Thursday, November 22, 2012

Translating Caesar

I first started learning Latin in the summer of 1977, when I was 15. (It was a difficult time in my life, but that's another story.) A pet project of mine has been translating Julius Caesar's famous COMMENTARIES ON THE GALLIC WARS.  It has the famous opening "Greater Gaul is divided into three parts..." (I translated it as "Greater Gaul..." instead of the more common "All Gaul..." because I wanted to distinguish between that superregion and Gaul proper, which didn't include the Belgians in the northeast or the Aquitanians in the southwest.)

I put the translation aside for a few years after finishing the first section, which was about Caesar's war with the Helvetian Gauls, who staged a mass emigration out of what's now Switzerland and tried to overrun the rest of Gaul.  About 300,000 people left on this trek, but after Caesar had defeated them only about 100,000 returned. (The rest were largely killed or enslaved.)

Recently I started translating the next section, which is about Caesar's conflict with German tribes from the east who'd been overrunning eastern Gaul.  Their leader was Ariovistus, whose name is probably a Latinized version of the German for "Lord [Herr] of the West." I've just got to a tough part where Caesar's giving a pep talk to his officers because the German warriors' reputation as supermen has scared even the Roman soldiers.

Translation always involves issues of style.  Caesar keeps referring to himself in the third person (there's a crook on BOARDWALK EMPIRE who does that too), but I use the first person for him.  Also, I use the modern name for the places in the text whenever that's clear, one example being Besancon for Vesontio.  And I refer to the province of Transalpine Gaul, the base for Caesar's operations, as a capitalized "the Province."

One thing to remember when reading the text is that it's only Caesar's side of things--no doubt he was writing it to justify himself against the charge that his wars were an unnecessary vehicle for his political ambitions.  And he hasn't mentioned what the whole conflict was really about:  gold.  I learned from Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) in the TV documentary series BARBARIANS that Gaul at this time had become a major gold-producer and its wealth was now attracting conquerors from Helvetia, Germany and Rome.

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