ESeminar June 2008 - Topic 5

Venizelos' Thucydides: Historicizing Translation
Emily Greenwood, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

‘So why a translation, why the circumvention which is the way home?'

Steiner (1998) 399

The Background

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864-1936) is known primarily as one of the towering statesmen of the modern Greek state. As prime minister of Greece from 1910-1915, 1917-1920, and 1928-1933, Venizelos presided over the expansion of the Greek state in fulfilment of the Megali Idea (lit. ‘Big Idea'). As the head of a revolutionary government in Salonica in 1916-17, Venizelos was also at the centre of deep ideological divisions over the very identity of the Greek state and its politics, a period referred to as the national schism, or dissension (ethnikos dichasmos). [1]

During a period of exile after his defeat in the 1920 elections, Venizelos worked on a translation of Thucydides' History, which he supplemented with a commentary. [2] Both the translation and the commentary were completed in 1928, but were not published in his lifetime. When Venizelos died in 1936, his widow Helena entrusted the manuscript of the translation to Dimitrios Caclamanos, who subsequently edited the work for translation. Venizelos' translation was first published by Oxford University Press in 1940, in two volumes. Of the commentary, only eleven notebooks appear to have survived, covering books 1-4 of Thucydides' History – although the coverage of Thucydides' text is not entire. These notebooks were published in 1991, in modern Greek, edited by Evie Zachariades-Holmberg.

The context for Venizelos' Translation

Previous discussions of Venizelos' translation have tended to take either of two approaches: scholars have either concentrated on the linguistic politics of the translation, scrutinizing Venizelos' decision to translate Thucydides into katharevousa Greek, [3] or they have analyzed Venizelos' ‘political' interpretation of Thucydides and have viewed the translation as ‘an indirect political statement' (Holmberg 2003: 7). The discussion that I offer here combines both approaches. Focusing on a single passage in Venizelos' translation, I will use it as a case-study to illustrate the cultural politics of Venizelos' translation of Thucydides and Venizelos' substantial autobiographical investment in the translation. In addition, my discussion will also serve as a case-study in the importance of historicizing the position of the translator in order to appreciate how a translation inevitably speaks to a particular moment in the history of the target culture.

Venizelos' translation of Thucydides is an extreme case of inter-lingual translation as an exercise in domestication. Typically, a domesticating translation is one in which the cultural norms and values of the target language / culture are substituted for those of the source language / culture. [4] In the case of Venizelos, the process of ‘domestication' is complicated by the fact that this is both an inter -lingual and an intra -lingual translation: the modern, katharevousa Greek into which Venizelos was translating was sufficiently continuous with Thucydides' Greek to blur the difference, collapsing over two millenia of cultural and historical change. [5] In his editorial preface, Dimitrios Caclamanos comments on this linguistic affinity between source text and target language in Venizelos' translation:

Veniselos respected, as far as possible, the vocabulary of Thucydides' History, using only different words when the meaning of the ancient ones had changed in the modern Greek. […] Veniselos, in close spiritual communion with the Historian, excels in the task. He adopted a simple, fluid “katharevousa” for rendering the original accessible even to an entirely unclassical reader.

Caclamanos (1940) xvii-xviii

It is hard to know whether to speak of foreignization or domestication; in fact, there is a certain amount of reciprocity between source language and target language in Venizelos' translation. On the one hand, Venizelos' Greek is heavily under the attraction of Thucydides' Greek leading to a strikingly archaic katharevousa, forced into awkward syntactic constructions that are approximations to those in Thucydides. [6] In this sense the target language is foreignized by Thucydides. On the other hand, through a process of what we might call misrecognition, or what George Steiner terms ‘positive-mistaking', [7] in places Thucydides is made to sound like Venizelos' contemporary as though lending his voice to an ideological struggle in the present day (Greece in the 1920s). While other scholars have explored Venizelos' intellectual affinity for Thucydides and the extent to which Venizelos identified his historical situation with that of Thucydides, I will examine how this domesticating strategy, whereby Venizelos identified himself with Thucydides, manifests itself in the choices that Venizelos made as translator.

In the context of the Greek state in the period 1920-1928, when Venizelos was working on his translation, ‘domesticating translation' has a specific political resonance. This was the period of both the flourishing and collapse of Greek irredentism – the ideal of a greater Greece, ‘ Greece of the two continents and the five seas', which was briefly realized in August 1920 with the Treaty of Sèvres. [8] This irredentist dream envisaged the unification of a previously disjointed homeland, or the bringing home of ‘Greek' territories that had been geographically and politically alienated from the Greek state. [9] In this context, domesticating the translation of Thucydides is part of a larger cultural and ideological project to reclaim the history of ancient Greece for the modern state. [10] This metaphor of bringing ancient Greek culture ‘home' is reminiscent of one of the metaphors that George Steiner uses to illustrate the second stage of his ‘hermeneutic motion' in which the translator enters the source text ‘aggressively' and expropriates its language and value: ‘The translator invades, extracts, and brings home' (Steiner 1998: 314). The idea of bringing the inferred meaning of the source text home recurs in Steiner's work making the translator's expropriation an act of misplaced familiarity; the translator recognizes the source text because ‘He has been here before he came. […] His sense of the text is a sense of homecoming, or, as the sentimental tag precisely puts it, of a home from home' (Steiner 1998: 398). [11]

This principal of recognition fits Venizelos' translation of Thucydides very well. As Photea has observed, ‘for Venizelos, Thucydides was the historian of the first national schism' (1990:134). In his translation of Thucydides' History, Venizelos merges two different temporalities, in order to identify the political dissension of Greece in 1916-17 and the subsequent collapse of the Asia Minor Expedition (1922) with factionalism in Athenian politics and the collapse of the Sicilian expedition (413 BC) and the dream of the exponential enlargement of the Athenian empire. [12]

Case-Study: Reading Venizelos' Translation of Thucydides 7.87.5–8.1.2

In order to appraise Venizelos' translation, I offer a literal English translation of the last two paragraphs of Book 7 of Thucydides' History, in which Thucydides summarizes the outcome of the Athenians' expedition to Sicily and places it in a broader historical context:

Thucydides History 7.87.5-6

This undertaking (ergon) was the greatest Hellenic undertaking that occurred in this war; indeed in my opinion it was the greatest of all the Greek actions that we know of by popular report, in that it was both most illustrious for the victors and most devastating (dustuchestatos) for those who were destroyed. For they were comprehensively conquered and in no quarter was their suffering small, but it was complete annihilation, as the saying goes: both the infantry and the fleet, in fact there was nothing that was not destroyed, and few out of many made their way back home. These were the events that happened in Sicily.

In Venizelos' translation of this passage, he translates the Greek noun ergon in the first line as polemikos epicheirêsis (‘military undertaking'), a phrase that is repeated and reinforced with the noun ekstrateia (‘expedition'). The ancient Greek noun ergon has much greater latitude, and can mean ‘action', ‘event', ‘deed', ‘achievement', and even ‘monument'. I have translated it as ‘undertaking'; other translators have chosen ‘action' (Warner) or ‘achievement' (Crawley). [13] Venizelos has chosen to describe the defeat in language that evokes present day military operations in such a way that the Greek reader cannot help but catch allusions to the expedition of the Greek army to Turkey in 1919-1922, and its ultimate defeat in September 1922. A further allusion to the Asia Minor disaster is present in Venizelos' translation of the adjective dustuchestatos (‘devastating') as katastreptikôtatos (‘catastrophic'), [14] a choice which also suggests the Asia Minor Disaster – referred to simply as ‘the Catastrophe' (i katastrophi) – as an interpretative framework for this section of Thucydides' History. Whereas, following other English translators of Thucydides, I have translated the ancient Greek verb apollumi (used in the middle voice) as ‘destroyed', Venizelos selected the modern Greek verb khanô (‘I lose'): ‘everything was lost'. Arguably this selection alludes to the sense of national loss in Greece in the post-Disaster era, since the Greek territories in Asia Minor that were claimed by Turkey after the failure of the Greek expedition were referred to as i khamenes patrides / politeies – ‘the lost homelands / settlements'. [15]

That the Catastrophe informs Venizelos' conception of the Sicilian Expedition is also evident in his translation of the first chapter of Book 8 of Thucydides' History. [16] Thucydides describes the disbelief with which reports of the failure of the expedition were greeted in Athens, commenting that ‘they disbelieved even the most respectable of the soldiers who had themselves escaped from the scene of action and clearly reported the matter, a destruction so complete not being thought credible' (8.1.1; trans. Crawley in Strassler 1996: 481). The phrase ‘scene of action' translates the ancient Greek phrase ‘ auton ton ergon ' (lit. ‘the very action'). In Venizelos, this becomes ‘the theatre of the catastrophe' (to theatron tis katastrophis). Similarly, at 8.1.2, where Thucydides describes the Athenians' ‘fear in relation to what had happened', Venizelos has ‘fear in response to the catastrophe that had befallen' (ek tis epelthousis katastrophis).

Further research is necessary to establish the extent to which this synchronous identification or ‘positive-mistaking' pervades Venizelos' translation, or whether it is a feature of the translation of particular passages in which Venizelos discerned analogies between the history of the Greek world in the late fifth century BC and the politico-historical situation of the Greek state in the period 1916-1928. Evie Holmberg's study suggests that Venizelos saw parallels with particular sections of Thucydides' History, but a systematic, historicizing analysis of the translation might yield a different perspective.

Venizelos' interpretation of Thucydides, seen here from the perspective of translation, shares much in common with the political interpretation of Thucydides in the disciplines of International Relations and Political Thought, where Thucydides' analysis of a particular geo-political conflict has been used as a blue-print for the study of foreign policy in the cold war era and continues to inform military intelligence and foreign policy decision making in the era of the war on terror. [17] In fact, one could go further and say that the appropriation of Thucydides' History by European statesmen was one of the motivating factors for Venizelos' translation. His ‘domesticating' modern Greek translation suggests that the recent historical experience of the Modern Greek state is the truest or native parallel for the Atheno-Peloponnesian War. By assimilating Thucydides' History to a modern Greek context, Venizelos challenges the appropriations of Thucydides in other national contexts. It could be argued that Thucydides invites such appropriations, by holding out his History as a possession to be listened to for all time whose relevance is staked jointly on its clear presentation of past history and its relevance for future conflicts that are very close in nature to the one that he describes (1.22.4). This latter clause (relevance for future conflicts) invites precisely the kind of positive-mistaking of which Steiner accuses the translator in the guise of interpreter.

Drawing on Lawrence Venuti's study of the political and cultural agendas that govern translation, [18] we could argue that Venizelos' katharevousa translation of Thucydides rewrites or reforms the source text in a situation where the source language exercises a cultural tyranny over the target language – and not the other way round. In other words, in this context it might be helpful to think of domestication as a defensive, rather than an aggressive strategy. By exploiting the linguistic continuity between Thucydides' Greek and the katharevousa dialect of his translation, Venizelos is able to renegotiate the relationship with the classical past, inscribing contemporary references and cultural values in Thucydides' text. The example that I have focused on here is the insertion of the value-laden noun katastrophi at pivotal points in Thucydides' text. This is very much a reciprocal model: while Thucydides' Greek might be seen to weigh heavily on the modern dialect of Venizelos' translation, exercising an archaic pull, at the same time Venizelos transforms key ideas in Thucydides' text, creating a space for the historical experience of modern Greece in this classic of classics. [19] We should also juxtapose Venizelos' translation with contemporary translations into other European languages in order to appreciate the extent to which his translation of Thucydides into modern Greek can also be construed as a form of resistance in terms of a minority language taking on major languages, challenging the English-language or the French-language Thucydides with a Greek language counterpart. [20]

Clearly Venizelos' translation is a complicated and over-determined work. As Holmberg has argued, the translation is a political statement that offers an analysis of recent political history and constitutes an apologia for Venizelos' politics. [20] I have suggested that, for Venizelos, translation was also a way home, a way of continuing to negotiate an Hellenic ideal through dialogue with the classical past.

Bibliography

Alexiou, M. (2002) After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor. Ithaca and London.

Benjamin, W. (1999) ‘The Task of the Translator', trans. H. Zorn, in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, ed. with an Introduction by H. Arendt. London : 20-82.

Caclamanos, D. (1940) ‘Editor's Preface', in Venizelos, trans. (1940): vii-xix. [This preface was originally delivered as a lecture at King's College London on 19 March, 1937]

Clogg, R. (1992) A Concise History of Greece. Cambridge.

Doulis, T. (1977) Disaster and Fiction: Modern Greek Fiction and the Asia Minor Disaster. Berkeley.

Gomme, A. W. (1942) ‘Venizelos' Translation of Thucydides', The Classical Review 56.1: 29-31.

Gougouris, Stathis (1996) Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford.

Holmberg, E. (= E. Zachariades-Holmberg) (2003) Thucydides and Venizelos on Propaganda and the Struggle for Power. Minneapolis (Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, Supplement No. 12).

Kitromilides, P. M. (2006) ‘Intellectual Projects and Cultural Interests', in id. (ed.) Eleftheros Venizelos: The Trials of Statesmanship. Edinburgh : chapter 13.

Leontis, Artemis (1995) Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland. Ithaca and London.

Steiner, George (1998) After Babel : Aspects of language and translation, 3 rd edn. Oxford : Oxford University Press.

Venizelos, E. (1940) Thoukudidou Istoriai: Kata Metaphrasin Eleutheriou Benizelou. [ Thucydides' History: translated by Eleftherios Venizelos ], ed. D. Caclamanos. Two Vols. Oxford.

Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an ethics of difference. London.

[1] The national schism was precipitated by a political dispute between King Constantine of Greece and Venizelos over the allegiance of Greece in the First World War. Constantine urged neutrality out of loyalty to Germany, whereas Venizelos wanted Greece to enter the war on the side of the Entente. This is the background to the formation of Venizelos' revolutionary government in Salonica in September 1916.

[2] The translation and commentary spanned the years 1920-1928. For the chronology see Caclamanos (1940) ix and xiv; and Kitromilides (1996) 378.

[3] For discussion of these politico-linguistic approaches, which relate Venizelos' Greek to questions of ethnicity, language, and national identity, see Kitromilides (2006) 378-89.

[4] The distinction between domesticating / foreignizing translation originates with Friedrich Schleiermacher's distinction between naturalizing / alienating translations, formulated in the essay ‘On the different methods of translating' (originally published in German in 1813).

[5] I realize that I am simplifying a complicated linguistic debate about the relationship between ancient Greek and modern Greek and whether this relationship is properly diachronic – a language that has changed over time - or synchronic, a continuous language with different, often concurrent, linguistic registers. For an overview of the debates, see Alexiou (2002) 19-42.

[6] See Gomme's critique of Venizelos' choice of the katharevousa dialect in his review of the translation for The Classical Review (1942: 29). Gomme argues that Venizelos' style is too easy-flowing for Thucydides and points out that katharevousa entails interference from Western European languages such as French, with the result that many of the constructions ‘seem alien to Greek'. As a counterargument to Gomme, one could argue that such assumptions about the essence of the Greek language or the purity of the Greek language were partly responsible for the introduction of katharevousa in the first place.

[7] Steiner (1998) 399.

[8] See Doulis 1977: 8-45 and Clogg 1992: 93-105.

[9] See Leontis (1995) passim for a discussion of the significance of the construction of the Hellenic homeland in modern Greek literature, history, and culture.

[10] The metaphor of bringing Hellenic culture back to Greece is used repeatedly in Seferis' essay ‘Dialogue on Poetry: what is meant by Hellenism?' (1938). For a discussion of homecoming and repatriation in the work of Seferis, see Leontis (op. cit.) ch. 5.

[11] See also Steiner (1998) 400: ‘It is only when he ‘brings home' the simulacrum of the original, when he recrosses the divide of language and community, that he feels himself in authentic possession of his source.' (my emphasis).

[12] See Gourgouris (1996) 15, who applies Benedict Anderson's thesis about the role of imagination in the formation of national identity to the modern Greek state; following Anderson, Gourgouris highlights the ‘importance of temporal / spatial simultaneity' leading to the conflation of the past with the Nation's present and future.

[13] Warner (1972): 537; Crawley in Strassler (ed.) (1996) 478.

[14] Both Warner and Crawley translate dustuchestatos as ‘calamitous' (op. cit.).

[15] See Clogg 1992: 103.

[16] I will discuss the broader significance of the Sicilian expedition in Greek literature in the twentieth-century in a future publication.

[17] See Dimitrios Caclamanos' testimony in his editor's preface (1940) ix: ‘He [Venizelos] often said that by reading Thucydides one obtained penetrating glimpses of every contemporary event, and found in his History and its philosophy a guiding star to all important political actions.'

[18] Venuti (1998) 8-30.

[19] Steiner includes reciprocity as the final stage in his hermeneutic motion, allowing for the possibility of ‘compensation' and ‘restitution' on the part of the translator: ‘Translation recompenses in that it can provide the original with a persistence and geographical-cultural range of survival which it would otherwise lack' (1998: 416). In turn this evokes Walter Benjamin's argument that the translation of important works of world literature ‘marks their stage of continued life' (1999: 72; originally 1923). However, neither Steiner nor Benjamin intend reciprocity in translation in the sense in which I use it here.

[20] Caclamanos (1940) viii records that Venizelos first read at school Thucydides using a French interlinear translation.

[21] Holmberg (1993) passim.