It's a great thrill for me to open our 2009 Translation Bake-off by welcoming Rachel Hadas to the Distinguished Guest forum. An accomplished poet, scholar, teacher, writer of essays and memoirs, and translator, she is fully worthy of this forum and our previous guests whose luminary company she now joins. Two months ago I slathered the boards with links to
her biography at Poets.org; you may find the same information at
her website, as well as a substantial selection of her work. The following is from the introduction to a
1997 interview with Gloria Brame, and more interesting than your average publication list:
Quote:
The daughter of one of the world's eminent classical scholars, Columbia Professor Moses Hadas [for reflections on her father's life and work, go here--cc], Rachel spent her childhood in the rarified atmosphere of literary high culture. But the early death of her father, while Rachel was still a girl, shocked the calm of this world. And her life soon took an extraordinary turn when, in her early twenties, she married a young Greek man and moved abroad to live with him on his native island. There Rachel was ultimately arrested and imprisoned on charges that she set fire to an olive oil factory--the victim of xenophobia gone mad in their peasant village.
Yet, even before her twenties were done, her life transformed once more: she began what were to become lifelong and artistically important friendships with poets James Merrill and Alan Ansen; and she returned to New York City to pursue her graduate studies and to know early success as a poet and writer.
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Moses Hadas was one of the first old school philologists to champion teaching the classics in translation. He said, "Let each age put down the classics in its own language, just so long as they keep the spirit of the original," and proceeded to sweep out the Victorian cobwebs from an astonishing array of Latin and Greek authors with his own modern translations rendered in clear and unadorned prose. Now a professor at Rutgers University, Rachel continues in her father's footsteps, having produced, besides her original poetry,
Other Worlds Than This (Rutgers UP 1994), a collection of translations from French, Latin, and ancient and modern Greek; Euripides'
Helen (U Penn Press 1997); Seneca's
Oedipus (Hopkins 1994); & Racine's
Iphigenie en Aulide (unpublished, but
go here for an excerpt). Her latest book, due out from Norton in December 09 & co-edited with Edmund Keeley, Peter Constantine, and Karen Van Dyck, is a vast anthology of Greek literature from Homer to the present, and contains many of her original translations.
Of the art of translation, Rachel says:
Quote:
I love the double sense I have in translating of serendipity and surrender. Translating is also--among other things--a way of negotiating a dry passage: taxing one's verbal skills while pouring oneself into a formal vessel not of one's own choosing. Forcing myself to render ideas and feelings as skillfully as I can, I forget to worry about my own lack of inspiration.
Am I saying that whatever one thinks one is doing at the time, any project that seizes the imagination turns into another version of the self, another chapter in the ongoing oeuvre? Something like that.
I'm proud of my translations. Maybe I'll be remembered (if I am, which is a huge if) in the future as a gifted translator who also had a career as a poet.
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Here and now we acknowledge and applaud her as all of the above. Please join me in warmly welcoming Rachel Hadas to the Eratosphere, and stay tuned for a subsequent post with samples from her work.