Kristina Chew (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Smallness is a feature of my work as a translator in how I use the physical space of a page, how I conceive of a translation in relation to the original text, and in my choice of texts to translate. Small spaces within a line can simulate the rhythm and beat of the meters of Greek and Latin, acting as a caesura-like pause, as in these lines from the Chorus in Seneca’s Hercules Furens (125-128):
Now scattered stars flicker faint,
the cosmos sinking night undone
siphons vagrant fires the light
swims back, Phosphoros corrals
Smallness also describes the status that a translation holds in relation to the original. Like Tityrus’ habit of “seeing the big against the littles,” sic parvis componere magna solebam (Vergil, Eclogue 1.23), a translation is ever being positioned in respect to the original text as diminutive if not diminished (Misior-Mroczkowska 2017). Translation is the parva to the magnis of the original, analogous to hors d’oeuvres, which offer a bite or two but leave it to the main course to fill the reader up, or the bees’ well-ordered hive in Aeneid 1.420-436, that takes up a far smaller footprint than any human society.
Yet a translation's “reach” is inversely proportionate to this diminutive size. Today, translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts occupy more space on bookshelves and in backpacks than do the original works. More students and readers encounter the Odyssey of Lattimore, Lombardo, or Wilson, than work their way through Homer’s Greek. Some translations (Logue 2016; Carson 2012) make a virtue and even a method of being less than the magna opera of the original, unhesitatingly taking on the role of an opening act that warms up the audience and then hands over the space for the headliner.
My own choices of texts to translate are from the not-so-big and non-epic poetic genres — pastoral, didactic, lyric — as well as fragments. The journal Ancient Exchanges provides a vital space for translations of such works, whose “spun down song” deductum carmen (Vergil, Eclogue 6.5) grants them fewer appearances on college syllabi, and for which there tends to be (as one editor once wrote me, with regrets) less of a market. Further, the journal’s “In the Classroom” feature offers pedagogical tools to make a space for the small stuff of translation, by showing how a translator’s word-by-word choices offer “an opportunity to examine our values as a reader and experience the present moment, so long as we are willing [...] to set down our comfortable clichés and step into the unknown” (Hanssens-Reed 2021). That a tiny package contains something big is a cliché hardly worth restating, yet Catullus’ nugae that his poem 1’s addressee “thought to be something” (aliquid esse putare) and Virgil’s reference to the labor of Georgics 4 as “in a fine vein... but not so fine’s the grace of glory,” in tenui… at tenuis non gloria (4.6), remind us of how crucial a role translation (however little space allotted to it) plays.