Brandon Brown's "The Persians by Aeschylus": Artist Statement by Brandon Brown

The Italian adage that calls the translator a traitor expresses a long-standing and still effervescent understanding of the role of the translator in the process known as “translation.” The translator—what are her qualities? She operates between the poles of fidelity and treason. She is valued to the very extent that she maintains her invisibility. She operates between the poles of domesticity and foreignness. She is full of secrets. She is not to be trusted.

In my work I have been interested in the sentence passed on translation, the sentence passed on the translator in advance. I am interested in the specificity of the metaphors that translators live by. These metaphors, far from serving as remote descriptors of an alien process, have affected my process as a translator in an intimate way—I have embraced them as it were in a thorny embrace, without the melodrama.

In 2004, I translated several odes of the Roman poet Horace. In the process of making those translations, I experienced profound discomfort in reading his works. I was not able to read these works, written in praise of Caesar Augustus (a dictator whose father had just recently been dictator) and praising his recent decisions to wage war, as if there were no time and space, only mirror images of meanings. My eyes, if they were focused on the text of Horace, were always part of the body which was inundated by representations of the unimaginable violence taking place in my name around the world, to some extent engineered by a sort of dictator (whose father had just recently been dictator).

Benjamin Hollander describes a translation as “some of what the translator read.” I wished to make that profound bodily discomfort I experienced in reading the works legible in the translations.

The Persians, an ancient play by Aeschylus, shows the Persian court during the time of the war between the Persians and the Greeks. It depicts the Persians learning of their massive defeat at the hands of the Greek army. I desired to make a literal translation of The Persians by Aeschylus using a process similar to the method with which I translated Horace. I wished to expand that practice, however. I believed that the text which proceeded from my body should report on my total experience of reading The Persians by Aeschylus, not simply report on the “meanings” of the “words” of that work.

This was an obviously impossible project. To help myself out, I tried to include many collaborators to intervene in the translation, especially including Edward Said, Jane Austen, Walter Benjamin, my Arabic class, the Clash, e-mail correspondence with a translator recruiter from the U.S. Army, and Rumi; also all the things I ate and drank and wore and said and did are in the translation; and most especially I tried to pay attention to the terrific war and the terrific language that the war made that completely infiltrated all of my food and beverages and clothes and words and actions, and I let that get in the way of the translation too. In this way, The Persians by Aeschylus transmits numerous reports: a report of a reading, a toxological report of the reading and the writing; those latencies did not lie down.