In which I am not fluent in Greek
Oct. 14th, 2011 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ricardienneThis is not about the fact that I have been embarrassing myself when I have to translate in seminar, and have been giving the impression all week that I don't know either Greek or Latin and am not preparing for class at all (none of those things are true).
This is about my niggling obsession with forms of address and social distinctions that are expressed in language. Or aren't expressed (really obviously) in language, as seems to be the case.
So here is an example of what is bothering me today.
A contemporary translation of a bit of Achilles Tatius; Melite, a wealthy woman of Ephesus, is inspecting her estate when a slave woman in chains falls at her feet and makes a plea:
Direct address in Greek normally (and often, only) contains a vocative at the beginning that establishes the relationship of the speaker and the addressee.* So the woman (spoiler alert: she's actually the heroine Leucippe, although we don't technically know that yet, because the last time we saw Leucippe, she was being decapitated and thrown overboard by hired pirates in the harbor of Alexandria), addresses Melite first as despoina ("mistress", translated as "m'lady"), while Melite uses gunai ("woman"), a fairly standard address to slaves and servants in later Greek (in Homer it's normal for all woman). All of the other honorifics in Lakaina's speech are absent from the Greek. My inclination, furthermore is to think -- but this is what I am frustrated that I can't comment upon with certainty -- that "Lakaina" does not in fact speak in a particularly abject manner: her language is the language of supplication ("I humbly beg your generous ladyship" is in Greek something like "I proffer this evil fate of mine as the mark of my suppliant status") but that isn't really the same thing as the repeated markers of "I'm in a position of a servant/slave" that the translator puts in.
Or is it? English usage expects (if things like fairy tales, fantasy novels, and Masterpiece Theatre are an indication), regular use of an honorific, if an honorific is being used. Ancient Greek really seems to use only the initial vocative (as does classical Latin, incidentally), but it may be that we need to use English conventions, because it would be misrepresenting the relationship implied by the juxtaposition of those initial vocatives not to reiterate it where we would expect it to be reiterated in English. Not all slaves address their masters with despota. And it's kind of trope, (at least as far back as Euripides) that for a free woman to use despota (Master) is a big, soul-wrenching deal.
My other anecdote in this woefully threadbare web is a Chinese WWII-drama miniseries I was watching with my landlady. I do not know Chinese, but it didn't take me very long to pick up that a soldier's normal response to an order was "Hai!". In English: "Yes sir!" The Chinese has no vocative or honorific marker, but I think that it would weird bordering on unthinkable for a hypothetical subtitler to leave one out. Because in English, soldiers say "Yes sir!" and not "Yes!" (It's not clear what Roman soldiers said, but there is not a Latin equivalent of "sir." You did want to know that, didn't you?)
The other thing that bothers me about this Achilles Tatius translation is that Leucippe/Lakaina's Greek is -- I am fairly certain -- not markedly lower-class in the way it is translated here. It's simpler and more declarative than her letter in the next chapter, but not simpler or different in word choice than "high status" dialogue. I think. (What kind of (graduate) student of Greek am I, who is still almost completely at sea on things like register at this point!)
*Eleanor Dickey is the main person who works on this ("The Ancient Greek Address System and Some Proposed Sociolinguistic Universals", Greek forms of address: from Herodotus to Lucian); she has convincingly shown that Classical Greek does not have a T-V system of vocatives the way, e.g., English does. I would suspect that sociolinguistic distinctions would occur on levels other than direct address, which is harder to measure in a systematic way, especially where the "colloquialism" of a lot of the sources is doubtful.
This is about my niggling obsession with forms of address and social distinctions that are expressed in language. Or aren't expressed (really obviously) in language, as seems to be the case.
So here is an example of what is bothering me today.
A contemporary translation of a bit of Achilles Tatius; Melite, a wealthy woman of Ephesus, is inspecting her estate when a slave woman in chains falls at her feet and makes a plea:
"Have mercy on me, m'lady, as one woman to another. I am free by birth, though now a slave, as Fortune chooses." And so saying, she fell silent.
Melite said: "Stand up, woman. Tell me your name and country and who put these shackles on you. Even in fallen circumstances, your beauty proclaims you a person of no mean birth."
"It was the bailiff," the woman replied, "because I would not submit to his lechery. Lakaina is my name, ma'am, born in Thessaly. I humbly beg your generous ladyship, free me from this awful condition, keep me somewhere safe until I can pay back the two thousand gold pieces that Sosthenes gave the pirates for me. I'll pay if off quick, I promise you. Else I'll wait on you hand and foot, m'lady. Just look here, now, how he's been swinging his lash at my poor back!" And she slipped down part of her dress to show her back cruelly striped with welts.
Direct address in Greek normally (and often, only) contains a vocative at the beginning that establishes the relationship of the speaker and the addressee.* So the woman (spoiler alert: she's actually the heroine Leucippe, although we don't technically know that yet, because the last time we saw Leucippe, she was being decapitated and thrown overboard by hired pirates in the harbor of Alexandria), addresses Melite first as despoina ("mistress", translated as "m'lady"), while Melite uses gunai ("woman"), a fairly standard address to slaves and servants in later Greek (in Homer it's normal for all woman). All of the other honorifics in Lakaina's speech are absent from the Greek. My inclination, furthermore is to think -- but this is what I am frustrated that I can't comment upon with certainty -- that "Lakaina" does not in fact speak in a particularly abject manner: her language is the language of supplication ("I humbly beg your generous ladyship" is in Greek something like "I proffer this evil fate of mine as the mark of my suppliant status") but that isn't really the same thing as the repeated markers of "I'm in a position of a servant/slave" that the translator puts in.
Or is it? English usage expects (if things like fairy tales, fantasy novels, and Masterpiece Theatre are an indication), regular use of an honorific, if an honorific is being used. Ancient Greek really seems to use only the initial vocative (as does classical Latin, incidentally), but it may be that we need to use English conventions, because it would be misrepresenting the relationship implied by the juxtaposition of those initial vocatives not to reiterate it where we would expect it to be reiterated in English. Not all slaves address their masters with despota. And it's kind of trope, (at least as far back as Euripides) that for a free woman to use despota (Master) is a big, soul-wrenching deal.
My other anecdote in this woefully threadbare web is a Chinese WWII-drama miniseries I was watching with my landlady. I do not know Chinese, but it didn't take me very long to pick up that a soldier's normal response to an order was "Hai!". In English: "Yes sir!" The Chinese has no vocative or honorific marker, but I think that it would weird bordering on unthinkable for a hypothetical subtitler to leave one out. Because in English, soldiers say "Yes sir!" and not "Yes!" (It's not clear what Roman soldiers said, but there is not a Latin equivalent of "sir." You did want to know that, didn't you?)
The other thing that bothers me about this Achilles Tatius translation is that Leucippe/Lakaina's Greek is -- I am fairly certain -- not markedly lower-class in the way it is translated here. It's simpler and more declarative than her letter in the next chapter, but not simpler or different in word choice than "high status" dialogue. I think. (What kind of (graduate) student of Greek am I, who is still almost completely at sea on things like register at this point!)
*Eleanor Dickey is the main person who works on this ("The Ancient Greek Address System and Some Proposed Sociolinguistic Universals", Greek forms of address: from Herodotus to Lucian); she has convincingly shown that Classical Greek does not have a T-V system of vocatives the way, e.g., English does. I would suspect that sociolinguistic distinctions would occur on levels other than direct address, which is harder to measure in a systematic way, especially where the "colloquialism" of a lot of the sources is doubtful.
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no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-16 03:44 am (UTC)...Yes? (I know basically no Latin and less Greek, but I really enjoy hearing you talk about it :) )
no subject
Date: 2011-10-16 03:59 pm (UTC)