Wry Mockery Infamised Helen
(Which is an anagram for Frederick Ahl Is My Enemy Now.)
“The epic should be allowed to speak, in so far as a translation can achieve this goal, for itself”, writes Frederick Ahl. In the translator’s note to his translation of the Aeneid, he discusses the technical difficulties of translating the poem while preserving its dactylic hexameter. No detail may be overlooked! Ahl talks about translating Vergil’s anagrams, keeping the number of lines the same, and even how he distinguishes between the pronunciation of (for example) Aeneas’s and Aeneas’. You would think that this is a very careful translation (careful in that Ahl is very deliberate about the choices he makes) and for the most part, it is.
So when I came across the word “bitch” in Book 6, I thought — strong word choice! I wonder which Latin word this is translating! I didn’t think Vergil used any similarly rude words! The Latin (Aeneid 6.511–2) reads:
sed me fata mea et scelus exitiale Lacaenae
his mersere malis; illa haec monimenta reliquit.
But me my own fate and the Laconian woman’s death-dealing crime overwhelmed in these woes. It was she who left these memorials! (Loeb translation)
Or in Ahl’s translation, where the epic “should be allowed to speak for itself”:
My own fate and the deadly crime of that bitch of a Spartan
sank me in all of these evils: she left me these scars as mementoes.
This is Deiphobus speaking to Aeneas in the Underworld, about how “the Laconian woman” — Helen — was responsible for his murder and subsequent mutilation. There is no word equivalent to bitch.
Translators (male ones) have a bit of a thing about Helen of Troy. Certain translators (This Is About Fagles) go hog wild with the slurs. Fagles is particularly nasty in having Helen describe herself as “bitch that I am” (Iliad 6.408) and “whore that I was” (Odyssey 4.162).
And in certain passages (about Helen, but also the slave women in the Odyssey) this tendency increases. In the translator’s note to her Odyssey Emily Wilson writes:
[…] in the scene where Telemachus oversees the hanging of the slaves who have been sleeping with the suitors, most translations introduce derogatory language (“sluts” or “whores”), suggesting that these women are being punished for a genuinely objectionable pattern of behavior, as if their sexual history actually justified their deaths. The original Greek does not label these slaves with any derogatory language. Many contemporary translators render Helen’s “dog-face” as if it were equivalent to “shameless Helen” (or “Helen the bitch”). I have kept the metaphor (“hounded”), and have also made sure that my Helen, like that of the original, refrains from blaming herself for what men have done in her name.
Ahl’s decision to call Helen a bitch at Aeneid 6.511–2 is interesting because it is not a passage that has a tradition of being horrible about women. John Dryden, in his translation from 1697 put it as:
These are the monuments of Helen’s love:
the shame I bear below, the marks I bore above.
Robert Fitzgerald:
My lot
And the Laconian woman’s ghastly doing
Sank me in this hell. These are the marks
She left me as her memorial.
David West:
It is my own destiny and the crimes of the murderess from Sparta that have brought me to this. These are reminders of Helen.
Seamus Heaney:
It was my destiny
and the criminal, widowing schemes of my lady
of Sparta wrecked and ruined me. What you see
are the love bites she left me in remembrance.
Sarah Ruden:
Fate and the Spartan woman’s fatal sin
have plunged me in this torment — her memorial.
Robert Fagles (unsurprisingly?):
My own fate and the deadly crimes of that Spartan whore
have plunged me in this hell. Look at the souvenirs she left me!
Ahl just… decided to do that. Metre can’t be the explanation, because “bitch of a Spartan” is metrically identical to “woman of Sparta”. He just saw the word “Lacaenae”—Spartan woman—and let “the epic” speak for itself. What are we supposed to think about his careful translation? That anagrams can’t be left out, but slurs can slip in? That “the translator has no such business imposing any such intentionalist framework” (as Ahl puts it) onto the text—unless it’s to decide that the tone of the word for “Spartan woman” warrants a translation as “bitch”? Or did he thinkingly decide this was an appropriate choice of word? Out of casual or deliberate misogyny, which is worse?
Just one word may seem like too little reason to declare that Frederick Ahl Is My Enemy Now. But it opens a door. Ahl claims that the text should speak for itself when he is speaking through it and it through him. Ahl’s careful translation is made through (mostly) careful choices — but how many more of those choices don’t we see? This one word is important in that it makes the fact that they are choices clear, and makes Ahl as translator, and the attitudes he brings with him, suddenly, painfully visible.
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