The Translator’s Invisibility

Fitts (1903–1968) was a poet and critic who from the late thirties onward gained a distinguished reputation as a translator of classical texts, for the most part drama by Sophocles and Aristophanes. He translated Greek and Latin epigrams as well and edited a noted anthology of twentieth-century Latin American poetry. As translator and editor of translations, he produced sixteen books, mainly with the large commercial press Harcourt Brace. His reviews of poetry and translations were widely published in various magazines, mass and small circulation, including some linked with modernism: {209} Atlantic Monthly, The Criterion, Hound & Horn, Poetry, Transition. The entry on Fitts in Contemporary Authors concisely indicates the cultural authority he wielded during the fifties and sixties, while offering a glimpse of the canonical translation strategy his work represented:

Dudley Fitts was one of the foremost translators from the ancient Greek in this century. Differing from the procedure many scholars follow, Fitts attempted to evoke the inherent character from the work by taking certain liberties with the text. The result, most reviewers agreed, was a version as pertinent and meaningful to the modern reader as it was to the audiences of Sophocles and Aristophanes.

(Locher 1980:152)

The “inherent character” of “the work,” “as pertinent and meaningful to the modern reader as” to the Greek “audiences”—the assumption is that appeals to the foreign text can insure a true equivalence in the translation, transcending cultural and historical differences and even the linguistic “liberties” taken by the translator. This anonymous, somewhat contradictory entry makes clear that Fitts’s authority as a translator rested on his advocacy of a free, domesticating method that rewrote the foreign text in recognizable terms, like “modern” English.

In the preface to his One Hundred Poems From the Palatine Anthology (1938), Fitts described his method in some detail:

I have not really undertaken translation at all—translation, that is to say, as it is understood in the schools. I have simply tried to restate in my own idiom what the Greek verses have meant to me. The disadvantages of this method are obvious: it has involved cutting, altering, expansion, revision—in short, all the devices of free paraphrase. […] In general, my purpose has been to compose, first of all, and as simply as possible, an English poem. To this end I have discarded poeticisms, even where (as in Meleagros, for instance) they could have been defended.

Except in certain Dedications and in similar pieces where the language is definitely liturgical, I have avoided such archaisms as ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ and all their train of attendant ghosts. Less defensibly, I have risked a spurious atmosphere of monotheism by writing ‘God’ for ‘Zeus’ (but Mr Leslie would have it {210} ‘Jupiter’!) whenever the context admitted it without too perilous a clash.

(Fitts 1956:xvii–xviii)