Orality and Translation

Paul Bandia

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138232884
• eBook ISBN: 9781315311159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the current context of globalization, relocation of cultures, and rampant technologizing of communication, orality has gained renewed interest across disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Orality has shed its once negative image as primitive, non-literate, and exotic, and has grown into a major area of scientific interest and the focus of interdisciplinary research, including translation studies. As an important feature of human speech and communication, orality has featured prominently in studies related to pre-modernist traditions, modernist representations of human history, and postmodernist expressions of artistry such as in music, film, and other audiovisual media. Its wide appeal can be seen in the variety of this volume, in which contributors draw from a range of disciplines with orality as the point of intersection with translation studies. This book is unique in its exploration of orality and translation from an interdisciplinary perspective, and sets the groundwork for collaborative research among scholars across disciplines with an interest in the aesthetics and materiality of orality. This book was originally published as a special issue of Translation Studies.

Speaking as Greeks, speaking over Greeks: Orality and its problems in Roman translation

Siobhán McElduff

Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada

This article explores the cultural and social background of oral and textual translation in Rome to discuss the profound effects that oral forms of translation, along with oral performance, had on ancient Roman translation. It examines the significance of speaking and writing “proper” Greek among the Roman elite, the anxieties that provoked in Rome, and the reasons why Roman texts elide the help of Greeks in their translations, even though the lack of dictionaries and other aids meant that their help was necessary. It also discusses the role of orality in Cicero's translations and, in particular, in his On the Best Type of Orator, and in Pliny the Younger's and Catullus' writings on translation.

Frequently, scholars approach oral translation as if it worked in the same ways that literary or textual translations do, or treat it as a poor cousin to literary translation (Cronin 2002). Here, for all I will talk about literary as well as oral translation practices in Ancient Rome, I do not wish to commit that error. However, as both oral and literary translation are embedded practices which take place in social environments and are affected by the habitus of a translator or interpreter,¹ it is necessary to examine and understand the particular circumstances of oral translation in a cultural system, and the case of Rome is not an exception to this rule. In this article I will use an examination of the cultural and social background of oral and textual translation in Rome to discuss the profound effects that oral forms of translation, along with oral performance, had on Roman translation, and how their impact may explain the forms it took (and, in one famous case, may explain Cicero's abandonment of a translation).

That said, it must be admitted that in dealing with antiquity we face the problem that oral translation was not a well-documented procedure and any picture we have of interpreters and interpreting (to take only one example of oral translation) is necessarily very fragmentary. It is also dominated by elite discourse, which frequently elides the presence of oral translation. Although, for example, we know that a great deal of interpreting must have happened in Roman courts and for the benefit of provincials who had to deal with the Roman administration and army,² we have little evidence of how it was practised, any norms it may have adhered to, or its practitioners. There is, as a result, a temptation to dismiss oral translation in Rome as unimportant in the role it played in shaping other translation practices, or to mark it as one of the many topics that, barring any further information being uncovered, we cannot discuss in any great detail.

Orality in Roman culture

However, Ancient Rome was very much a literate culture; it was also a profoundly oral one at the same time.³ Those who created literary translations were deeply integrated into a cultural system where oral performance, especially in the courts and Senate, was also key to political, economic and literary success. Authors were expected to perform their works to friends and larger audiences as they were writing them and as part of their publication process. Let me stress, however, that I am not arguing that Roman texts were, for example, transmitted in the same manner as oral poetry in archaic Greece was or that Rome was an oral culture. Rather, I am stating that orality was an important component in literary production, even if only in terms of the language and the gestures that an author might make towards his audience⁴ (even in the genre of oratory an initial first performance was often followed by the publication of a written text that might sometimes have little to do with the original version).⁵ Translation and translating were part of this cultural environment: translating into and out of the right Greek and Greek texts and speaking the right sort of Greek were part of proving one belonged to the Roman elite.⁶ Conversely, speaking the wrong sort of Greek, not speaking Greek or using it inappropriately marked you as the wrong sort of Roman (see below).

Orality and literary translation in Cicero and other Roman authors

The marks of orality can be found in a number of translations and texts on translation, but here I will focus on the Roman orator Cicero's On the Best Type of Orator (44 BCE), a text familiar to translation studies. This, a preface to a planned translation of two opposing Greek speeches of the fourth century BCE, Demosthenes’ On the Crown and Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon, is best known for Cicero's comment “that he translated as an orator, not as an interpreter” (14). Less frequently cited is the final line of the preface, which introduces the translations. In this line Cicero announces to his audience: “but enough of me; now let us hear Aeschines himself (ipsum) speaking Latin”.⁷ It was extremely rare that Cicero said enough of himself: he clearly felt that hearing Cicero and about Cicero was a very good thing, and the more you got of him on a regular basis, the better.⁸ However, it is not the unusual nature of this statement for Cicero that interests me, but how it highlights the intersection of the literate and the oral in Roman translation. Cicero's audience is not told to read Aeschines, but to listen to him speaking to them in person. The Latin grammar is very emphatic about this: this is Aeschines ipsum, himself, that Cicero's listeners will hear. The last word of the preface is audiamus – let us hear – a word that unites both the translator and his audience as listeners to the translated Greek orator, rather than marking Cicero out as the person who will be animating the voice of a Latinized Aeschines.

We are used to the invisible translator who elides themselves out of their text or performance; the Romans, however, were not.⁹ Speaking as a Greek when one was a member of the Roman elite in the Late Republic was an act that carried considerable risks; speaking over Greeks, on the other hand, whether one did that through translation or some other means, was acceptable. (There were many Romans who thought the more you spoke over Greeks the better.) To understand why this is the case, I will examine the role of Greek and Greeks in Roman elite culture and translation before moving on to the issue of oral performance and the consequences of all these elements for Roman translation practices.

The Role of Greek and Greeks in Roman elite culture

Over the course of the third century BCE the Roman elite began a process of Hellenization that picked up speed and intensity as the centuries progressed and never vanished as a critical element in Roman aristocratic education (see e.g. MacMullen 1991). Speaking Greek, reading Greek, and knowing Greek literature – especially genres such as oratory and history – became a critical way to express elite status.¹⁰ This did not occur without some pushback and there were attempts to restrict the influence of Greek culture, especially when it came into conflict with traditional modes of training and acculturating elite men. Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE) advised his son that

I will tell you at the right point what I dug up on those Greeks in Athens, Marcus, my son: it is a good thing to browse their literature, not learn it off by heart. I will win my case that they are a worthless and unteachable people. Consider me a prophet in the following: as soon as that tribe hands over its literature, it will corrupt everything. (Cato, To his son Marcus, Fragment 1)

As a mark of his privileging of Latin over Greek, Cato the Elder used an interpreter when he spoke to the Athenian Assembly while a military tribune, supposedly causing the Athenians to admire the brevity of Latin when compared to Greek (Plutarch, Cato the Elder 12). The following comment by the imperial historian Valerius Maximus shows that issues about speaking Greek and when it was appropriate for Romans to do so lived on in the reign of Tiberius (14–37 CE):

Long ago our magistrates acted to maintain the greatness of the Roman people; we can see this in how – along with other examples of how they preserved their dignified status – they guarded with great diligence the tradition of never giving responses (responsa)¹¹ to the Greeks in anything other than Latin. In fact, they even forced the Greeks to speak through interpreters not just in Rome, but even in Greece and Asia [Minor], stripping them of those smooth tongues through which they get their power. This certainly spread an increased sense of the dignity of the sound of Latin through all peoples. These magistrates were learned [i.e. in Greek], but they thought that the toga should not be subject to the pallium¹² in any area, and judged it was inappropriate that the importance and commands of empire should be handed over to the sweet nothings of literature.¹³

Although this passage is problematic,¹⁴ we know from elsewhere that the Romans kept controls on the use of Greek in the Senate, including using interpreters to prevent Greeks from speaking directly to the Senate in formal situations.¹⁵

The Romans used Greek interpreters while representing Rome in an official capacity and avoided speaking the language in particularly fraught situations. The Roman general Scipio Africanus the Elder used an interpreter when speaking to the Carthaginian general Hannibal before the battle of Zama in 202 BCE (Polybius 15.6, Livy, From the Founding of Rome 30.30). Although both were fluent in Greek, and Hannibal understood and spoke Latin (although with a strong accent), the presence of an interpreter marked their identities as generals leading armies of two powerful, non-Hellenistic states. The general Aemilius Paullus, who was also fluent in Greek, had his praetor¹⁶ Gnaeus Octavius interpret for him when speaking to the defeated Greek army after his victory at the battle of Pydna in 168 BCE (Livy 45.29.1–3). Paullus spoke Greek to the Greek king while they were in Paullus’ tent, but wasn't willing to speak it to him or the other Greek captives in public, and especially not before his victorious army.

At the same time, speaking and reading Greek was part and parcel of elite life and identity, and Romans embraced the language enthusiastically: the senator Fabius Pictor wrote the first history of Rome in Greek and the praetor Albucius was s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Orality and translation
• 1. Speaking as Greeks, speaking over Greeks: Orality and its problems in Roman translation
• 2. Views of orality and the translation of the Bible
• 3. Similarity and alterity in translating the orality of the Old Testament in oral cultures
• 4. Reviewing directionality in writing and translation: Notes for a history of translation in the Horn of Africa
• 5. Orality, trauma theory and interlingual translation: A study of repetition in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé
• 6. Translating orality, recreating otherness
• 7. Translating orality in the postcolonial Arabic novel: A study of two cases of translation into English and French
• Index