Hammylton

"I caught a sucker dyin' 'cause he thought he could rhyme

Now if his momma is a quarter daughter must be a dime"

Outkast - The Whole World

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“PIQUANT FACTS FOR SIMILES. ‘There were originally but three Muses — Melete, Mneme, Aœde — meditation, memory, and singing.’ You may make a good deal of that little fact if properly worked. You see it is not generally known, and looks recherché. You must be careful and give the thing with a downright improviso air."

 - Mr. Blackwood coaching the Signora Psyche Zenobia in How to Write a Blackwood Article

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"There was the poodle. There was Pompey. There was myself. We were three. Thus it is said there were originally but three Furies — Melty, Nimmy and Hetty — Meditation, Memory, and Singing."

- Signora Psyche Zenobia's resulting usage of said advice in The Scythe of Time

 

E. A. Poe

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"Qui pauet[pavet?] vanos metus, veros meretur." - line from Seneca's Oedipus

who / it will stop [feed?] / empty / fear / true / he deserves - verbatim Google Translate results

"Who balks at hollow fears, true ones deserves." - my quick, lazy and ignorant poetic approximation of the above

(alternate - who feeds hollow fears)

"Who quakes at empty fears, hath true in store." - translation by Frank Justus Miller, 1907 

 

"Who trembles with vain fear, true fear deserves." - translation by Frank Justus Miller, 1917

 

"Those with false fears deserve real ones" - translation by Emily Wilson, 2010

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My distaste for emotional manipulation makes the stoics a predictable fit, to the point a couple of people expressed surprise that I haven't already been reading Seneca. So I thought I might as well and instead of downloading his plays/letters ordered myself a couple of paperback volumes. That old-timey stuff suits relaxed bathtub reading.

Emily Wilson spoiled my bath!

I'm not entirely opposed to modernization of old works, where it adds some extra layer of awareness (usually to illustrate universality) or it simply trims away intervening centuries' own undue affectations and misrepresentation of the original. We can safely do away with stuffing Romans' mouths full o' thees and thous like Miller did in those older translations. (Wilson's is certainly an improvement even by my meager understanding, not denying that.) But inserting new colloquialisms for the sake of wider appeal is by the same token counterproductive. Wilson's translation has one character bragging about eating "gourmet food" another about getting away "scot-free" (which apparently does not refer to stingy Scots as I'd always assumed, but nonetheless carries overly-specific cultural baggage) and other such awkward little attempts to connect to an imaginary plebeian readership crop up every other page.

Far more pervasively though, a sort of dross mundaneity weighs down Seneca's bombast, and though I do not truly speak Latin and can't critique the translation directly, parsing many sentences like that cited in the opening leads me to decry: "traduttore, traditore!" Creon's declaration against Oedipus' unjust accusation, a declamation against regal wrath warrants a bit of pomp, especially voiced at the very cusp of the play as characters weigh potentially disastrous revelation against the extant disaster of ignorance. Pithy as it is, the line carries both the air and weight of proverb and begs its due action verbs and descriptive descriptors. Will "pavet" not stretch to balking, quaking, trembling or quailing (or at least fearing actively) instead of merely having fear? Or "vanos" to empty, hollow or vain? Must the audience be walked like toddlers to the juxtaposition of "real" with "false" - or like remedial students sitting in front of a multiple-choice exam?

 

Ultimately, I honestly don't know. I confess to being out of my depth Latin-wise. Still, as a random schmoe, a simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid, a homini lupus, something tells me I'm not getting my money's worth out of my contribution to Oxford University Press. I ain't gettin' my dose of ancient Roman here. If "'rhetorical' and 'didactic' are no longer dirty words" as stated in the collection's introduction, why fall back on such impoverished phrasing? Ditch the iambic pentameter? I'll take your word for it. But then why did "primone in aevo viridis" shift from the more poetic interpretations of first greening, blooming, budding or blossoming to the dustily prosaic "vigorous young man"? Is Latin the real issue here, or addressing an audience incapable of figurative speech, whose command of English is no sturdier than their Latin?

 

Let's not saddle Wilson specifically with more than her share of guilt though. The fad of "modernizing" past centuries to the point of overt vandalism in desperate attempts to win over pop-culture audiences has tumesced uninterrupted since at least West Side Story. Dumbing down the general verbiage while colloquializing to inflict targeted bouts of familiarity fits the notion of a readership with a thousand-word vocabulary peppered with Jersey Shore witticisms. Even wikimedia's usage notes warn: "gourmet has become somewhat debased by marketing usage, and is considered by some a pretentious middlebrow term." It's not a bug, it's a feature, right Oxford?

 

One moment... wait, wait... who do you think your audience is? Who the futuo do you think is buying Seneca?? Will using smaller words impart to all the dudebros, drunk girls and Billy-Bubbas a sudden burning passion for Early Empire cogitations? Your potential audience consists of a million lit/theatre/philosophy majors who damn well better be shorting a few neurons pondering the original context and nuance to earn their diplomas, plus a thousand random nerds with actual interest in the topic, self-motivated enough to trudge through a few obscure adjectives or verb/noun inversions here and there. Annotate, but do not water down!

 

You will NOT sell to the majority. What you're looking for is a minority of that majority, oligoi of polloi, and you should be focusing on capturing that niche the moment their attention falls on you, not vainly, hollowly snatching past them at their thirty cousins who consider it their duty to blindly hate the classics. They will never reach for your book on the shelf in the first place, and if assigned it in school, will hate it because it was assigned in school! Go for the geek market.

Yes, we lowly rabble will ignore you in favor of Star Wars 99.9% of the time, but in that 0.1%, in those brief moments of self-improvement we want the real Oxford brand, not some rhinestoned knockoff.

Yes, you desperately need to reach fresh audiences, but those few picking up your book are less likely to be warmed by your linguistic rapprochement than insulted by your condescension. What will feel worse to them than suffering the highfalutin' snobbery of a classicist? A hundred pages in, realizing they've been getting talked down to by Suky Snobbs playing Pygmalion to their gal LaToya.

 

"Mr. Blackwood has a pair of tailor's-shears, and three apprentices who stand by him for orders. One hands him the “Times,” another the “Examiner,” and a third a “Gulley's New Compendium of Slang-Whang.” Mr. B. merely cuts out and intersperses. It is soon done — nothing but Examiner, Slang-Whang, and Times — then Times, Slang-Whang, and Examiner — and then Times, Examiner, and Slang-Whang."