O Tempora! O Mores!

I have titled this post with a famous phrase of Cicero's, from his first speech against Catiline. The modern reader may not understand what it means; the modern reader, after all, doesn't usually know Latin. It is rather difficult to translate the simple force of the Latin into English, and especially to find an adequate rendering of the word 'mores,' which can mean 'manners, customs, traditions," or, of individuals, "morals, or character." I am far from disowning the great difficulty, rather the impossibility, of rendering Cicero's phrase into English. I have recently discovered, however, in an old Penguin translation of some of his speeches, a manner in which it most certainly ought not to be rendered: "What a scandalous commentary on our age and its standards!"

To his credit, our interpreter, Michael Grant, does translate the two substantial words of the phrase ('tempora' and 'mores') with English equivalences that are not wholly off the mark ('age' and 'standards'). 'Standards' is certainly rather weak, given the situation (the thrust of Cicero's argument at this point is that true Roman patriots would have already killed Catiline, and not allowed him to attend the present Senate meeting), but 'age' is a fine translation, semantically speaking, for 'tempora.' What really pushes the translation over the edge is the paraphrasing and vacuous "what a scandalous commentary" that he tacks onto it. Was his goal to trivialize the great statement? I cannot imagine anyone with any command of Latin could be so spiteful of the master. Did he not think his readers would understand something like "O the standards of our age!"? Dear old Tully hardly deserves such patronizing.

It may seem rather mean of me to pick on some poor little classicist from the sixties (the translation was published in 1969). Yet the method of translation which has made itself plain in this sentence is a source of great vexation to me. The chief principle of this method, if I may speak rather broadly, is to bring the text to the reader in all the ways it can, not only across the gulfs of language and of time, but over the obstacles of different of diction, style, and priorities; with great authors this almost always constitutes a downward motion. This method commits all sorts of grave offenses against literature, the gravest being that it convinces readers that all literature sounds like their own, and makes their world for that a little smaller.

Good translation should ideally provide the reader with their author unchanged except in language, as Dryden wrote, in the preface to his translation of the Aeneid: "I have endeavored to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age." I for one cannot see the words our translator has given him coming out of Cicero's mouth at any time or in any nation. Yet it strikes me that Mr. Grant's translation of Cicero's phrase does have the feel of something we would hear in the House or Senate, and this thought troubles me greatly, that the greatest orator of ancient Rome would either be mute today, or not himself. What a commentary that is upon the standards of our age.