The Rawlinson Herodotus!

Our book today is the mighty 1858 translation of Herodotus by George Rawlinson, and it brings to the forefront the whole subject of the translator's art - how could it not, when critics the whole world over immediately hailed Rawlinson's book as a masterpiece of that art? A masterpiece, yes, but a thoroughly supplanted one - even here on Stevereads, where the praises of Aubrey de Selincourt's Penguin Classic translation have been sung endlessly but Rawlinson not ever mentioned.

Rawlinson worked on his epic translation alongside his brother Sir Henry, but it was mostly younger brother George who supplied the perfectly rounded phrasings, and although those phrasings are, in their essence, virtually the rhetorical opposite of Herodotus' own style of writing, they have the grace, the power, and that effortless Ciceronian cascade effect that so much of the best Victorian prose always has. Sometimes that rolling, sonorous quality is the only thing that will answer for a mood or a patch of weather or a bout of illness. There's such an unblinking certainty to it - the very quality that led later ages to despise it, but I've always thought the reaction was mostly vanity. No age has written per capita as mightily as the Victorians (even my beloved Elizabethans come in only second), and the Victorians knew it. Other ages knew it too, on some level, and that's never an easy knowledge.

Ordinarily, I'd feel some sympathy. But there are days when I reach for my battered Rawlinson without any thought for de Selincourt or any of the more modern translators. Listen to the delegate from Corinth, for instance, rebuffing the offers of strong government from the Spartans:

"Surely the heaven will soon be below, and the earth above, and men will henceforth live in the sea, and fish take their place upon the dry land, since you, Lacedaemonians, propose to put down free governments in the cities of Greece, and to set up tyrannies in their room. There is nothing in the whole world so unjust, nothing so bloody, as tyranny. If, however, it seems to you a desirable thing to have the cities under despotic rule, begin by putting a tyrant over yourselves, and then establish despots in other states. While you continue yourselves, as you have always been, unacquainted with tyranny, and take such excellent care that Sparta may not suffer from it, to act as you are now doing is to treat your allies unworthily. If you knew what tyranny was as well as ourselves, you would be better advised than you are now in regard to it."

All 20th century versions of that passage are pithier - but pithy isn't everything. Rawlinson captures better than anybody one essential element of reading Herodotus - how the so-called Father of History envelopes you in a seamless fog of narrative, story upon story, story within story, and you happily floating along without ever touching down because all those stories, regardless of length or pertinence, have first been chosen for their worth by a master storyteller. That worth is the one thing they have in common, and Rawlinson's rolling English perfectly mirrors it. When the female ruler of his own native Heilcarnassus becomes an ally of Xerxes and leads her troops personally, her story unfolds in an aside worthy of a novel:

Of the lower officers I shall make no mention, since no necessity is laid upon me; but I must speak of a certain leader named Artemisia, whose participation in the attacks upon Greece, notwithstanding that she was a woman, moves my special wonder. She had obtained the sovereign power after the death of her husband; and, though she had now a son grown up, yet her brave spirit and manly daring sent her forth to the war, when no need required her to adventure.

I recently spent a dreary afternoon reveling in the company of Rawlinson's Herodotus, and I heartily recommend it. But do yourself a favor and prepare first: the best, most full-blown literature of the Victorian era can't be picked up casually (unlike the literature of so many eras, which can) - its demands are as great as its rewards, so you need to acclimate yourself. The perfect way to do that? Find yourself a copy of the old Viking Portable Victorian Reader and spend some time rummaging its marvelous contents. By the time you know that volume inside and out, you'll be ready for everything the Victorians can throw at you - Trollope, Darwin, and yes, Rawlinson.

Peguins on Parade! Herodotus and Suetonius!

Some Penguin Classics become classics in their own right – a remarkable thing to happen to what is, at heart, a workmanlike series of trots. Ordinarily, in such a series, the works stay the same but the translations come and go – they get supplanted regularly as scholarship advances and copyrights expire. Those of us who live and breathe the classics of ancient Greece and Rome have not only made peace with this endless procession but come to relish it – watching to see what new versions of our old friends each publishing season will bring. And each time a new and truly superb translation comes along, we wonder the same thing: not 'can this ever be topped' since there is no single pinnacle, but rather, 'will we see another translation of this work this good in this generation?'

Those who thought the Rawlinson Herodotus unsurpassable, for instance, learned their folly in 1954 when Aubrey de Selincourt produced his epochal translation, which had less of the rhetorical power of Rawlinson but a good deal more of the stylistic fun of Herodotus himself. The de Selincourt Herodotus became the Penguin Herodotus, and it stayed that way for decades, delighting amateurs and instructing countless students in the ways of the first and most enjoyable of historians. In its wit and sparkle, it too seemed unsurpassable – and Penguin Classics wisely decided not to try to surpass it.

But even the most beautiful mansions need the occasional facelift, and in 1996 Penguin enlisted John Marincola to provide just that for the de Selincourt translation. Marincola added or updated many of the appurtenances modern editors are expected to provide – a glossary, a bibliography, a new introduction conversant in the latest scholarship, etc. - and he had the courage to put a toe on the stage with de Selincourt himself: “Although I have made several hundred minor revisions to Aubrey de Selincourt's translation,” he tells us, “I have attempted to retain its distinctive character and readability.” Any reader dismayed by the sound of those 'several hundred minor revisions' might not like what follows any better:

Where I felt the translation had the wrong tone, I have made minor alterations. This, naturally, is more subjective, but I hope the effect will be to underline the seriousness of Herodotus' purpose without taking anything away from the delightfulness of his narrative.

But the proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes, and no reader familiar with de Selincourt's version (or over-familiar, as some of us perhaps are) will find its spirit violated anywhere here. Not only does the earlier translator's perfect expression of the historian's earnest attempts at accountability (a new idea, pioneered by Herodotus) remain:

Up to this point I have confined what I have written to the results of my own direct observations and research, and the views I have formed from them; but from now on the basis of my story will be the accounts given to me by the Egyptians themselves – though here, too, I shall put in one or two things which I have seen with my own eyes.

… but so do all the characteristic Herodotean moments in which our historian can't help himself and simply must express his personal curiosity over some detail in the narratives he's found in his research or been told by witnesses, as in this little detail on the march of Xerxes mighty army:

It was during this march that his pack-camels were attacked by lions, which came down from their haunts at night and never attacked either the men or any of the other animals, but only the camels. I marvel at what it could have been that made the lions ignore every other living creature and set only upon the camels – beasts which they had never seen, or had any experience of, before.

Around the same time de Selincourt was providing the reading world with his landmark translation of Herodotus – in the year 1957 – Robert Graves was doing likewise with the Roman biographer Suetonius, in a fluid and loquacious version that again would leave readers wondering what could ever rival it (indeed, in terms of sales figures, Graves himself provided the only rival on the playing field, with his own heavily Suetonian I,Claudius and Claudius the God). Graves grappled with the notorious difficulties of Suetonius and produced a version for the ages.

So why, then, asks acerbic classicist Michael Grant decades later in 1979, was he asked to edit it? Where another expert might have made the usual pro forma humble remarks (perhaps using the tried-and-true metaphor of a mansion needing a facelift), Grant decided to explain himself in terms arch enough to win the approval of Livia herself:

Because Robert Graves (who explicitly refrained from catering for students) did not aim at producing a precise translation – introducing, as he himself points out, sentences of explanation, omitting passages which did not seem to help the sense, and 'turning sentences, and sometimes, even groups of sentences, inside-out'. But I feel that Mr Graves has been much too modest in this willingness to exclude from his readership those who want greater verbal exactitude …

(Grant does himself no great credit when, elsewhere in his introduction, he praises Suetonius for his dispassionate objectivity – even Graves, the novelist/interpolator, wasn't willing to go quite that far)

This explanation scores borderline-nasty points, but it does so at the expense of accuracy – Suetonius is a small, localized nightmare to translate; cracking apart his flaccid prose and making it sensible in English often requires just the kind of wholesale re-alignment Graves took it upon himself to do. In cases like this, the results must speak for themselves with slightly louder a voice than, say, the translation into English of a novel written last month in crystal-clear French.

Luckily, Graves and Grant make a good team – good enough, in any case, so the welding job doesn't show at all. Suetonius will often come up with sentences that snake here and there in apparent chaos only to deliver a sting at the end, and in all cases, the Graves/Grant combination works to preserve the particular little jolt of pleasure that comes when reading such monstrosities, as in this little gem about Mutina, scene of one of Octavian's victories:

When Augustus heard that Mark Antony had been taken under Lepidus' protection and that the other military commanders, supported by their troops, were coming to terms with these two, he at once deserted the senatorial party. His excuse was that some of them had contemptuously called him 'the boy', while others had not concealed their view that, once publicly honored, he should be got rid of – to avoid having to pay his veterans and himself what they expected. Augustus showed regret for his former allegiance by imposing a heavier fine on the people of Nursia than they could possibly meet, and then exiling them from their city; they had offended him by erecting a monument to fellow citizens killed at Mutina, with the inscription: 'Fallen in the cause of freedom!'

In both these cases, Penguin Classics chose the exact right route to take with these monuments to the art of translation (a route not often taken in an age in which 'new' has increasingly been characterized as a synonym for 'better'): preserve them, but tastefully update them for new generations of readers. Those of us who've loved these versions for years can't help but be grateful, even as we scan the horizon for the next great successors. Which will, in their turn, be Penguin Classics.

In the Penny Press! Heroes and Villains!

There's a horrible circular pattern that holds, stalled, over virtually all the major fiction outlets these days: the long-established names get published in their every jot and tittle, and everybody else must wait until physical infirmity or extreme decrepitude force openings in the calendar. Louise Erdrich getting a bowel-resection? Fine - let's look at the slush pile! Philip Roth's off-track betting covering his balloon payment this month? Fine - let's beat the workshop bushes!

It isn't fair, naturally, and it results in a frightful piling-up of jots and tittles. The unfairness stems from the fact that in a perfect world, EVERY SINGLE short story submitted to any major publishing venue would be read anonymously - not only so that every story would be read on its merits alone, but also so that literary dinosaurs wouldn't continue to view places like Harper's or the New Yorker as their private fiefdoms.

Two egregious examples this time around, one in the New Yorker and one in Harper's.

The case in the New Yorker is a short story called 'Bravado' by William Trevor. The title alone is warning enough: Trevor is approximately 115 years old and has never in his life written about anything closer to 'bravado' than the kitchen sink. But even so, we are trained by this damned wretched pattern to give every dog its day, and so we read 'the latest' by Alice Munro or John Updike, even though there's nothing any 'later' in them than the Crimean War.

That 'Bravado' is a shapeless, meandering mess of a thing will come as no shocking news to anybody who's watched Trevor's slow (and, it should be said, at times almost imperceptible) decline over the years. But what drew us up short, over and over, was the technical ineptitude creeping in at the edges.

Take one paragraph chosen at random:

"Less than half a mile away, the night was different. Young people prowled about outside the Star night club, it's band - Big City - taking a break. A late shop was still open, a watchful Indian at the door noting who came and went. A few cars drew away, but more remained. Then, with a thump of such suddenness that for a moment it might have been taken for a warning of emergency or disaster, music again burst from the Star night club."

Just counting up the infelicities in that single paragraph filled me with the urge to find some undergrad writing class and SUBMIT it, just to see what the smart ones would do to whip it into shape.

And it's not just the leaden repitition of 'the Star night club,' although there are at least ten ways to get around that. And maybe that 'late shop' (as opposed to 'shop open late') is some kind of UK colloquialism. And although that 'its band - Big City - taking a break,' the way it's written here, freezes the band forever on hiatus in the context of 'the night,' maybe Trevor was going for compression and just misstepped. But 'a watchful Indian at the door noting who came and went'? 'A few cars drew away, but more remained'? What are the redundant clarifications there, except sure signs of a) authorial laziness and b) an empty hole where an editor should be?

Over in Harper's we have our resident bete noir, Alice Munro, turning in yet another endless story in which two provincial female characters (usually, as in this case, the narrator and her sister - although this story intensifies the miasmic horror of it all by having the two women be identical twins... as if anybody would read a Munro story and think otherwise) natter on for 90 pages. For all we know here at Stevereads, they may natter on a good deal longer than that - 90 pages is the longest we've ever been able to subsist without light or air.

In this latest story, "Child's Play," there are no technical clunkers quite so bad as those littering Trevor's piece (at 75, Munro is, after all, 40 years younger). But she more than makes up for it by troweling on the sententious sentimentality until you're accidentally slopping it all over the coffee table:

"Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person. Generally it's in the fall, when you re-enter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That's when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year, but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and, it would seem, automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done."

Nevermind the laziness here (that 'it would seem' is so quintessentially Munro, an author so devoid of emotion that she can't even wholly trust her reportage of it), or the contradictions (if you notice the timing of this self-changing in childhood and then afterwards don't, then those changes cleary don't go on 'just the same,' etc) - no, it's the dunderheaded weirdness of the passage, the alien wrong-notedness that has always characterized Munro's prose. Honestly, has anyone ever viscerally felt anything CLOSE to what this passage describes? (Bertrand, Beepy, kindly put your hands down, ya mewling tools - the question was rhetorical)

Fortunately, not all was likewise bleak and bloated in this installment of In the Penny Press! For instance, in the same issue of Harper's, Jonathan Lethem turns in a very good, very comprehensive look at the phenomenon of plagiarism (for which we might also recommend - though it pains us to do so - Judge Posner's new booklet, "The Little Book of Plagiarism"). Of course, Lethem being Lethem, he can't do the job without a clever twist - this time in the not-quite-as-original-as-he-seems-to-think form of documenting all the plagiarisms he committed in the writing of the article.

We've seen this particular trick before (it was rife in the wake of the 'Opal Mehta' flap), and although Lethem does it more entertainingly than anybody else, we're not sure we like the implications of the gimmick itself. By persnicketishly documenting every word and echo, the writers in question seem to be implying that ANY uproar about plagiarism is, well, much ado about nothing. That if 'we' all dug around enough, we'd find that ALL of us are filching stuff from EVERYBODY all the time, so why bother getting so worked up about it? Look what you originality-Nazis are making me do, the joke seems to say - OK, I've noted every little thing I lifted from somebody else, are you HAPPY now?

Still, the piece was fun.

Also a great deal of fun in this same Harper's issue was a column of excerpts from the Chicago Manual of Style's website - poor souls writing in for grammar and style usage-tips and getting some unexpectedly spry responses:

"Q: A friend and I were looking at a poster that read 'guys apartment.' I believe it should read 'guys' apartment.' She claims it should read 'guys's apartment' and that the CMOS specifically gives the example of 'guys's' to make 'guy' possessive. I looked through every section on possessives and did not find the word 'guys's' or any rule that would make this correct.

A: 'Guys's' is acceptable in the way that 'youse guys' is acceptable; that is, neither is yet recognized as standard prose, and if your friend can find it in CMOS, I'll eat my hat. And shame on your friend. It must make you wonder what else she's capable of.

Q: O English language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing?

A: In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no."

Hee. Grammar is so much fun!

And lastly, of course those of you who saw it will have guessed already our thorough-going approval of Robert Kaplan's piece in the latest Atlantic - he writes in praise of Herodotus, and although he shoe-horns in one or two too many references to the quaqmire in Iraq, his main point bears repeating: reading Herodotus is entirely more enjoyable than reading Thucydides.

Which gives us the perfect opportunity to close with an unabashed plug: currently featured at a Barnes & Noble near you is the 'Barnes & Noble Classics' version of Herodotus, and it's an extremely worthy candidate for your $7 (yep, a wopping $7). Not only is it a surprisingly well put-together volume, pleasingly hefty and prettily designed, but it features the sturdy, resonant G.C. Macaulay translation, here given a well-deserved second life.

But the best feature of this edition is the editorial presence of Donald Lateiner. By some happy chance, B&N got lucky in finding Professor Lateiner, and you get to share in that luck for less than the cost of lunch. Lateiner's introduction is that perfect kind of academic prose that's bright and conversational enough to appeal equally to students and experts alike, and his notes throughout are a marvel of unobtrusive lucidity.

Nobody's classics shelf can be without Aubrey de Selincourt's seminal edition of Herodotus, but this, what can fairly be called the Lateiner edition (pace Macaulay), is certainly the first runner-up and almost equally mandatory (since everybody should have at least two different translations of any ancient classic). Our good professor also masterfully annotated the B&N edition of Thucydides, but as Kaplan (and we here at Stevereads) has already pointed out, Herodotus is where the fun is.