Past the Fire’s Edge: Figures of Translation from Herodotos 1.86

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Notes

1. References to classical texts follow the abbreviations laid out in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, third rev. ed., ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xxix–liv.

2. All translations from Greek are mine unless otherwise noted.

3. Arrojo, “The Power of Fiction as Theory,” 37.

4. On the level of content, Carolyn Dewald hears in Herodotos a storyteller who “saturates” his narratives with “mythic thinking.” “Myth and Legend in Herodotus’ First Book,” 2. Page numbers throughout the notes refer to the electronic version.

5. Arrojo, “The Power of Fiction as Theory,” 46.

6. Derrida, “Des tours de Babel,” 168.

7. Following Charles Simic that “[t]ranslation is an actor’s medium” (The Monster Loves his Labyrinth, 81). See also Yotam Benshalom, who reflects on producing a translated dramatic text, finds that he was “using acting techniques for the sake of producing a better translation,” and sees that the “metaphor of acting as a tool for discussing translation has an important potential for translation studies” (“Performing Translation,” 48, 49).

8. Herodotos orients his description of Lydia by the south–north flow of the river Halys, “flowing from the south between Syrians and Paphlogonians extends in the direction of the north wind to the so-called Euxine Sea” [Hdt. 1.6.1]. The description provided above has drawn on the maps provided by Robin Waterfield in his translation of Herodotos (Herodotus, n.p. [end matter]).

9. Kaindl, “Going Fictional!,” 4.

10. As in Jakobson’s “translation proper” that is “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language.” Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” 127.

11. Nietzsche, “Translations,”67.

12. Waterfield, introduction to Herodotus, xiii. Munson’s recent study emphasizes the Persian sources for Herodotos’s narrative and the commitment Herodotos makes “to understand foreign cultures on their own terms.” Yet at times—for example, in her discussion of the Persian’s view of themselves—a circle of Greek narration closes upon that understanding, as it is presented in Greek sources and corroborated by reference to other Greek sources. Munson, “Who Are Herodotus’ Persians?,” 457, 467, respectively.

13. Liu, “Introduction,” 2.

14. Bassnett and Trivedi, “Introduction,” in Post-Colonial Translation, 2.

15. Vermeer, “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action,” 199.

16. Tymoczko has exposed and problematized the assumption that translation works as “mediation or communication between linguistic groups.” Maria Tymoczko, “Reconceptualizing Translation Theory,” 16.

17. Delabastita and Grutman, “Introduction,” 12–13.

18. This thread following the violence of narrative translation in Herodotos, according to which Persians and others hostile to Greek interests are represented by that translation in ways that both establish and reinforce Greek opinions about them, will not be pursued in the present study. An important caveat to such a study would arise from Munson’s view of an ethnically and culturally plural environment in the western Asiatic rim of the Mediterranean basin. Munson, “Who Are Herodotus’ Persians?,” 464.

19. de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 40. The extent to which this reversal of “the hierarchy that always privileged the foreign European over the domestic,” as Arrojo reads Andrade’s cannibalism, only repeats the structural violence, calls for reflection and may not yield to a single interpretation. Arrojo, “The Power of Fiction as Theory,” 38.

20. Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, 2.

21. Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” 240.

22. Ibid., 241.

23. Dewald, “Myth and Legend,” 25.

24. Rafael, “Translation, American English and the National Insecurities of Empire,” 463–465.

25. The glossic range of the hermeneutes in this passage Herodotos does not specify. The troubled situation of translators comes into view through studies such as Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speake My Language, especially ch. 2, “The Translator,” 21–37; Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire” (op. cit.); Apter, “Translation-9/11,) 196–99; and Inghilleri, “Translators in War Zones,” 207–21.

26. Such threads of myth in the fabric of language might be added to Dewald’s useful collection of strands that together form what she calls the “dense web” of mythic thinking. Dewald, “Myth and Legend,” 3.

27. Editor R. A. McNeal notes a further narrative translation: “the words, not of Solon, but of Herodotus, who does not want to repeat Solon’s arguments in c.32.” Herodotus: Book I, 145.

28. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 76–77.

29. Berve and Gruben, Griechische Tempel und Heiligtümer, 24; Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle, 218–19; Koutlouka, “Logos et croyance religieuse chez Héraclite (Fr. 92, 93),” 260–61.

30. Lefevere, “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers,” 7.

31. Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” 254.

32. The notion here builds on Martin Heidegger’s development of the passage from λόγος to Roman, and then Medieval and Christian iudicium (Parmenides, 51–52). Some of Heidegger’s insights on logos come to fruition in the essay “Logos (Heraklit, Fragment 50),” 199–221.

33. Parke and Wormell, The Delphic Oracle, Vol. I, 5–8.

34. Koutlouka, “Logos et croyance religieuse chez Héraclite (Fr. 92, 93),” 261; my translation.

35. Parke and Wormell, The Delphic Oracle, 4.

36. Again, reference to Jakobson; see above, p. 2 and n. 10.

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D. M. Spitzer

D. M. Spitzer is currently a doctoral candidate at Binghamton University in the Philosophy, Literature, and Theory of Criticism Program within the Department of Comparative Literature. He works primarily on early Greek thinking and its modern and contemporary reception and on translation theory. In August, 2016, Etruscan Press published his book of poems, A Heaven Wrought of Iron: Poems from the Odyssey. While he typically works on book-length projects, some poems & excerpts from book-length works have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as TRANSverse, Metonym, Numéro Cinq, Cyphers and North American Review. Among other projects in progress, Mr. Spitzer is co-editing a volume on translation and philosophy.