Analysis: We have certain assumptions about the kind of English ancient Greeks and Romans should speak in fictional works and translations
By Alastair Daly, TCD
Ridley Scott's sequel to the much-beloved Gladiator (2000) opens in Irish cinemas this weekend. While most cinemagoers will be there to be entertained, others will no doubt come away with questions about historical accuracy. Such quibbling can help us learn more about the ancient world, sometimes in surprising ways. For example, while the Romans did not have sharks in the Colosseum as Scott insists, they did know a bit about them despite a recent claim to the contrary in The Hollywood Reporter.
Yet anachronism or 'historical inaccuracy' is fundamental to all recreations of the ancient world. This is most obviously the case when it comes to language. Audiences generally don’t want to sit through a three-hour-plus historical epic spoken entirely in historically accurate Latin. Whether it is Spartacus, Gladiator or HBO’s Rome, we suspend our disbelief.
From Paramount Pictures, trailer for Gladiator II
While English-speaking audiences can accept Julius Caesar speaking English, many find it difficult to stay immersed in a historical setting unless it is the ‘right’ kind of English. The (implicitly racist) objections online to Denzel Washington's accent in Gladiator II are an excellent example of this. as others have pointed out.
Why does Washington's accent feel so 'wrong’ to some viewers (and indeed why has Paul Mescal appeared to have adopted an English accent?) What can this reaction tell us about the kind of English ancient Greeks and Romans should speak in fictional works and in translations of Greek and Latin literature?
In cinema, Romans have generally spoken standard or prestige versions of British and American English making these dialects a convention of the genre. That is, we think a Roman emperor should sound like a Royal Shakespeare Company actor. But this convention is also entangled with the belief that the UK and the US, through their culture and their empires (past and present), have a special kinship with the ancient Greeks and Romans.
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The very same assumptions and the same pressure to follow established conventions apply to the interpretation and translation of Greek and Latin literature. If I had to translate a speech of Cicero, and rendered it into formal British English, my motivations would not be unlike those of Mescal in Gladiator II.
This is what the scholar and translator Lawrence Venuti calls domestication which he contrasts with foreignisation. Put simply, a 'domesticating' translation will try to sound like something which was originally written in English. A 'foreignising' translation tries to keep what was different or foreign about the original text. While Venuti’s work is intended for translators and readers of translations, it can also help us understand the politics behind the kind of English spoken in historical fiction.
So, what would a modern portrayal of the ancient world that rejects 'domestication' look like? Published last year to considerable acclaim, Ferdia Lennon's debut novel Glorious Exploits sets an encouraging example. The novel takes place in Sicily in 412 BCE after the failed Athenian invasion and tells the story of two young Syracusan potters, Lampo and Gelon, looking for something to live for after the trauma of the war.
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They entertain themselves by visiting the quarry where thousands of Athenians are imprisoned. They give scraps of bread to the starving Athenians in exchange for scraps of verse by the great Athenian playwright and poet, Euripides. In fact, Plutarch, writing some 500 years later between 90 and 120 CE, claims that some of the Athenians were freed from slavery for reciting Euripides' work.
As Lennon has stated in interviews, it was this anecdote in Plutarch's Life of Nicias which inspired his novel and gave him its opening lines: "So Gelon says to me 'Let’s go down and feed the Athenians. The weather’s perfect for feeding Athenians.’" It was also with these lines that Lennon knew for sure that his two main characters would be Dubs. With the exception of its epilogue, the novel is narrated in the first person by Lampo. Both he and Gelon, and many of the other characters, speak a recognisable form of Hiberno-English: the local Dublin dialect.
Like any literary language, it is not a perfect record of real everyday speech. There are tweaks here and there. Lennon mixes in ancient Greek ideas which would be recognisable to his audience with, for example, references to the Greek gods. It may seem odd at first, but after reading 'gobshite', ‘fella’, ‘eejit’, ‘mot’, ‘proper’, and the like a few times, it starts to feel natural.
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Lennon achieves in fiction an effect all thoughtful translators should strive for. His characters and the world they move in feel both strange and familiar at once. His reimagining of the ancient Greek world captures the tension between domestication and foreignisation. For Lennon’s non-Irish readers, his work is foreignising. For his Irish audience, it should be domesticating but it somehow keeps its foreignising effect.
After all, we are also used to Greeks and Romans speaking and acting as if they were Victorians. As much as we may relate to Lennon’s Hiberno-Greeks, the choice is still unusual enough to remind us of Lennon’s act of ‘translation’. In both cases, Lennon upsets the dominant way of interpreting and representing the ancient world.
The point here - and I am sure Lennon would agree - is not that late 5th century BCE Greeks should all speak Hiberno-English in fiction and in translations, but that a more pluralistic approach would give a fuller and more human picture of the ancient world.
Dr Alastair Daly is a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics at Trinity College Dublin.
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