Is Michael Grant the worst translator of Latin in our time?
Cicero, "First Speech Against Catiline" (Grant tr.):
What a scandalous commentary on our age and its standards!
Cicero, "Oratio in Catilinam Prima in Senatu Habita":
O tempora, o mores!
... Dunno how that strikes you, but I find myself not wanting to read a single word of Grant's Cicero after that.
That. is. so. ugly. To take one of the most famous lines in literature and turn it to... nothing ...
ReplyDeleteGeorge Orwell is spinning in his grave.
He didn't even have to translate it at all. Could've just footnoted it for the small set of readers who are (1) reading Cicero and (2) haven't heard that tag before.
ReplyDeleteI'd heard Grant has a bad rep as a translator, but not having any Latin, I'd never seen it demonstrated so blatantly.
The Penguin Classics have been forced to fight back in recent years against serious competition from Oxford in the ancient-classics dep't -- modern translations with more notes, etc., vs. the old Penguin ideal of some bloke readin' Cicero in the pub over his Newcastle. Replacing Grant-style translations has been one of their aims. Don't think they've gotten to Cicero yet, tho.
... Having just said that, I'm enabled by Amazon to peek into the new volume of Cicero from Oxford, tr. D.H. Berry, and we get "What a decadent age we live in!"
ReplyDeleteThe only good thing I can say about that is he turns Cicero's 4 words into 7, not 10. And "decadence" is too loaded a word; I'm not even sure when the Romans began to think of themselves as decadent, tho Cicero's contemporary Sallust was I think a pioneer in that analysis.