to a ((survey)) of each translation of the 'Inferno,' of course. I find most of the translations here imperfect or very imperfect but my comments are concerned only with these opening lines, no more.

C. H. Sisson
Halfway along the road we have to go,
I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.

{distance} from the original is considerable, as with translations which make this sacrifice for the sake of a rhyme scheme. This translation doesn't have this excuse: an unfaithful translation with no compensating gains. Its wilfulness is shown, for example, by translating 'oscura' by 'great', in the phrase 'per una selva oscura.' 'Bewildered' is a superfluous translator's addition. The original conveys the state of mind of Dante more economically, directly and powerfully.

Ciaran Carson
Halfway through the story of my life
I came to in a gloomy wood, because
I'd wandered off the path, away from the light

'di nostra vita:' 'of our life.' Ciaran Carson's 'of my life' is worse than pointless: it removes the sense of universal human experience. 'away from the light' is a translator's addition: again, unfaithful, with no compensating gains.

Steve Ellis
Halfway through our trek in life
I found myself in this dark wood,
miles away from the right road.

'trek' suggests arduousness throughout life. The original suggests a less problematic and difficult journey which has become more difficult, bewildering. 'miles away' suggests a gap, {separation}, between the 'right road' and this point in the journey which distorts the original.

Sean O' Brien
Once, halfway through the journey of our life
I found myself inside a shadowy wood,
because the proper road had disappeared.

One of the best translations of this stanza.

Anthony Esolen
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wilderness,
for I had wandered from the straight and true.

Good, but flawed. 'wilderness' is an inadequate translation for 'selva,' which is 'wood' or 'forest.' There's no reason why any reader should be led to suppose that Dante is lost in an indeterminate wild or desolate tract.

Henry Longfellow
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Good, except for 'pathway,' too narrow a translation of 'via.' The {ordering} of 'forest dark' is distracting for contemporary readers.

Ronald Bottrall
Midway in human life's allotted span,
I found myself in a dark wood,
where the straight path I sought in vain.

This isn't at all resonant. 'the straight path I sought in vain' belongs to the world of conscious and even humdrum effort' rather than the 'recessed' world within the dark wood.

Tom Phillips
Just halfway through this journey of our life
I reawoke to find myself inside
a dark wood, way off course, the right road lost.

'just' in 'just halfway' makes for an over-qualified opening. 'I awoke' is an acceptable translation of 'mi ritrovai,' but not 'I reawoke. 'way off course, the right road lost' is pleonastic.

Robert Pinsky
Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard -- so tangled and
rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring....

The only translation here which abandons the division into three line stanzas, three lines compressed into less than two. The translation is plain but very effective.

Dorothy L Sayers
Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

This is a translation which uses terza rima. Dorothy L Sayers makes the difficult look easy. This is impressive. The price paid is obvious here, the superfluous ' ... and gone' to give a sound-linkage between 'gone' and 'upon,' but this is a minor consideration. This is a good translation.

Anything Can Happen (District and Circle)

A. Original Horace, 'Carmina:' 1, 34

Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens,
insanientis dum sapientiae
consultus erro, nunc retrorsum
vela dare atque iterare cursus

cogor relictos: namque Diespiter,
igni corusco nubila dividens
plerumque, per purum tonantis
egit equos volucremque currum,

quo bruta tellus et vaga flumina,
quo Styx et invisi horrida Taenari
sedes Atlanteusque finis
concutitur. Valet ima summis

mutare et insignem attenuat deus
obscura promens; hinc apicem rapax:
Fortuna cum stridore acuto
sustulit, hic posuisse gaudet.

B. Discussion of Seamus Heaney's version (in 'District and Circle,' with title 'Anything Can Happen,' after Horace, Odes, 1, 34.)

This poem about the destruction of the twin towers on 9 / 11 is one of the more obnoxious of his poems. The fact that Seamus Heaney wrote this poem for a 'good cause, ' Amnesty International, has no relevance to its literary value.

The setting and the moral circumstances of the atrocity had a lucid simplicity, to an extent - the architecture of the twin towers, their uncluttered parallel lines seeming to converge high in the sky, the sky unclouded, an intense blue, the approaching airliner-missiles, the simplicity of the moral situation - fanatics about to inflict death on the innocent, an act which needed tortuous extenuations and intricate falsehoods to justify but none at all to condemn. The aftermath was anything but simple, the snuffing out of so many lives, at once or delayed, after the desperate attempt to survive had come to nothing.

Aluminium-skinned jet aircraft piloted into skyscrapers, the burning of people by jet fuel - this was a theme that called for a fully contemporary poem, one adequate to the reality of technology but adequate too to human realities, the human flaws which make perverted use of technology.

The first two lines of the fourth stanza of Horace's Ode (in my translation) describe bringing down the mighty and raising up the lowest. Is this how Seamus Heaney interpreted 9/11: the terrorists - the lowest - bringing down America - the highest? This brings to mind the notorious comment of Mary Beard, the Latinist at Cambridge University. She wrote of 'the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think.'

Horace is 'mindful of raving wisdom.' In the original, this is an interesting conjunction. In applying the poem to the destruction of the twin towers, there's the danger of attributing wisdom to raving fanatics. To commemorate such an event as this, Seamus Heaney's poem, like Caesar's wife, should have been beyond suspicion. It was unwise of Seamus Heaney to choose this poem as his starting-point. Mary Beard was heavily criticized. He got away with it, on the whole, although there were dissenting voices: the benefits of oblique reference and Latin obscurity.

'Anything Can Happen' reveals in stark simplicity the aridity and barrenness of Seamus Heaney's enterprise, its mythological burdens, its evasions and pretentiousness. In a poem of only four stanzas, the whole of the first stanza is taken up with mythological preparation for 'Across a clear blue sky' at the beginning of the second stanza.

The whimsy of the first stanza is as out of place in a poem with this subject as it would be at a Holocaust Remembrance Day:

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky ...

As if this isn't enough mythological intrusion into the poem, this is closely followed by another in the next verse-paragraph, the River Styx, all the more obtrusive because the Styx appears in Dante's Inferno as well, in Canto Seven, and is associated with the torments of the damned. Are these torments of the damned associations which any contemporary poet should be risking? The Styx is in the original Latin of Horace's ode but Seamus Heaney was under no compulsion to use this ode at all, or if he did use it as a starting-point, to include this. 'the tallest towers' aren't in the original, of course, and although 'Fortune,' 'Fortuna,' is, he gives it his own private interpretation: here, not a principle which makes lives unpredictable, subject to chance, but a bird of prey with a cruel beak who has similarities with 'Crow,' the bird in Ted Hughes' abysmal sequence of poems. This private avian mythology is far removed from the technological / human world of 9 / 11 and is utterly inadequate.

Nature poetry which connects us with the inner beauty or strangeness or otherness of nature isn't improved by demanding for its full appreciation a knowledge of Linnaean binomial nomenclature of the flowers or animals which it presents, even if commentators with specialist knowledge approve. In his edition of the 'Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau,' Carl Bode distinguishes years in which Thoreau's observations were intense and illuminating from years such as 1853 in which 'science, symbolized by the Latin names for things, plays an increasing role and philosophy grows the less' (by 'philosophy' he means perceptive and interesting comment on human life, not technical philosophy at its most narrow) and 1856, in which 'The range of subjects is still wide. Yet the facts seem smaller and more exact - and there seem to be more of them.'

Poetry dense with allusions which requires detailed knowledge or the help of scholarship to understand is a legitimate form. My admiration for scholarship is practically unbounded. I regard it as one of the most important activities of the human mind. Simplicity isn't adequate in all circumstances. The complexity and intricacy revealed by scholarship are exhilarating, compelling and often indispensable.

But 'Anything Can Happen' is one of those poems which shouldn't demand scholarly explication or knowledge of Jupiter, the Styx or Atlas. This was a poem which demanded directness, intensity, a measure of simplicity, and which instead sank under the burden of its classical mythology and Seamus Heaney's private mythology.

The references in this and other poems are evidence that Seamus Heaney is very well read, but John Wilson Foster is mistaken in his claim, in 'Crediting Marvels: Heaney after 50,' one of the essays in 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' that 'he became (unlike Kavanagh) a literary scholar.' There's no trace in any of his published writings that he has the distinctive skills of a scholar, such as the use and critical analysis of a very comprehensive collection of sources, or that he has a particularly detailed knowledge in a necessarily restricted field. As well describe him as a lexicographer because his vocabulary is obviously wide, although not his technical or scientific vocabulary.

He's obviously familiar with the technical word 'telluric,' though. The final line of the poem has a reference to 'telluric ash.' 'Telluric' can refer to 'earth' or 'soil,' too general for 'telluric ash,' or 'of or containing tellurium [an element], especially in a high valence state' (Collins Dictionary), far too specific - but the artistic wrongness of 'telluric ash' should be obvious.

In this poem, Seamus Heaney was far more concerned to impress and to dazzle than to convey death and suffering and the extremism which brought about so much death and suffering.

C. My translation

A stingy, none-too-frequent honourer of gods
(but expert in raving wisdom)
I drift - now forced
to set sail, retrace my way home,

since Jupiter on high,
who splits clouds with lightning blast,
drives through unclouded sky
his horses and chariot fast,

till the heavy earth and wandering rivers,
Styx, rough Taenarus' headland
and the summit of Atlas
are concussed. And

he can reverse highest and lowest,
weaken the mighty. Fortune takes the crown
with sharp hiss,
with joy and delight - sets it down.

Michael Grant (in his 'Latin Literature: An Anthology') generalizes when he comments that 'the diction [of Greek and Latin poetry] is more elevated than anything produced today' (not more elevated than the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, for example) but observes that even so, Horace has [sometimes] a 'light touch,' censured by Keble. I try to convey this lightness of touch in the first line of my translation.

Translation necessarily involves compromises and the compromises demanded by a rhymed translation are generally prohibitive, unless the translation approximates to a paraphrase. I think that this translation, using rhyme and pararhyme, is an exception.

The need in general to renew translations is obvious enough in the case of this free translation by John Conington of the ode, dating from 1882, and given as the translation in the excellent Perseus site, which contains a very extensive collection of Greek and Latin texts and other classical material. It brings to mind the style of the English Augustan age of the eighteenth century rather than the style of the Augustan age in which Horace wrote.

My prayers were scant, my offerings few,
While witless wisdom fool'd my mind;
But now I trim my sails anew,
And trace the course I left behind.
For lo! the sire of heaven on high,
By whose fierce bolts the clouds are riven,
Today through an unclouded sky
His thundering steeds and car has driven.
E'en now dull earth and wandering floods,
And Atlas' limitary range,
And Styx, and Taenarus' dark abodes
Are reeling. He can lowliest change
And loftiest; bring the mighty down
And lift the weak; with whirring flight
Comes Fortune, plucks the monarch's crown,
And decks therewith some meaner wight.

Rilke: After the Fire (District and Circle)

A. Original Rilke, 'Neue Gedichte,' Anderer Teil. Title: 'Die Brandstätte'

(Linkage lines show sound-linkages)

B. Discussion of Seamus Heaney's translation (in 'District and Circle,' with title 'After the Fire.)

In his translation of 'The Apple Orchard,' Seamus Heaney almost, but not quite, manages to implement a complete rhyme scheme. Here he seems to have begun a rhyme scheme but abandoned it very quickly. 'To make them realize what had stood so' isn't in fact a particularly contrived line but reads like one, showing the obvious wish to place 'so' last and form a sound-linkage with 'Pharaoh.'

But in general, the translation reads very well, at least the second and third verse-paragraphs. In the third stanza, 'one with a doubtful tale to tell' distorts too much. The original has 'lying:' 'als ob er löge,' literally, 'as if he lied.' (Here, 'als ob' brings to mind the book 'Die Philosophie des Als Ob,' The Philosophy of 'As if.')

The first and last verse-paragraphs are less accomplished. The translation diverges too far from the original and distorts its meaning too much but has no particular literary value. In the first stanza, the abstractions 'newness' and 'emptiness' are ineffective and 'Shying at newness' is poor. The impression is given that the 'emptiness' is separate from the 'moorland house' but of course it's the moorland house which has burnt down, which has left an empty space. 'just one more wallstead' is a poor way of taking corrective action, to prevent any misconception as to this point, and 'wallstead' has no basis is the original. I think that 'a foreigner amongst them' isn't a good translation for 'aus fermen Land,' literally, 'from a far-off land.' A foreigner doesn't always come from a far-off land, but more importantly, it doesn't suggest the importance of {distance} in Rilke. Here, the {contrast} with nearness should be brought out. I give further examples of {distance} in my page on Rilke.

C. My translation

Shunned by the early autumn morning
and its deep suspicions, behind the scorched linden tree
that cramped this heath-land house,
lay a new and empty space, one more place

where kids, from God knows where,
bawled at each other and grabbed for scraps,
but suddenly silent whenever he,
the son of this place, dragged from the hot beams,

half reduced to ashes, a kettle, or troughs,
with his long, forked branch -
and then, with a lying look,
to make them believe

what stood in this place,
now no more. It seemed to him
so strange, more fantastical than Pharaoh.
And he was changed. As if from a far-off land.

D. Discussion of my translation

My own translation is far more literal than Seamus Heaney's. I use internal rhyme in the fourth line, 'space' and 'place.' I translate 'Kinder' by 'kids,' not Seamus Heaney's 'youngsters,' because 'kids' suggests the sound of 'Kinder' and is rhythmically preferable to the fussiness of 'youngsters.' I think it would be difficult to improve on Seamus Heaney's translation 'more fantastical than Pharaoh,' for 'phantastischer als Pharao' ('fantastic' would have given the wrong impression) and I've retained it. I translate 'als ob er löge' by 'with a lying look,' where 'look' is intentionally ambiguous. It refers to the look of the Son and the 'appearance' of lying.

Rilke: The Apple Orchard (District and Circle)

A. Original Rilke, 'Neue Gedichte,' Anderer Teil. Title: Der Apfelgarten

(Linkage lines show sound-linkages)

B. Discussion of Seamus Heaney's translation (in 'District and Circle,' with title 'The Apple Orchard.')

Bernard O' Donoghue writes in his Introduction to 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney' that 'much of the book [takes place] in the Underground or afterlife. It would be far more accurate to say that a few poems have a setting in the Underground or afterlife. This was an interesting organizing principle. The poet obviously was only able to write a few poems about the theme. This is no disgrace, since poets can never produce their best work, or even adequate work, to order: ' adhering to the dogma of socialist realism, adhering to the various and varying dogmas of political correctness, the dogmas of writing 'positive poetry.' Even a fruitful and interesting organizing principle may demand 'writing to order.'

Once he'd decided to include translations to supplement his own inspiration, he had the opportunity to strengthen the theme of the Underground and the afterlife. He did this by including a translation of C. P. Cavafy's 'The Rest I'll speak of to the ones below in Hades.' He included two translations from Rilke which have nothing to do with the underworld. If the translations had been outstanding, they could have been justified, but this isn't so.

Anthologists can be inspired or uninspired, show flair or much more than flair. Seamus Heaney showed not nearly enough flair in his choice of translations for 'District and Circle.' There are poems by Hölderlin which touch upon the underworld and movement downwards and which have outstanding literary quality, such as 'Lebenslauf,' which refers to Orcus, and 'An die Parzen,' 'To the Fates,' which also refers to Orcus and to 'Stille der Schattenwelt,' 'tranquillity of the world of shades.' ('Orcus' is the Roman name for the underworld.)

In the third verse-paragraph of his translation of 'The Apple Orchard,' Seamus Heaney obviously tried to find a sound-linkage between 'woodcut' and 'rooted' but had to concede defeat, so that there's a gap in his rhyme scheme. More often than not, a rhymed translation involves substantial compromises in diction, rhythm and meaning. Rhyme schemes belong to what W H Auden described as the 'separable' aspect of translation, an aspect which a translation can't in general carry over into the object language, or at least not without compromising more important matters.

In translating the first two lines, I'd stress the importance of observing, and the good reasons for following, Rilke's distribution of verbs and nouns in the places of maximum prominence, the beginning and ends of the lines. In line 1, a verb in the imperative at the beginning, a noun given weight by its placing at the end. In line 2, a verb in the imperative at the beginning, a noun given weight by its placing at the end.

Seamus Heaney's line 1 has a verb in the imperative, 'Come' at the beginning and a verb in the imperative, 'watch' at the end. Line 2 begins with 'This' in a position of emphasis - a wasted opportunity, and ends with a noun, 'sward,' which has no currency in the living language. He chooses, then, to give this archaic word emphasis. More importantly, the German word 'Grund' which is part of the compound word 'Rasengrunds' (in the genitive) means 'ground' and has far more 'earthiness' than 'sward.'

In line 2, 'this deepening of green' in Seamus Heaney's translation is misleading. Without going into the complexities of colour theory, it suggests that the hue is becoming more saturated. Very soon after sunset, of course, colours become less saturated. Colour vision becomes more and more impaired.

In line 4, 'a something' is an obvious blunder.' There's no justification for the vagueness here. In the original, there's 'es,' 'it,' referring to the 'evening green of grassy ground' (in my translation.) This is what's 'interiorized,' to express it less clumsily, brought deep into the mind, where a complex process of blending - Seamus Heaney's 'infusing' is good - and maturation takes place.

Seamus Heaney's 'thoughts as ripe as windfalls' doesn't do justice to this maturation. Windfall apples are often hard and poor. Rilke has 'overfull fruits' which bring to mind the fruit in Keats's 'To Autumn,' fruit filled 'with ripeness to the core.'

The trees they come from, 'wie von Dürer' are described in his translation as 'like trees in a Dürer woodcut,' vivid but far too restrictive, since Dürer's enormous output includes, as well as woodcuts, engravings, drawings and paintings.

The fruit is described as 'ready to serve.' There's no suggestion in the original that the fruit is now about to be brought on, as a dessert, perhaps. This is a mistranslation of 'dienend,' 'serving.'

The worst of the translation is reserved until the last. The final verse paragraph of the translation is dismal, rambling and ineffectual where the original is sturdy and decisive.

The first line of this verse paragraph, 'In the knowledge that no matter how above' seems to be missing a word like 'far,' 'In the knowledge that no matter how far above' although in either version, the linkage with the original is very tenuous. ' ... when a long life willingly / Cleaves to what's willed and grows in mute resolve' has no reference to a word of decisive importance in the original, 'das Eine,' 'the One.' But it fails in every other significant respect as well.

C. My translation

Come, just after the setting of the sun,
see the evening green of the grassy ground;
is it not as if for a long time we had
taken it into ourselves and saved it,

sensing it now as feeling and remembrance,
new hope, half-forgotten joys,
yet now mixed with interior darkness,
to scatter it before us in thought

under trees like those of Dürer, that
carry the weight of a hundred
workdays in the overfilled fruits,
serving, full of patience, trying, like

that which all measure transcends,
is still to be lifted up and offered,
when one willingly, throughout a long life,
wants but this one thing - grows, and is silent.

D. Discussion of my translation

My own translation is more faithful to the original, which has to include faithfulness to the tortuous length of the sentence: excessive, and an imperfection in the original, I think.

I've been able to follow exactly the syllable count of the original lines, but I made no attempt to convey the rhyme scheme.

This is the rhyme scheme of the original, and my translation, with the number of syllables in brackets:

a (10), b (9), a (10), b (9)
a (10), b (9), a (10), b (9)
a (9), b (10), b (10), a (9)
a (9), b (10), b (10), a (9)

Cavafy: 'The rest I'll speak of to the ones below in Hades' (District and Circle)

A. Original  (Not part of Cavafy's 'Canon.')

«Tα δ’ άλλα εν Άδου τοις κάτω μυθήσομαι

«Τωόντι», είπ’ ο ανθύπατος, κλείοντας το βιβλίο, «αυτός
ο στίχος είν’ ωραίος και πολύ σωστός·
τον έγραψεν ο Σοφοκλής βαθιά φιλοσοφώντας.
Πόσα θα πούμ’ εκεί, πόσα θα πούμ’ εκεί,
και πόσο θα φανούμε διαφορετικοί.
Aυτά που εδώ σαν άγρυπνοι φρουροί βαστούμε,
πληγές και μυστικά που μέσα μας σφαλνούμε,
με καθημερινή αγωνία βαρειά,
ελεύθερα εκεί και καθαρά θα πούμε».

«Πρόσθεσε», είπε ο σοφιστής, μισοχαμογελώντας,
«αν τέτοια λεν εκεί, αν τους μέλλει πια».

B. Discussion of Seamus Heaney's translation (in 'District and Circle.' Title: 'The rest I'll speak of to the ones below in Hades.)

It was convenient to expand 'District and Circle,' which has a subterranean theme, in part. He did it by including this routine translation. Faithful translators often have literary talents which are very considerable. Readers are entitled to expect that 'improved translators' will surpass this often high level of achievement. Seamus Heaney doesn't achieve this here.

He owed it to a fellow-poet to make it clear that this poem wasn't part of the Cavafy 'Canon.' Cavafy, who was a self-publisher, was meticulous. He made it clear which poems were part of the canon and which weren't. This particular poem was left unfinished. It was written, rewritten but then put aside. Seamus Heaney ought to have mentioned this fact. A

Poems aren't works of scholarship, but in some cases, notes can make things clear which aren't clear in the original poem (or translation.) Seamus Heaney has a page 'Notes and Acknowledgements.' He could have made it clear on this page (after making it clear that Cavafy didn't want this poem to be part of the canon of his poems) that his title is misleading as it stands. The title is, 'Cavafy: 'The Rest I'll speak of to the ones below in Hades' which gives the impression that Cavafy wrote the words of the quotation. The quotation is in classical Greek, not the modern Greek of Cavafy, and comes from Sophocles' Ajax (line 865.) I defer discussion of Seamus Heaney's translation of the line until I give my own translation.

After the title line,' in line 1, Seamus Heaney gives for  κλείοντας το βιβλίο 'replacing the scroll.' All the other translations known to me give 'closing the book,' which is faithful and accurate. βιβλίο not only means 'book' but of course is 'embedded' in English, in words such as 'bibliography.' Seamus Heaney's translation may give the mistaken impression that the proconsul has an ancient version of Sophocles in the form of a scroll, rather than a more modern book. 'Replacing' and 'closing' are two different and incompatible activities, and 'replacing' is inaccurate. Does 'replacing the scroll' have a literary quality markedly higher than 'closing the book' to compensate for its inaccuracy ? Is it undeniably an example of improved translation? Not at all.

In line 3, βαθιά has become embedded in English too, in words such as 'bathos' and words with the prefix 'bathy-' such as 'bathysphere.' It means 'deeply.' Seamus Heaney excludes the idea of depth by translating it as 'Sophocles at his most philosophical.' Again, this is an 'unfaithful, unimproved translation.'

The fourth line is very simple in its structure, a clause which is repeated:

Πόσα θα πούμ’ εκεί, πόσα θα πούμ’ εκεί,

A translation should convey this repetition, as in:

How much we'll say there, how much we'll say there.

Seamus Heaney ignores the repetition:

We'll talk about a whole lot more down there

His translation of line 6

Here we're like sentries, watching anxiously

makes no attempt to translate the significant word άγρυπνοι  'sleepless,' of the guards or sentries. Again, it isn't self-evident that his translation has such literary quality that the omission is unimportant.

C. My translation

The rest I shall speak unto them that are in Hades

'Indeed!' said the proconsul, closing the book,
'this line is beautiful and so, so true.
Sophocles wrote it it in a deeply philosophical mood.
How much we'll say there, how much we'll say there,
and how different we'll appear.
Things we protect here like sleepless guards,
injuries and secrets locked within us here,
things we protect so anxiously each day,
we'll speak of freely and clearly down there.'

'You might add,' said the sophist, half-smiling,
'if they speak about them there, if it happens any more.'

D. Discussion of my translation

Seamus Heaney translates the title line as 'The rest I'll speak of to the ones below in Hades.' I try to differentiate between the language of this line in the original, Classical Greek, and the language of the rest of the poem, Modern Greek. Almost two and a half thousand years separate the two. A contemporary translation of a classical Greek text shouldn't use archaic language anywhere, except in places where it can be justified, but Cavafy's poem, including the title, has writing belonging to two very different time-strata and these can most easily be distinguished by using non-contemporary English for writing which belongs to the earlier stratum.

Another example of significant contrast: a part of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' is in French, not Russian. Translators have generally translated the French as well as the Russian into English. Constance Garnett, Aylmer Maude and Rosemary Edmonds chose to follow this course. In their translation, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky distinguish between French and Russian by leaving the French untranslated in the main text and providing a translation in footnotes.

The line in Cavafy's poem comes from Sophocles' 'Ajax.' (865). Giving the preceding line as well:

τοῦθ᾽ ὑμὶν Αἴας τοὔπος ὕστατον θροεῖ, 
τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλ᾽