Dears: I came to "Paradise Lost" late. In earlier years I tried and tried to read it, but couldn't get through the first book. Then I read Roger Shattuck's "Forbidden Knowledge" and was able to read "Paradise Lost" and was bowled over by it. Where had it been all my life?
Now it has been "translated" into prose. -- Belle
Danielson is well aware that it might seem odd to translate a poem into the language in which it is already written. Dryden turned some of “Paradise Lost�?into
rhymed verse for a libretto while Milton was still alive; but that was an adaptation, not a translation. There are of course the Classic Comics and Cliff Notes precedents; but these are abridgments designed for the students who don’t have time to, or don’t want to, read the book. Danielson’s is a word-for-word translation, probably longer than the original since its prose unpacks a very dense poetry. The value of his edition, he says, is that it “invites more readers than ever before to enjoy the magnificent story �?to experience the grandeur, heroism, pathos, beauty and grace of Milton’s inimitable work.�?
Danielson borrows the word “inimitable�?from John Wesley, who in 1763 was already articulating the justification for a prose translation of the poem. Wesley
reports that in the competition for the title of world’s greatest poem, “the preference has generally been given by impartial judges to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’�?but, he laments, “this inimitable work amidst all its beauties is unintelligible to [an] abundance of readers.�?Two hundred and fifty years later, Harold Bloom
made the same observation. Ordinary readers, he said, now “require mediation to read ‘Paradise Lost�?with full appreciation.�?/DIV>
What features of the poem require mediation? Danielson’s answer is the “linguistic obscurity�?from which he proposes to “free�?the story so that today’s readers can read it “in their own language.�?By their own language he doesn’t mean the language of some “with-it�?slang, but a language less Latinate in its syntax and less
archaic in its diction than the original (which was archaic and stylized when it was written). Milton’s language is not like Chaucer’s �?a dialect modern readers must
learn; it is our language structured into a syntax more convoluted than the syntax of ordinary speech, but less convoluted or cryptic than the syntax of modern poets
like Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.
Like Milton, these poets do not make it easy for readers to move through a poem.
Roadblocks, in the form of ambiguities, deliberate obscurities, shifting grammatical paths and recondite allusions, are everywhere and one is expected to stop and try to figure things out, make connections or come to terms with an inability to make connections.
The experience of reading poetry like this was well described by the great critic F.R. Leavis, who said of Milton (he did not mean this as a compliment) that his
verse “calls pervasively for a kind of attention �?toward itself.�?That is, when reading the poetry one is not encouraged to see it as a window on some other,
more real, world; it is its own world, and when it refers it refers to other parts of itself. Milton, Leavis said, displays “a capacity for words rather than a capacity for
feeling through words.�?The poetry is not mimetic in the usual sense of representing something prior to it; it creates the facts and significances to which you are continually asked to attend.
It is from this strenuous and often frustrating labor that Danielson wants to free the reader, who, once liberated, will be able to go with the flow and enjoy the pleasures of a powerful narrative. But that is not what Milton had in mind, as Donald Davie, another prominent critic, saw when he observed (again in complaint) that, rather than facilitating forward movement, Milton’s verse tends to
“check narrative impetus�?and to “provoke interesting and important speculative questions,�?the consideration of which interrupts our progress.
Here is an example. When Adam decides to join Eve in sin and eat the apple, the poem says that he was “fondly overcome by female charm.�?The word that asks
you to pause is “fondly,�?which means both foolishly and affectionately. The two meanings have different relationships to the action they characterize. If you do
something foolishly, you have no excuse, and it’s a bit of a mystery as to why you did; if you do it prompted by affection and love, the wrongness of it may still be
asserted, but something like an explanation or an excuse has at least been suggested.
The ambiguity plays into the poem-length concern with the question of just how culpable Adam and Eve are for the fall. (Given their faculties and emotions, were
they capable of standing?) “Fondly�?doesn’t resolve the question, but keeps it alive and adds to the work the reader must always be doing when negotiating this
poem.
Here is Danielson’s translation of the line: “an infatuated fool overcome by a woman’s charms.�?“Infatuated�?isn’t right because it redoubles the accusation in “fool�?rather than softening it. The judgment is sharp and clear, but it is a clearer judgment than Milton intended or provided. Something has been lost (although as Danielson points out, something is always lost in a translation).
Another example. At an earlier point, the epic narrator comments on mankind’s susceptibility to the blandishments of the fallen angels. Men and women are duped even to the extent that “devils they adore for deities.�?The tone is one of incredulity; how could anyone be so stupid as to be unable to tell the difference?
But the line’s assertion that as polar opposites devils and deities should be easily distinguishable is complicated by the fact that as words “devils�?and “deities�?are close together, beginning and ending with the same letter and sharing an “e�?and an “i�?in between. The equivalence suggested by sound (although denied by the sense) is reinforced by the mirror-structure of “adore for,�?a phrase that separates devils from deities but in fact participates in the subliminal assertion of their likeness.
What, then, is the line saying? It is saying simultaneously that the difference between devils and deities is obvious and perspicuous and that the difference is hard to tell. This is one of those moments Davie has in mind when he talks about the tendency of Milton’s verse to go off the rails of narrative in order to raise speculative questions that have no definitive answer.
When Danielson comes to render “devils to adore for deities,�?he turns it into a present participle: “worshiping devils themselves.�?Absent are both the tone of
scornful wonder the epic voice directs at the erring sinners and the undercutting of that scorn by the dance of vowels and consonants.
One more example. In line 2 of book I, the reference to the fruit of the forbidden tree is followed by “whose mortal taste/ Brought death into the world.�?“Mortal,�?
from the Latin “mors,�?means both fatal �?there is no recovery from it �?and bringing about the condition of mortality, the condition of being human, the taste of
mortality. By eating of the forbidden tree, Adam and Eve become capable of death and therefore capable of having a beginning and an end and a middle filled
up by successes, failures, losses and recoveries. To say that a “mortal taste�?brought death into the world is to say something tautologous; but the tautology is
profound when it reminds us of both the costs and the glories of being mortal. If no mortality, then no human struggles, no narrative, no story, no aspiration (in
eternity there’s nowhere to go) no “Paradise Lost.�?/DIV>
Danielson translates “whose mortal taste�?as “whose lethal taste,�?which is accurate, avoids tautology (or at least suppresses it) and gets us into the next line
cleanly and without fuss or provoked speculation. But fuss and bother and speculations provoked by etymological puzzles are what makes this verse go (or,
rather, not go), and while the reader’s way may be smoothed by a user-friendly prose translation, smoothness is not what Milton is after; it is not a pleasure he wishes to provide.
I have no doubt that Danielson is aware of all of this. He is not making a mistake. He is making a choice. He knows as well as anyone how Milton’s poetry works,
but it is his judgment (following Wesley and Bloom) that many modern readers will not take their Milton straight and require some unraveling of the knots before
embarking on the journey.
I’m not sure he’s right (I’ve found students of all kinds responsive to the poetry once they give it half a chance), but whether he is or not, he has fashioned a powerful pedagogical tool that is a gift to any teacher of Milton whatever the level of instruction.
The edition is a parallel one �?Milton’s original on the left hand page and Danielson’s prose rendering on the right. This means that you can ask students to take a passage and compare the effects and meanings produced by the two texts.
You can ask students to compose their own translations and explain or defend the choices they made. You can ask students to look at prose translations in another
language and think about the difference, if there is one, between translating into a foreign tongue and translating into a more user-friendly version of English. You can
ask students to speculate on the nature of translation and on the relationship between translation and the perennial debate about whether there are linguistic universals.
In short, armed with just this edition which has no editorial apparatus (to have included one would have been to defeat Danielson’s purpose), you can teach a
course in Milton and venture into some deep philosophical waters as well. A nice bargain in this holiday season.
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