A Reader on Reading

In the index to John Boswell’s groundbreaking book on homosexuality in the Middle Ages, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, the entry for “Translation” reads, “See Mistranslation” — or what Boswell calls “the deliberate falsification of historical records.” The instances of asepticized translations of Greek and Roman classics are too numerous to mention and range from a change of pronoun which willfully conceals the sexual identity of a character to the suppression of an entire text, such as the Amores of the Pseudo-Lucian, which Thomas Francklin in 1781 deleted from his English translation of the author’s works because it included an explicit dialogue among a group of men on whether women or boys were erotically more desirable. “But as this is a point which, at least in this nation, has been long determined in favour of the ladies, it stands in need of no further discussion,” wrote the censorious Francklin.

“We can only prohibit that which we can name,” wrote George Steiner in After Babel. Throughout the nineteenth century, the classic Greek and Roman texts were recommended for the moral education of women only when purified in translation. The Reverend J. W. Burgon made this explicit when in 1884, from the pulpit of New College, Oxford, he preached against allowing women into the university, where they would have to study the texts in the original. “If she is to compete successfully with men for ‘honours’ “ (wrote the timorous reverend), “you must needs put the classic writers of antiquity unreservedly into her hands—in other words, must introduce her to the obscenities of Greek and Roman literature. Can you seriously intend it? Is it then a part of your programme to defile that lovely spirit with the filth of old-world civilisation, and to acquaint maidens in their flower with a hundred abominable things which women of any age (and men too, if that were possible) would rather a thousand times be without?”

It is possible to censor not only a word or a line of text through translation but also an entire culture, as has happened time and again throughout the centuries among conquered peoples. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, for instance, the Jesuits were authorized by King Philip II of Spain, champion of the Counter-Reformation, to follow in the steps of the Franciscans and establish themselves in the jungles of what is now Paraguay. From 1609 until their expulsion from the colonies in 1767, the Jesuits created settlements for the native Guaranis, walled communities called reducciones because the men, women, and children who inhabited them were “reduced” to the dogmas of Christian civilization. The differences between conquered and conquerors were, however, not easily overcome. “What makes me a pagan in your eyes,” said a Guarani shaman to one of the missionaries, “is what prevents you from being a Christian in mine.” The Jesuits understood that effective conversion required reciprocity and that understanding the other was the key that would allow them to keep the pagans in what was called, borrowing from the vocabulary of Christian mystic literature, “concealed captivity.” The first step to understanding the other was learning and translating the other’s language.