My primary concern so far has been to explore what an aesthetic theory of translation might involve. I want now to ask what a beautiful translation might look like, a related but distinct question. Within a Kantian aesthetic framework, such an enquiry can only be conducted by means of examples. According to the Third Critique, the job of the critic is not to issue general rules: the 'matter upon which it is competent for critics to exercise their subtlety' (there may be some irony here) is 'not one of exhibiting the determining ground of aesthetic judgements of this kind in a universally applicable formula-which is impossible? Rather the critic's task is either what Kant calls the 'science': the investigation of the faculties of cognition and their function in these judgements' (Kant's own main concern in the Critique), or what he calls the 'art': the illustration, by the analysis of examples, of their mutual subjective finality, the form of which in a given representation has been shown above to constitute the beauty of their object'. The 'art' involves the reflection of the Subject upon his own state (of pleasure or displeasure), to the exclusion of precepts and rules', and this task alone, in Kant's view, the literary critic can usefully perform. So let us look in rather more detail from such a perspective at how Dryden brings Ovid to presentation in one episode from the Metamorphoses. I have chosen the story of Io from the complete translation of the frst book included in Examen Poeticum (1693). Elsewhere I have described Ovid's tale as an exercise in getting the story crooked, as Ovid deforms tropes and narrative sequences, while retaining at least some of their traditional resonances. Indeed what tone or tones might suit the story of a woman who is turned into a cow by her divine lover in an attempt to evade the attentions of his jealous wife (perhaps significantly herself called 'cow-eyed' or 'cow-faced' in Homer) and who, thus transformed, suffers grievously until she is restored to her former shape?
We can see the measure of Dryden's achievement if we compare his translation with two versions from the end of the last century. Kenneth Koch, in his contribution to After Ovid, gives us a postmodern, camp Ovid. He offers an archly knowing pastiche of the lively but jogging fourteeners of Arthur Golding's translation of 1567 with which Shakespeare was so enamoured. Koch's gods are comic without grandeur or menace (even the point that they live for ever is reduced to a simple joke):
But Juno knew he lied.
'Darling, she's such a lovely one, I'd like her for a gift.'
'Er, well, my dear-' Jove felt some fear. And he had little shrift--
He didn't want to give his sweetheart to his nagging wife,
But also didn't want her nagging at him all his life,
Which was eternal.
When, for her father, Io writes her name (which is also the Greek for 'alas') in the sand, Koch's exuberant embroidery turns the scene into farce; the passage ends with the kind of deliberately bad comic rhyme favoured by Byron in his satire Don Juan:
Weeping, she longs to find some way to make him understand,
And with her hoof she traces her name IO in the sand.
(How fortunate that she was not named Thesmophoriazusa
Or Melancholy Myrtle, or Somatacalapoosa-
For by the time she wrote it out her strength would have been wasted,
Inachus have gone elsewhere, or the rising tide erased it.)
By contrast, Charles Boer (1989) generally eschews comedy, divine or otherwise, his stated aim being to uncover the 'harsher, violent subtexts' of Ovid's poem. To do this he rejects a smooth-sliding continuity of syntax and metre for the broken phrasing and fragmentation characteristic of Modernism. In his endorsement on the cover (which shows a Haitian god) the poet and translator Guy Davenport compares the result to The Rite of Spring, and it is worth recalling that both Stravinsky's score and Ovid, partly mediated through Sir James Frazer, were two key sources of inspiration for Eliot's The
Waste Land. At its best Boer's version is not without a certain raw power:
about to say this, Mercury sees all
eyes shut, succumbing to slumber; stops talking
& deepens sleep with eye-languishing tap of magic
wand: immediately followed by sickle slice across neck
of Argus's nodding head; lopped onto rock, bloody,
it stains step cliff
But, however legitimately Boer may plead as justification the poem's underlying 'savagery, the cruelty which seldom lies far from the surface of the poem (on this account), to read the whole episode-let alone the whole poem--in this staccato mode of insistent jerks is an exhausting, and unvaried, experience.
Each of these versions has something pleasurable to offer, but, in my experience of it, Dryden's generates, in greater measure, aesthetic ideas'. Dryden is able to show that comedy can coexist with other qualities, including a sense of human pain and of the cruel amorality of the powers that control the universe. It is a combination of seemingly incompatible tones and qualities that has often disconcerted, or troubled, readers of the Metamorphoses. Dryden's errant husband Jupiter may be, for our amusement, 'the almighty lecher' (832), who, in a sub-heroic touch, 'transforms his mistress in a trice', but he can also sustain proper epic treatment ('involved with vapours), and, just before raping Io, he speaks with terrible authority in a powerful triplet:
thy guide is Jove:
No puny power, but he whose high command
Is unconfined, who rules the seas and land,
And tempers thunder in his awful hand.
Allusions to admired and resonant passages from Milton and Ben Jonson confirm that profound emotions are at issue, at least on occasion.
上一篇：FIGURATIVE EXTENSIONS OF MEANING
下一篇：ТECHNIQUES FOR DESCRIBING THE REFERENTIAL MEANINGS OF SINGLE WORDS
微信公众号搜索“译员”关注我们，每天为您推送翻译理论和技巧，外语学习及翻译招聘信息。