"What's the point of a revolution without general copulation?" Peter Weiss. Marat/Sade.

Another fine HNN headline led me to this story on finding the oldest representation of copulation, 7200 years old, in fact.

Probably it’s copulation. The male and the female were found separately, and they could have been performing a really interesting ritual dance.

But all the articles (to be fair, perhaps based on the same report) refer to this as “pornography.” Why? Pornography’s connotation is illicit, the blatant portrayal of the furtive. In our culture that makes some sense. But, Eros be praised, not all cultures are like ours. If these figures really were plugged together, they surely weren’t in someone’s private stash of erotic sculpture. They were front and center at some ceremony.

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What’s the point of being a translator? It certainly isn’t fame. When I went googling for the Marat/Sade quote, I found numerous references to playwright Peter Weiss. (I found the quote here, by the way.) But Weiss is German, and I wanted to know who the translator was. So I went to Amazon.com (Do I really need to link that? Good). It listed no translator. I found myself wondering, “Was I wrong? Is he not German? Or did he do his own translation?"

So I looked up Braudel’s, Civilization and Capitalism. I knew bloody well it was translated. I even thought I remembered the translator, Sian Reynolds. No translator listed for it either.

So I went to my library’s site. (Actually I’m going now, as I write this). We only have the movie (but I can tell you that Peter Brooks directed). I’m shifting to a Wisconsin-wide search. Now, I think I have found it. “English version by Geoffrey Skelton. Verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell.”

Think about it. Those of us who like the play talk about Weiss’s genius all the time. But the words that arouse us are not his. They are Skelton’s—or perhaps Mitchell’s in the songs. There’s an old saying that “poetry is what is lost in the translation.” But the best translators make new poems that echo closely the old.

Now usually in the literary world some acknowledgement is given to translation—though that becomes more common when multiple translations exist. In the historian’s world, do we pay much attention at all?

PS: It is Sian Reynolds who translated Braudel. There’s a cap over the “a” that I don’t know how to make here.

David Lion Salmanson - 4/7/2005

Walter Benjamin had some very interesting reflections on the Art of the Translator which can be found in the essay collection Illuminations. Dell Hymes (sp?) has done some fascinating work on the translations of Native American texts. Translation remains one of the central problems for historians, even Americanists. How does one translate regionalisms or inflections, for example.