The Golden Ass by Apuleius, trans. Robert Graves

At what point does a translator become as important as the original author? Is there a point where the translator becomes more important?

I read a bunch of things that are translated from their original languages, because I want to appear as a modern man with wide, cosmopolitan tastes. (Or maybe I just read a lot of comics originally from France, but don't read French.) And I write about them all here, by habit or compulsion. When they're translated, I've tended to put the translator in the body of my blog post, somewhere, and sometimes note where I've read different translations of the same underlying work, or otherwise think I can discern something about the translation itself.

This time, though, I feel like the translator is important enough to get an author credit - maybe because the book cover does that, maybe because he's famous on his own, maybe because this is a nearly two-thousand-year old religious romp translated by one of the greatest prose writers of the last century.

According to the cover, this is The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass. Generally, it's just called The Golden Ass. It was written by Apuleius (Lucius was his given name, but, like Madonna or Cher, he's usually called by the single name) around the year 180, and translated in 1947 by novelist Robert Graves, who also provided an introduction.

I'm not enough of a historian to know if this is the oldest surviving picaresque novel. Probably not: there are always earlier versions of everything. But it's early, and it's picaresque, and very obviously and maturely so: this is a story made up of stories, almost fractally, and they're all told with grace and humor and a quietly bawdy air. I'm pretty sure most of the stories in here are versions of things circulating at the time, familiar from storytellers and earlier novels or plays or whatever. (My knowledge of the publishing and literary scene of the mid-second century Latin world is shockingly small.)

So I came here from later picaresques - most obviously, and recently, from Jack Vance's Cugel novels, which also feature a roguish young man with an eye for the ladies traveling across a landscape filled with danger and magical transformations. And the first thing I would say about The Golden Ass is that it is fun to read: Graves' translation is still modern enough to be quick and lively and engaging, and the story is cynical and honest in turn in ways that will resonate just as well in the 21st century. This book is almost two thousand years old, but it's presented in clear language and features people that modern readers will recognize: their religious concerns are very different, but how they interact with each other is instantly familiar.

Apuleius is telling a story ostensibly about himself, about Lucius, a young man traveling in Greece, looking to work as a lawyer and fascinated by stories of witches. This is all true, he claims - it's that kind of book, from that tradition. Along the way, he'll tell us how he was transformed into an ass, and what happened afterward. Even more so, he'll tell us other stories - stories he heard along the way, stories that were told to him, stories upon stories.

It's structured like one long night with a master storyteller, who starts out by telling his own "no shit, there I was" story, gets sidetracked for long periods with "oh, and while I was there, I heard this fascinating tale," but always comes back to the core narrative and ends all of those stories well. In the end, it's actually a religious parable, I think: but the fun part for a modern reader is that it's a pagan Latin parable, all about how you need to devote your life to the correct mystery cults, and then wealth and success will follow you in your life forevermore. (Or something like that: Graves has some details in his introduction, and the last chapter is Apuleius directly talking about all of his successive initiations and why they were each important.)

This is one of the most frivolous and light-hearted "classics" I have ever read. It does have a moral at the end, as I just noted, but the moral comes out of such a different world and set of expectations that most modern readers won't even take it as a moral. I can recommend it even to readers allergic to morals, and anyone who likes stories within stories, picaresque adventures, or good-natured rogues.