Interview of the month – Robin Waterfield

 Interview of the month – Robin Waterfield
(writer-classic scholar and translator)

So, tell us a bit about yourself. Why ancient history and why the Classics?

I sort of drifted into studying Classics. I had a traditional British private-school education, in which Latin and Greek featured prominently. I started Latin at age 8 and Greek at 10. Aged 13, I wanted to change to modern languages, because French was my best subject, but at my school you could not study both German and ancient Greek: they coincided on the timetable. So I went to my form teacher and told him I wanted to change from Greek to German. ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ he said – and I didn’t. I carried on in the half-hearted way that many teenagers approach school work, and only truly fell in love with Classics at university. In my final year at Manchester, I had to choose between my two favourite subjects, philosophy and history. I tossed a coin, and it came down on philosophy. I returned to history about fifteen years ago.

What were the challenges you faced while learning Greek and especially ancient Greek?  

Well, when you start Greek at the tender age of 10, the learning is very gradual and slow, and I was quick, so it was okay! The kind of traditional education I had involved learning grammar and so on by rote – repeating, time and again, the principal parts of verbs, for instance, until you’ve got them right. Of course, there were many difficulties along the way, probably those that are experienced by everyone: English is not an inflected language, so I had to get used to the grammar; I found Homeric Greek and other poetry very difficult (I still do in some cases: Euripides’ choral odes, for instance!); when accents were introduced when I was about 16 years old, I found them difficult, not least because when English people speak ancient Greek out loud, they pronounce the words with English stresses, ignoring the original accents, so it was hard to remember whereabouts on any given word the accent fell. Just the usual difficulties, then! 

How would you describe your experience of translating the Classics? What are the specific challenges and rewards involved in this type of translation? 

I love translating. It gives me as much pleasure as almost anything. I can usually get to see not just what the ancient author is trying to say, but also what some of the undertones and overtones are. The challenge is to translate in a way that catches not just the surface meaning, but something of the undertones and overtones as well – and to do it all in fluent English! Even if it’s rare to get it perfectly right, it is such a joy when it happens, or you get close enough. It is critically important for translators not just to be as good as possible at their non-native language, but to have a really good feel for their native language. I read very widely in English, fiction and non-fiction, and that certainly feeds back into my translating as well. 

Do you have a favorite ancient writer/philosopher? What do you love about them?  

My favourite ancient writer is generally whoever I’m translating at the time! The pleasure is in the translating, as well as the content. I suppose if I had to pick on just one author it would be Plato, for his genius as both a thinker and a writer; but it is easy to get sucked in by Plato’s brilliance, and to fail to question some of his ideas – especially his anti-democratic politics. Herodotus would come a close second. 

How is your current project, a general history of the ancient Greeks, from c.700 to c. 30 BCE, going? How do you deal with all the existing information? 

I think it’s going well, but there’s a long way to go yet (I have to deliver the typescript in about ten months’ time). Sometimes the responsibility weighs quite heavily on me: the book will be published by Oxford University Press, so it will have that cachet, and might be read by a lot of people – the whole next generation of students and history buffs (my target audience). And there are quite a few general histories of ancient Greece around, so there is no point in adding to them unless the book is outstanding. Well, we shall see about that! I’m definitely over-writing, though, and will have to do some severe editing at the end. There is, of course, an incredible amount to read: I have suddenly to know … well, everything! My reading list is about 200 pages long! Thanks to the support of my wife, I’ve been able to work about thirteen hours a day, seven days a week, for over a year now, and I’m loving every minute of it. Despite the enormous amount of reading, my eyelids rarely seem to get heavy. I have a large collection of books here at home, and make visits to Athens to supplement what I have on my shelves. 

Have you seen any of your works translated? 

It is, of course, very unusual for a translation to be translated into another language, but for some reason one of my 25 or so translations has been further translated: my translation of Plato’s Statesman has appeared in Chinese! Presumably they couldn’t find anyone local who knew ancient Greek well enough. As for my other books: my children’s books have appeared in many languages, as have my biography of Kahlil Gibran and my book Hidden Depths, on hypnosis. The history books have not been picked up so much by foreign publishers: a couple of them are in Spanish – but three of them are in modern Greek:

Athens: A History was published by Enalios as Αθήνα;
Xenophon’s Retreat was published by Psychogios as Ξενοφών: Η Κάθοδος των μυρίων;
and Why Socrates Died was published by Psychogios as Σωκράτης: Η Ζωή του, ο Θάνατός του.