How do translators handle the tricky parts of translating ancient texts, especially when there are multiple manuscript versions?

Volker Eichener

Professor at Hochschule Düsseldorf

Even translating a modern book requires an understanding of the matter of the book. You must be an engineer to translate a book about engineering, you must understand the philosophy of the author if you translate his or her book into another language and you must have a sense of poetry if you translate a poem

Ancient texts are usually translated by philologists - academic experts of the history and of the literature of this time. It starts with the vocabulary. Take the word γλαυκῶπις (glaukopis), depicting the colour of Athena’s eyes. You cannot look into a dictionary under γλαυκῶπις and just write it down. Since the word is very important frequently used in Homer’s epics, you have to do research. In which other works is the word used? In which context? What may be the meaning? Is there a single meaning or are there multiple meanings or have meanings changed over time? - Eventually, you might find that the word γλαυκός (glaukós) has been used by other authors of roughly the same time to describe the colour of the sea in the morning, but your are still not sure how to translate it - as “light blue” or “greyish” or “shimmering”? Believe it or not: a philologist has researched for months about the meaning of γλαυκός and written an article about his results. And this is just one word!

Sometimes, philosophers have written etymologies about words, but you cannot trust them. Some of their explanations have been proven wrong, so it does not help if Herodotos or Aristotle gave an etymological explanation. Really hard work.

You may use ancient commentaries, citations or the so-called scholions (annotations).

Finally, the manuscripts. Often, parts are missing, because a papyrus has holes or the ink has vanished.

You have to reconstruct the texts. You read what you have, you try to understand what the author meant and you have to use imagination to fill the gaps. So, you complete the text even before you start translating it.

Same with multiple versions. You compare, painstakingly, word by word. You try to find out which version is older, more authentic, more reliable. Or which version might have been changed for political reasons (happened very often with Roman texts, e.g. emperor biographies).

If you want to recreate the metric of an ancient text (e.g. hexameter) the task is even more challenging.

All these difficulties are the reason why you find to many different translations of ancient texts.