Roadwork Ahead

Picture this: You’re driving along in your car without a care in the world, traffic moving along spiffily all around you. Then, the dreaded orange signs appear on the roadside. Roadwork ahead. Now, instead of the comfortable pace you were previously traveling at, you move at a frustrating crawl, limited by the construction being done to the roadway.

In a way some of the great works that we read remind me of roadwork. While many are enlightening about times past, they are also full of hidden meanings, or sentences that make you just go, ‘what?’ inside. Some of the ‘clever allusions’ used by these authors merely confuse and frustrate the reader of today instead of giving them insight as to what the author is referring to.

This is not to demean figurative language at all, after all, where would this particular blog post be without it. However, when faced with a work such as a Shakespearian sonnet one quickly realizes that allusion can only carry one so far before the words woven bring you in a giant circle and only confusion is produced instead of a greater understanding. This may not have always been the case, for as I‘m sure you would acknowledge, language has changed drastically over the years, and meanings that words once possessed have been altered until some are no longer recognizable.

Conversely, in terms of age, it is amusing to me that Plato is much more understandable than some of the works that we read. There is a reason for this though, and his name is translator. Because Plato’s works were originally in Greek, they had to be translated, paving the way for all of us to ‘enjoy’ today. As the works we read today are still technically English however, the translators have touched them very little. Why is this? Could translators today not simply do the same to pieces already in English to make them more easily understandable?

I’m sure some of you balk at this idea, after all no one wants to tamper with an author’s work and inadvertently change the meaning. But this is what these people were paid to do, so presumably they are somewhat skilled at it. So why is it that we are uncomfortable with the idea of changing these works? Is it because some of us enjoy the task of muddling through the old language? Am I simply alone in my frequent incomprehension of non-modern English? Or are we simply afraid of change? I leave this question for you to answer.