Levitan on translating Apuleius

Professor William Levitan

The inimitable William Levitan, whose translation of Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings, is a tour de force of the translator's art,  reviewed S. J. HARRISON, J. L. HILTON, AND V. J. C. HUNINK, trans. Apuleius: Rhetorical Works. Oxford.   Below are some excerpts that point out salient characteristics of Apuleius' style.  The full review is available on the UB Learns site, under course documents.

"Apuleius of Madauros, as this book reminds us, was no one-trick burro. Indeed he was always eager to reveal just how many tricks he had in store. “Uno chartario calamo me reficere poemata omnigenus apta virgae, lyrae, socco, coturno, item satiras ac griphos, item historias varias rerum nec non orationes laudatas disertis nec non dialogos laudatos philosophis, atque haec et alia eiusdem modi tam graece quam latine, gemino voto, pari studio, simili stilo” he tells us in what is actually one of his more muted fanfares on the theme of his own versatility (Flor. 9.27–29); there was still more to the man. Polymath and poet, Platonist and philologue, writer, rhetor, raconteur, and Wortjongleur in two tough tongues, he was also (he reminds us) a globe trotter, a snapper-up of historical trifles, a connoisseur of cults and maven of mysteries, a public performer, a popular idol, a grateful pal to the great and powerful, and the toast of the coast of northern Africa—all these boasts of omnicompetent cultivation just part of the pose and professional program of the second-century sophist.

...My strongest reaction to the book is admiration for the translators’ pluck. It is certainly a daring move to face down texts like these, one tour de force after another of uninhibited verbal display. The famous Apuleian jangle turns out to be one of the smaller problems. At least in the short run, it is in fact relatively easy to do a relatively poor but recognizable English imitation (see, e.g., first paragraph above) of some of the isolated and more conspicuous formal mannerisms of Apuleian rhetoric—alliteration, homoteleuton, rhythmical cola, rhyme, puns, pleonasm, the mix of diction, and so on. To my mind, it is unthinkable to render Apuleius without a good helping of this verbal flavor, and the translators here all liberally dish up the spice; but alone it is a simple parlor trick and in the end as unsatisfying as verse translation “in original metres.

More difficult by far—and far more valuable—is getting the sense of real performance in these texts. If these rhetorical works of Apuleius belong anywhere, they belong most securely to the history of self-display. Voice, stance, tone, brute showmanship, the play of roles and masks, the audience in the palm of his hand, and Apuleius always at center stage—these are not mere features of his work: they are its raisons d’être. But voice is notoriously the most elusive quality for a translator to render, and with Apuleius in particular there is the temptation of several false moves. For all his mannerisms, Apuleius cannot be made to speak like a sideshow huckster; for all his sly flamboyance, he is not camp; for all his learning, he is no bore; and for all his long and crafted sentences, he does not sound—worst of worsts—like a translator of classical texts. Because the codes of performance governing the interaction between actor and audience are woven so intimately into the fabric of an individual culture, we may surely despair of finding a unique mode that both pretends to historical verisimilitude and yet will work in our time and in our language; but still, something must be done to lift the voice of Apuleius from the page and restore it to something like living presence before a living audience. And whatever this something is, it is the translator who must do it."
American Journal of Philology, Volume 124, Number 1 (Whole Number 493), Spring 2003, pp. 156-160.