TRANSLATION AND THE CORPUS

When I began teaching I never imagined I would show Kevin Smith's Clerks in class. Don't get me wrong: I love the film, a 1994 comedy about a day in the life of two convenience store clerks in New Jersey, but it's not an obvious sell as classics, nor does its content lend itself to easy endorsement in the classroom. Nevertheless, I found myself pressing “play” in a big Roman civilization lecture and giving over to Jay and Silent Bob the ostensible scaenae frons (Roman stage) of my class. For this I have Amy Richlin to thank. In the introduction to her translation of Plautus’ Persa (a play she titles Iran Man), Richlin claims that the films and comic books of Kevin Smith provide “a really excellent current parallel” (111) for the type of humor found in Plautus and, one might argue, Roman comedy in general. Clerks presents a world in which working-class youths run amuck while literally minding the shop. The perennial absence of an authority figure allows a cast of over-the-top slackers to engage in a particularly vulgar and subversive yet also literate and political brand of hilarity, the very brand one finds in the comic works of Plautus and Terence. While many classicists attempt to draw connections between the ancient and modern worlds, Richlin endeavors to translate the experience of being Roman, suggesting a way for modern audiences to encounter Roman comedy as the Romans might have. Watching Clerks, along with reading Iran Man, of course, we might approximate in a meaningful way what it was like to sit as a Roman in the audience of a comedy.

The desire to approximate the experience of the ancient audience for the modern is precisely what inspired this translation. Most modern translations of Catullus tend toward the literal, and even Charles Martin's translation, by many accounts the best English language translation of Catullus to date, follows Catullus’ line breaks as if English-speaking readers had somehow internalized the Latin original.