Is That a Fish in Your Ear - By Bellos, David Page 0,113
of new work.
Just after the end of the Second World War, Penguin Classics brought out a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey, by E. V. Rieu. It was an unexpected success. As the company’s website records, the liveliness of Rieu’s style “proclaimed that this was a book that anyone—everyone—could, and should, read.”3 The classics were no longer restricted to the privileged few.
“Classic” here means Greek and Roman literature. Earlier translations had been done mostly to accompany the learning of Latin and Greek in the classier kind of schools, and so Rieu’s colloquial version was a revelation for less privileged folk. Its success and the long series that followed also reflected an important social aspiration of postwar Britain—to give much greater educational opportunities to the broad public than it had ever had before. The early Penguin Classics were mostly of ancient and medieval texts, including Neville Coghill’s famous rendering of Chaucer, but the series soon came to include literature ranging from ancient Egypt to the closing years of the nineteenth century. A collective enterprise of that kind was sustained by a conscious and explicit culture of translation. “It is the editor’s intention to commission translators who can emulate his own example and present the general reader with readable and attractive versions of the great books in modern English, shorn of the unnecessary difficulties and erudition, the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders so many existing translations repellent to modern taste.”4 Rieu’s marching orders point firmly toward an adaptive translation style. At the start, he tried to recruit academics but found that very few of them could write English of the kind he appreciated. He turned to professional writers such as Robert Graves, Rex Warner, and Dorothy L. Sayers, with personalities ranging from the scholarly to the idiosyncratic. But a stringent house style was imposed on these versions, and the result is that the first two hundred Penguin Classics read as if they had all been written in the same language—fluent, unpretentious British English, circa 1950. It was a remarkable achievement. The series certainly did educate millions, and it is undoubtedly one of the historical sources of the strong preference in English-language translation for adaptive, normalizing, or domesticating styles.
However, the social and cultural aspirations of these early retranslations are not necessarily those that motivate later retranslation projects. Save at special moments such as 1945 (or the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when Maksim Gorky launched his “World Literature” publishing house), retranslation is nearly always a strictly commercial affair.
Copyright is a modern invention, dating from 1708, but international copyright is even more recent. First sketched out in bilateral treaties in the 1850s, modern arrangements for the translation of literary works were first codified in the 1920s. The Berne Convention, which has since become the Universal Copyright Convention, doesn’t allow a publisher to put out a translation without purchasing that right from the owner of the original text. But when a publisher does acquire the right to publish a foreign work in translation, he becomes the sole owner of the translated work for as long as the edition remains in print.5 He has a monopoly in the target language—until the original work falls into the public domain.
International copyright protection is now set at seventy years from the author’s death or from first publication, in the case of posthumous works. Marcel Proust died in 1922, and the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu was published in 1927. Franz Kafka died in 1924, and his most famous works came out in 1925 (The Trial), 1926 (The Castle), and 1927 (America). English-language publishers of these perennial works lost their monopoly toward the end of the last century. Freud died in 1939, and so his works are now also “free of rights.” Publishers generally seek to retain some part of their market share in these hardy perennials by commissioning retranslations. That’s why over the last twenty years there has been a steady output of “new” Prousts, Kafkas, and Freuds.
The legal constraints on the international circulation of literary texts explain why there is only one translation available for most works first published since the First World War. Retranslation is not a practice that has any application to most of world literature created after the birth of the last generation but two.
A retranslator, whether working with older texts or with ones that have just become available at the seventy-year limit of protection, has to cope with ambiguous and conflicting demands. If the new translation is