CLICHED IN TRANSLATION

I came across a review in the LA Times of Robert Fagles's new translation of The Aeneid, linked from Ron Silliman's blog. I've written before about clichés in translation, but perhaps a larger problem--at least insofar as increasing the readership of translations in general is concerned--is the use of clichés in book reviews of translations. Consider this, how Thomas Cahill opens his review:

Now here's an unrewarding subject: translation. The Italians have it right when they insist "traduttore traditore," for every translator is, of necessity, a traitor to the original text. Robert Frost hit the nail on the head: When asked what poetry is, he said it's what's lost in translation.

Cahill, the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, has strung up three clichés in a row. As always, the problem with clichés is not their veracity--each of these sentences presents an undeniable, and undeniably boring, truth--but rather their lame attitude towards truth. Rather than digging further into what makes these phrases true--or more interestingly, what makes them false--the author of a cliché asserts the most mundane and limited fact imaginable, all the while thinking that he's really clever for his observations and his phrasing.

I don't expect that a book reviewer would have read scholarship on literary theory or translation studies. I don't think that only someone familiar with, say, Lawrence Venuti's books can write an effective review of literature in translation. But when the highest praise that Cahill can give to Fagles is, "This work, this miraculous beast of a text, is so enjoyable that you will hardly know you are reading an ancient masterpiece," he's coming very close to the kind of ethic that Venuti argues against in The Translator's Invisibility: if we forget that we are reading an ancient masterpiece, if we forget that we are reading a translation, then we are pretending that all the world throughout time acts and thinks and feels and speaks the way that we do now. And if that's the case, then what do we need translation for, anyway?

Sure, I understand that Cahill means only to praise Fagles for producing a translation that is lively rather than staid, relevant rather than dusty, and these are all qualities I look for in literature--especially translation--too. But by relying on so many clichés, Cahill's own writing is staid and dusty. By praising Fagles's translation by saying it seems like something it is not, then anyone who reads the Aeneid after reading Cahill's review is reading it in spite, not because, it is a translation. Is this how the publishing world plans to introduce more translations and push past the myopia of the American book consumer?

I have no idea if Fagles's Aeneid is any good (with my tastes, I have a hard time imagining anybody's Aeneid is any good). Based on what Cahill and other reviewers have written, it appears to contain passages of great strength. But if that strength is not also matched by strong reviewers and strong readers, then we have the impotence of someone who fled the Trojan war and languished at sea, never reaching another peninsula to found another empire, let alone descend into the underworld to emerge through the Gates of Horn.