Better Than Starbucks!

“Terentia doing well” was how any alumnus of Cambridge and Bletchley Park would have been likely to put it in the case of his own household, though no woman is resoundingly hale in the hours right after childbirth. But “doing well” is not at all what the Latin conveys: salva means that she didn’t die, which could by no means be taken for granted. Cicero was a typical Roman in having no stiff upper lip, which is understandable, as in that world the side was likely to let you down in every way imaginable, and the only thing you could do about it most of the time was to express yourself fully and precisely; another letter reveals Cicero responding to his only daughter’s death in childbirth with frank, uncontrollable grief. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the British education system, which fed personnel into the army and the Imperial civil service, plastered a false affect all over popular versions of Greek and Roman literature, most powerfully by means of the Penguin translations, which depict ancient authors as pompous and dull.

Emily and I are better translators in part because we’re women. We wake up every day ready to see things from other people’s point of view. We’re not used to getting away with anything. We can feel readers’ disappointment in translations that don’t ring true or sound appealing. We try harder. I hope that the big difference between 2008 and 2019 is that the greater number and influence of women in this calling are raising the standards.

AMJ: I’ve noticed that people who closely read Saint Augustine’s Confessions almost always seem changed by the experience. Since there is no way to read a text more closely than by translating it, let me ask you if translating the Confessions changed you in any way, and if so how?

SR: I don’t know whether it changed me, but it made me notice something important, which I hope is the beginning of change. The Confessions, which in nearly every worldly sense was written amid misery, is suffused with joy: that’s evident in every sentence. Augustine may have been ill at the time, which would be the most plausible explanation for the chance, though he was Bishop of Hippo, to closet himself with scribes for several weeks and pour out an immense, quasi-autobiographical prayer — that was perhaps his greatest self-indulgence since his conversion. He had spent many years without sex and on a restricted diet, working hard at preaching, teaching, theological controversies, charity, and church administration. He felt guilty even about his enjoyment of sacred music, and about gazing at a hunt as he passed by it.

But the act of writing purposefully and skillfully brings him bliss. He can make full use of his rhetorical expertise — he was in fact the greatest orator and writer of his era. But in a broader sense, the structural demands of rhetoric paradoxically open his mind and heart. Kicking a ball around the yard aimlessly isn’t much fun: you need rules to create a game. It’s like Thomas Merton’s feeling that his life opened up only within the walls of his Trappist cell. I learned from Augustine that ordinary hardships and limits have a reason. I’m digesting this lesson further now that an elderly relative is badly injured from a fall and my husband and I don’t have the freedom we used to, and our worries and griefs are multiplied.

AMJ: In your recent National Review essay you touched a nerve by calling Walt Whitman’s poetry a “windstorm of assertion indiscernible in its parts and knowable mainly through the damage it leaves behind . . ..” What did you mean by “the damage it leaves behind” and were you surprised by the vehemence of the response?

SR: I wasn’t surprised by the vehemence, as Whitman is a shrine in many trendy English departments. But I thought it was important to assert, especially to young people, “Hey, you don’t have to revere, or pretend to revere, everything you’re told to. If you can’t see anything wonderful, maybe it’s because there’s nothing wonderful there.” Amid the current paroxysm of hand-wringing and small-town diner haunting on the part of the Eastern intelligentsia, one thing I believe that’s being missed is the cultural element — which is distinct from the economic one; or maybe not, because the American university is a corporate overlord too.

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Anyway, Whitman worship seems an exemplary abuse to point out; for me, it’s a matter of stretching, frantically and in exhaustion, with my toes for the lake bottom and not finding it, moving all around the shoreline, and at last concluding that this is not because the whole lake is deep but because the whole lake is bottomless: there is no literary or moral merit in Whitman. The professors thunder at you to honor his “nursing” service during the Civil War, so you go and read more, and you find that some actual nurses were peeved with Whitman, whose theory of “magnetic touch” was a pretext for pawing wounded soldiers. The Whitman cult is, as it was for Whitman himself and his cronies, about power: “You will take this for God; I will make you; I will not quit.” It’s like advertising. If you want to understand Flyover rage, make a list of the idols foisted on the godly, or on those who would have been godly had God not been dressed in so many clown suits.