Richard Aldington’s Classical Translations

Abstract This chapter discusses Aldington’s translations of Greek and Latin poetry, which have attracted very little scholarly attention. Yet Aldington considered translation of ancient texts a crucial aspect of his poetic training, and an understanding of his translational theory is essential for evaluating his poetic practice. The value he placed on translating classical texts makes these translations a central aspect of his classical receptions. Aldington began publishing his translations when his grasp of the classical languages was still very weak; the chapter looks in particular at his translation of a fragment of Sappho under the title ‘To Atthis’ and discusses some of the reasons why he may have considered publication worthwhile even though he must have known that he was inviting adverse criticism. The chapter also examines the crucial importance of Aldington’s theories of translation for the development of modernist translation, especially as he expressed those theories in the prospectuses for the Poets’ Translation Series, which he and H.D. edited in 1915 and he revived in 1919–1920, and in an unpublished essay intended as an introduction to a collection of his translations. For the Poets’ Translation Series, Aldington intentionally recruited translators whose grasp of the source language was minimal, and yet he nevertheless claimed that their translations achieved semantic accuracy and was scornful of scholars who criticized them on the grounds of their semantic and lexical errors. The chapter argues that Aldington’s approach to and theories of translation laid the groundwork for the development of modernist translation theory, which moved away from requiring any knowledge of the source language at all.