In Stanley Fish’s most recent New York Times blog post, we read about a new modern, reader-friendly translation of one of, if not the, greatest epic poems of all time.
John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” in all its didactic complexities and hidden poetic treasures, recalls, in extended form, “Of man’s first disobedience, and the Fruit” and how Adam and Eve, once God’s seemingly unblemished creations, fell and eventually, thousands of blank verse lines later, “hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way” out of paradise.
The new adaptation, called, “Paradise Lost: Parallel Prose Edition” by Dennis Danielson “unpacks” the poem, as Fish notes, so that it is more coherent to modern readers. During a lengthy analysis, Fish takes several examples from the new translation and attempts to show how the new version changes the meaning from Milton’s original, tightly packed verse.
To take one example:
When Adam decides to join Eve in sin and eat the apple, the poem says that he was “fondly overcome by female charm.” The word that asks you to pause is “fondly,” which means both foolishly and affectionately. The two meanings have different relationships to the action they characterize. If you do something foolishly, you have no excuse, and it’s a bit of a mystery as to why you did; if you do it prompted by affection and love, the wrongness of it may still be asserted, but something like an explanation or an excuse has at least been suggested.
The ambiguity plays into the poem-length concern with the question of just how culpable Adam and Eve are for the fall. (Given their faculties and emotions, were they capable of standing?) “Fondly” doesn’t resolve the question, but keeps it alive and adds to the work the reader must always be doing when negotiating this poem.
Here is Danielson’s translation of the line: “an infatuated fool overcome by a woman’s charms.” “Infatuated” isn’t right because it redoubles the accusation in “fool” rather than softening it. The judgment is sharp and clear, but it is a clearer judgment than Milton intended or provided. Something has been lost (although as Danielson points out, something is always lost in a translation). — Stanley Fish, The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2008
Critics of Milton’s verse have said that the difficulty of the original text, according to Fish, rests in the self-centric nature of the poem. Quoting F.R. Leavis, he said the poetry “calls pervasively for a kind of attention … toward itself.”
Roadblocks, in the form of ambiguities, deliberate obscurities, shifting grammatical paths and recondite allusions, are everywhere and one is expected to stop and try to figure things out, make connections or come to terms with an inability to make connections.
Thus, a different sort of reading is required than the standard gathering of basic plot details. One is forced to, of course, follow the plot, but one is also invited to seek out the hidden complexities of the very words and letters on the page. Well-placed sonnets appear within its framework. Poignant acronyms, spotted by scanning the beginning letter of each line, are darted throughout. A prose-only reading of the text, then, would conceal these findings and, further, would exempt the reader from the possibility of finding them.
Clearly, Danielson’s love for Milton is palpable or else, he would not be a Milton scholar. And as Fish points out, Danielson includes the original verse right alongside his new translation.
I would agree with Fish on most counts. Danielson is providing a fine tool to introduce readers to Milton’s greatness. Fish says of Danielson:
He knows as well as anyone how Milton’s poetry works, but it is his judgment (following [John] Wesley and [Harold] Bloom) that many modern readers will not take their Milton straight and require some unraveling of the knots before embarking on the journey.
I’m not sure he’s right (I’ve found students of all kinds responsive to the poetry once they give it half a chance), but whether he is or not, he has fashioned a powerful pedagogical tool that is a gift to any teacher of Milton whatever the level of instruction.
Are scholars beginning to translate Beowulf or Chaucer or Shakespeare? If they are, I’m not aware. Regardless, I, having read the entire poem “straight,” as Fish notes, with no help from study aids or the like, found it quite understandable with the help of a good old dictionary and the simple textual notes provided with most Milton readers. So, while Fish says the edition is a “gift to any teacher of Milton,” I would have to disagree on that count. I don’t think we can allow our greatest writings to be watered down into modern prose, when prose was quite an opposite intention of the writer. Not only is “something” always lost in translation, much is lost in translation.
As early as 1763, John Wesley noted of “Paradise Lost” that “this inimitable work amidst all its beauties is unintelligible to [an] abundance of readers.” Much later, Harold Bloom, with a hint of fatalism for the direction of modern education, noted readers today “require mediation to read ‘Paradise Lost’ with full appreciation.” But reading “Paradise Lost” with mediation is not reading “Paradise Lost.” It’s reading or being fed someone else’s thoughts on the poem. Has Bloom and Danielson simply “given in” and acknowledged that it’s beyond modern readers’ capacity to read complex literature without assistance from other translations, study guides, etc?
If that’s the concession, and even when academia is acknowledging this much, it’s a sad day. I’m thankful that
I had a lit professor who dictated to us exactly what we would do when approaching Milton: Sit down with the original text, read the annotations for clarity if necessary, have a dictionary handy and let the poetry speak for itself. Was it difficult? Yes. But it was worth it. Danielson’s edition, while admirable in its attempt to make Milton more digestible to a new generation of readers misses the point.
“Paradise Lost,” as Fish begins with Danielson’s own reference to Wesley, is inimitable, or matchless. And for that reason, it should retain its luster; anything less is lazy and fatalistic teaching. It is the responsibility of the teacher or professor’s job to make Milton, Shakespeare and the like interesting to students, to make them understand just why it’s matchless, to help students take the text as it was meant to be taken. It’s not inimitable just because it tells a good story. It’s inimitable because it tells a good story in one of the most finely crafted, well-thought out, epic creations of poetry the world will ever see. To see it or study it as anything else is a true loss.