Translation, Interpretation, and Layers of Influence: Psalm 130 in English
Until the reformation in England, the bible would have been only known to the congregations as a Latin text. The first line of Psalm 130 would have simply read “de profundis clamavi ad te, domine”. Of course, many among the nobility, and the clergy, would have spoken Latin but a significant proportion of the general public would have not; they would have heard the lines but not understood them. When translation happens after the reformation, it starts with the Psalms — they are sung in protestant mass and so are translated into English, often in rhythmic metre, so that they can be put to music. These early translations are not, as you would expect from a society only recently allowed to translate religious texts, very close and literal translations but are instead liberal poetic exercises in translation as creative practice that can teach us a lot about what it means to produce a translation.
For instance, the line above can fairly roughly be translated as “I have cried to you from the depths, Lord”. Yet of course this could mean many things, both metaphorical and literal, and the job of the translator is to tease out the underlying meaning of the sentence and make sure that is present in the translation. Thomas Wyatt goes with…
“From depth of sin and from a deep despair
From depth of death, from depth of heartes sorrow,
From this deep cave of darkness deep repair
Thee I have called, O Lord.”
In the original, none of this is explicitly stated and so in effect the word “profundis” implies all of these meanings; Wyatt brings together different possibilities, sensing the potential of the original word and extrapolating five or six meanings. In doing so he captures something really key about literature — the best writing is always being re-interpreted. To different people, the terms “deep despair” or “deep cave” will capture the essential meaning that they would get out of the original ‘profundis’. Others still will find something that Wyatt doesn’t list, or perhaps even couldn’t see; their understanding may be pulled in some completely different direction.
Good translation is about understanding these questions and their impact on the text. For instance, as a native English speaker my understanding of the term ‘profundis’ is deeply influenced by its connection to the word ‘profound’, and thus I found myself reading into the word a specific kind of emphatic power. That’s not correct or incorrect, but it is a much narrower meaning than the original. In translating the sentence, should you emphasise one particular meaning that you feel is being emphasised by the author, and how can you separate that from the layers of meaning in your own interpretation that may relate to things the original author wouldn’t have ever considered? Yet tending to cautiously into the other direction could produce a blank slate of a translation which has some essential elements scrubbed out from the language. Translation is a balancing act of navigating between these two poles.
Wyatt chooses a particular path in his translation, emphasising a certain kind of ambiguity whilst also embracing a narrowness of meaning in giving five distinct but fairly specific meanings for the single word. This is not better or worse in any way than choosing to keep your translation general; it just lends a different mood to the final piece. In some ways, the most important piece of information is the context. This is written to be an artistic, rather than functional, translation — after the reformation, psalms were frequently translated in order to be set to music. It’s very different to the Geneva Bible translation of the same psalm — “out of the deep places I have called unto thee, O Lord”, which would have been written for use in mass and bible study. But it is also Wyatt’s specific artistic spin that lends the translation its theme; George Gasgoigne later goes on to translate the same lines as…
“From depth of dole wherein my soul doth dwell,
From heavy heart which harbours in my breast,
From troubled sprite which seldom taketh rest,
From hope of heave, from dread of darksome death,
O gracious God, to thee I cry and yell.”
Gasgoine does a similar technique to Wyatt but to very different effect, bringing a frenetic energy to the mournful tone that Wyatt strikes. And, after all, these are all in themselves translations of a translation — that of St Jerome who translated the Vulgate. The psalms were originally written in Hebrew, and then were translated into Greek in the Septuagint bible, and then from the Greek into the Latin. Each of these will have added a new layer of meaning and influence — despite most likely being fairly close, functional translations — which then affects Wyatt’s, which then goes on to affect the translations of all who read it, and thus the cycle continues anew.
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