According to the first choice, the translated text must be as close to the original as possible along all imaginable axes, including the choice of words, their rhythm and intonation within each sentence, the way these sentences shape, in turn, each paragraph, the pace of the story, the unfolding of events, and the general tone. This method may motivate you to choose obscure words because they are closer to those used in the original, even if they are unfamiliar to most readers. You may favor novel constructions over idiomatic expressions and may end up with a tone that sounds stilted or fancy or crude or just plain bizarre. The resulting text is a projection of the text that might have been had the author only been born in another country, as if language were currency that could be exchanged for only a small fee. The idea is to remind your readers constantly that they are reading a translation, and that the text before them was not composed with their needs in mind but is only the apparition of another text that does not inhabit their world. You must visit the foreign upon them and they are to feel, when they have finished reading, that they have been in communication with the other side of their own language.
This method is often criticized as being too challenging and too alienating: you can bring a reader to a text, but you can't make them engage with it unless it pulls them in, is how the argument goes.
On the other hand, if you decide to bring a text to a reader, the goal is to recreate as nearly as possible the relationship that an original reader -- a contemporary and compatriot of the author -- might have had with the original text. This method requires that the text be made familiar in any way necessary, ranging from updating the vocabulary, using current slang, relocating the action, emphasizing different aspects of the characters, adding explanatory passages, omitting material that seems repetitive or extraneous, &c. If you're successful, the reader will be able to enter the story freely, without feeling any sharp disjunction between the world of this text and the world they inhabit. There will be no barrier between reader and text, no reminder that they are, for all intents and purposes, strangers.
An example of the latter project is Alessandro Baricco's recent book, "An Iliad" (Knopf 2006, tr. Ann Goldstein). This is not just a translation, but a translation of an adaptation of a translation. Baricco altered and abridged Maria Grazia Ciani's Italian translation of the The Iliad, eliminating repetitive passages and thereby streamlining the narrative, entirely removing the scenes of intervention by the Gods, adding decorative or expositive sentences here and there, and shifting the third-person narrative into a series of first-person accounts. The Italian version was intended for aural consumption and was read aloud in Rome and in Turin in 2004, and has since been translated into a number of different languages for distribution around the world.
The English text is highly readable. It contains few epithets and no repetitions, is not in verse, features no Gods stepping down from the heavens to muck about, and is related in a tone that is smooth and simple overall, if a little formal. Chryseis, a Trojan woman, starts it: "It all began on a day of violence," she says, plainly. In his introduction, Baricco admits some doubt: "The peril of losing the power of the Homeric original is certainly great. I can't imagine what will happen" (p. xi). The force of an original text, like virginity, is something that is often discussed in terms of loss alone, a value that can be subtracted from but never augmented, although I don't believe the equation to be nearly so straightforward and can hardly imagine that Baricco does, either.
So what is it that Baricco and Goldstein have brought to us, the modern readers, out of the past? A roster of the dead, for one.
"Idomeneus killed Phaestus, the son of Borus of Maeonia, who had come from the fertile land of Tarne. He hit him in the right shoulder as he was trying to get out of his chariot. The hero fell backward and darkness enveloped him. Menelaus, the son of Atreus, struck Scamandrius, the son of Strophius...Meriones killed Phereclus, who had built for Paris the well-made ships, the beginning of the disaster...Meges killed Pedaeus, the bastard son of Antenor, whose wife nevertheless reared him as her own son, to please her husband...Eurypylus killed Hypsenor, the priest of Scamander, who was venerated by all the people as a god; he pursued him as he tried to flee, and when he reached him drew his sword and sliced through one shoulder, cutting off the arm." (p. 32-3).
It goes on. Sometimes the Achaeans have the advantage, sometimes the Trojans. Men fall and men cut each other down and men fall. They die horrible deaths; arrows enter eyeballs and necks, stomachs are rent like shirts. I read this text about the glory of war as a reproach of its horrors: I can't help it; the brutality is too deliberate, too honest. I wonder, too, if Baricco wanted to revive this work as a response to the war now being fought, the wars we fear might still be ahead, and if he chose to bring us not the text we expected, purple with heroes and cinematic in scope, but a starker story, in which the clamor of battle is replayed slowly, each moment like a single figure in a flipbook, each death lifted from the madness and frozen, illuminated.
At least, I think, we know their names.
