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~karen's anecdote corner~
before we begin...
My favorite words are ones I’ve never been able to communicate in English.
They’re words in my native tongue, Japanese: Otsukaresama. It’s a phrase spoken softly by your mother after you come home from a long day. “Otsukaresama,” she’d say. It’s a phrase uttered between friends after suffering a difficult test together. “Otsukaresama.” But when you try to translate it verbatim, you get a sort of dull, strange phrase: “You are tired.”
No simple English will convey this phrase in the same way as the original. Otsukaresama conveys respect, appreciation, a “thank you so much for your hard work,” but with the added depth of “I see all the effort you put in and how tired it must have made you.”
My dad, who works as a translator, said that the best translation he’s found is “Good job.” But I don’t think it’s the same. Otsukaresama is untranslatable.
There are many untranslatable words in the world between any language. These are words where–when translated to the best of the translator’s ability–their original nuance and complexity are lost.
When I was pondering on the nature of this word, and other untranslatable words in my life, I ran into a hypothesis: linguistic relativity. Consulting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the linguistic relativity hypothesis states that “some particular aspect of language influences some particular aspect of cognition.” The language we speak, and think in, might have the power to influence our worldview or cognition.
Ergo, our world is built in our mind by the words of our language, and if a word does not exist in the language of our thoughts, it could be entirely absent from our perception of the world.
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With this intrigue of linguistic relativity at the forefront of my mind, I was most captivated by Prof. Giannopoulou’s discussion of a similar lost-in-translation moment within The Odyssey. More specifically, I want to discuss the Greek phrase(s) for “nobody” – outis and metis – and how the complex meaning is lost in translation. From a broader perspective, I will explore how this then could change how we understand the story from our English-speaking point of view. And to come to a conclusion about who exactly is telling the story. Does language change how we perceive the story itself, as we move away from the lenses of the characters and to the pen of the translator?
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"
‘Nobody, friends' - Polyphemus bellowed back from his cave
'Nobody's killing me now by fraud and not by force!'
'If you're alone,' his friends boomed back at once,
'and nobody's trying to overpower you now-look,
it must be a plague sent here by mighty Zeus
and there's no escape from that.'
"
-Homer (450-459)
credit: Pellegrino Tibaldi, Ceiling of the Palazzo Poggi, Medium
The characteristic section of The Odyssey Book 9 is Odysseus’s clever word play in telling the Cyclops Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody.” On the surface, this anecdote appears as a humorous feat of wit. As Odysseus and his men attack and blind Polyphemus by spearing his one eye, he yells in pain. The other cyclops, running over in concern, are met with Polyphemus’s confusing statement that “Nobody” is killing him. They believe, therefore, that this was a “plague sent here by mighty Zeus” and leave, believing that there is nothing they can do for him.
The “Nobody” that we see repeated in English holds the same meaning in every sentence. Nobody, meaning no person, no one.
The interesting layer to this section of the episode comes from a look at the original Greek text.
As Prof. Giannopoulou explained in her lecture, “nobody” appears in multiple forms in the original Greek:
"
‘Nobody, friends' - Polyphemus bellowed back from his cave
'Nobody's (OUTIS) killing me now by fraud and not by force!'
'If you're alone,' his friends boomed back at once,
'and nobody's (METIS) trying to overpower you now-look,
it must be a plague sent here by mighty Zeus
and there's no escape from that.'
"
-Homer (450-459)
In Greek, the repetition of “nobody” is two-fold, separated between outis and metis. Outis is the direct translation of “nobody.” However, when outis is used in reference to Polyphemus, it is conjugated to the form metis. And though metis is also a translation of “nobody,” a direct translation from this form reveals the separate definition: “practical intelligence.”
When looking deeper into the double meaning, it becomes clear that in the English translation, the readers are losing the true wit behind Odysseus’s plan. Not only does he position his name as “Nobody” so that Polyphemus can be rendered unhelpable by his fellow cyclops community, he strategically thinks through the conjugation such that the other cyclops, from their own mouths, refer to him as an intelligent, cunning thinker. In a way, Odysseus’s story in the original Greek makes him more of a “winner” (from his own perspective, of course). He was able to successfully trick, or force, the Cyclops into acknowledging his greatness by strategically utilizing the linguistic conventions of the Greek language. In English, he only “wins” against the Cyclops by making Polyphemus unsavable. In Greek, he “wins,” not only relative to the Cyclops, but for himself, by forcing the cyclops into labeling him gloriously.
From the text, it can be interpreted that Odysseus’s greatest desire is glory and recognition, and this desire may be so deep-rooted that it becomes his fatal flaw. This is perhaps why he cannot resist the urge to deanonymize his identity as he escapes from Polyphemus.
“
Cyclops, if any man on the face of the earth should ask you who blinded you, shamed you so– say Odysseus, raider of cities, he gouged out your eye, Laertes’ son, who makes his home in Ithaca.
”
-Homer (558-562)
Odysseus wants the recognition and the glory for having outsmarted and escaped from the giant “beast” and leaves no ambiguity on his identity.
With this in mind, it can perhaps be extrapolated that Odysseus’s strategic positioning of language—utilization of outis and metis—is also a reflection of his inner psyche, a yearning for acclaim.
He desired the satisfaction of cleverly making those in opposition to him praise him.
This psychoanalytical interpretation of his “nobody” strategy is all but lost in translation when the meaning behind the Greek word “metis” is missing from the English word “nobody.”
The other question: Who is telling the story?
This question is one of many layers. Odysseus is telling his story to the Phaeacians. However, simultaneously, Homer is telling the story of Odysseus telling his story to readers of his work. And for us English-readers, it is the translator who relays Homer’s story of Odysseus.
I think there is something to say regarding the confines of language in the narration of a story. A story is bound by the limits of its language; if a word does not exist in the language, the idea is unable to be communicated when translated. This is the basis of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
The New York Times Magazine interviewed classicist Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English. Here is what she said about translation:
“
The fact that it’s possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? That tells you something.
I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: ‘This is the best I can get toward the truth.’
”
-Emily Wilson, to the New York Times
It is perhaps critical to understand the role of the translator as a medium between the original text and a foreign reader. If the same line can be translated “hundreds” of times, all in different ways, then surely the influence of the translator’s voice is present in each text. And this, to a reader of translation, can skew the way in which we understand the story.
Wilson’s final hope is that her translation can best “get toward” the truth. To me, it's this phrasing that is interesting, as it conveys that a translator can never precisely get “to” the truth; they can only approach it ever so closely. This communicates that when reading a translated text, the “teller” of the story -- in the most zoomed-out scope -- is the translator. And as we are confounded by the language’s limits, it is insightful to at least attempt to understand the original text in its original form.
credit: Pinterest
~reflection
This is my first experience utilizing this program and putting together a digital archive. I am finding it difficult to find the right balance of multimedia to words. This page might be heavy on the text, which was what I had been focusing on. As I learn to adapt my usage of the space, I hope to find a more eye-friendly balance.
I hope to archive in this website the texts that I encounter in the course (as seen through quotation segments), the images and media I come across to aid in understanding, but also my own life and my experiences that relate to the material covered in the course. You will come to see an array of my own personal images: ones I've taken, ones I've handwritten and drawn, and ones I'm in. I hope for this to not simply be contained in the lecture material, but in my life as a whole.
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