The Untranslatable Soul, Shakespeare Between Word and Spirit

“ Wherever he is read he becomes the spokesman against narrowness, dogmatism, and intolerance. To translate Shakespeare, he points out, is difficult because of the archaic language, the obscure allusions, and the intense originality of the expression. Shakespeare, indeed, is as much the creator as the user of his mother-tongue. The one translation of Macbeth in existence, Foersom's, is good, but it is only in part Shakespeare, and the times require something more adequate and "something more distinctly our own." ”

“ He seldom passes what he does not understand, without an attempt to find or to make a meaning, and sometimes hastily makes what a little more attention would have found. He is solicitous to reduce to grammar what he could not be sure that his author intended to be grammatical. Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words; and his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was all that he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the audience. ”

“ Our infirmity often takes fright at the inspired bold flights of genius, for lack of power to swoop down upon objects with such vast intelligence. And then, once again, there are defects which take root only in masterpieces; it is given only to certain geniuses to have certain defects. Shakespeare is blamed for his abuse of metaphysics, of wit, of redundant scenes, of obscenities, for his employment of the mythological nonsense in vogue in his time, for exaggeration, obscurity, bad taste, bombast, asperities of style. ”

“ To conclude: the presence of numberless colloquial idioms, impossible to "parse" or to explain by any simple rule, such as render the plays of Shakespeare almost incomprehensible to foreigners, such as throw into despair the students of Aristophanes, these are the characteristic features of every "natural" language, different in each, and no less difficult in the English than elsewhere. While they give a tongue much of its piquancy, its individuality, they immensely augment the difficulties of its mastery. ”

“ Similarly, if the exuberant Elizabethan language were really unfitted to the spirit of the work, I imagine that it would be barely possible to read the drama through, so irritating would be its ineptitude. But, as a fact, the language wins upon us somehow as the right expression for these people. ”

“ Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince, and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly cruel to Ophelia, he might see a ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his father; all this in the poorest and most homely language of the servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an audience; without troubling Shakespeare for the matter; and I see not but there would be room for all the power which an actor has, to display itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain ”

“ But there is one thing more extraordinary than all, that is that Shakespeare is a genius. The Italians, the French, the men of letters of all other countries, who have not spent some time in England, take him only for a clown, for a joker far inferior to Harlequin, for the most contemptible buffoon who has ever amused the populace. Nevertheless, it is in this same man that one finds pieces which exalt the imagination and which stir the heart to its depths. It is Truth, it is Nature herself who speaks her own language with no admixture of artifice. ”

“ The Dama Melindrosa would be easily intelligible and interesting to any audience to-day, but not Every Man in his Humour, or Epicene. With Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains—not in all cases, indeed, but in most—a play—that is, a consistent action—carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with unchanging human nature. ”

“ Shakespeare frees him from it, and he is right Hamlet—prince if you like, but king never—Hamlet is incapable of governing a people; he lives too much in a world beyond. On the other hand, he does better than to reign; he is. Take from him his family, his country, his ghost, and the whole adventure at Elsinore, and even in the form of an inactive type, he remains strangely terrible. That is the consequence of the amount of humanity and the amount of mystery that is in him. Hamlet is formidable, which does not prevent his being ironical. He has the two profiles of destiny. ”

“ Note the unity of religion and philosophy in Hamlet: he takes the one true position. Note also his courage: he has a strong presentiment of death, but will not turn a step from his way. If Death be coming, he will confront him. He does not believe in chance. He is ready—that is willing. All that is needful is, that he should not go as one who cannot help it, but as one who is for God's will, who chooses that will as his own.
There is so much behind in Shakspere's characters—so much that can only be hinted at! The dramatist has not the word-scope of the novelist; his art gives him little room ”

“ So mighty a faculty sets at naught the common limitations of nationality, and in every quarter of the globe to which civilised life has penetrated Shakespeare’s power is recognised. All the world over, language is applied to his creations that ordinarily applies to beings of flesh and blood. Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff and Shylock, Brutus and Romeo, Ariel and Caliban are studied in almost every civilised tongue as if they were historic personalities, and the chief of the impressive phrases that fall from their lips are rooted in the speech of civilised humanity. ”

“ Shakespeare is of no age. He speaks a language which thrills in our blood in spite of the separation of two hundred years. His thoughts, passions, feelings, strains of fancy, all are of this day, as they were of his own—and his genius may be contemporary with the mind of every generation for a thousand years to come. He, above all poets, looked upon man, and lived for mankind. His genius, universal in intellect, could find, in no more bounded circumference, its proper sphere. It could not bear exclusion from any part of human existence. ”

“ They don’t have the same configuration at all; they don’t have the same limits in the human mind. The mind exceeds them in all regards; they are immersed in it with different promontories thrusting more or less forward in different directions. Where one idiom halts, another goes on. What one expresses, another fails to. Beyond all idioms we spot what hasn’t been expressed. And beyond what is not expressed is what can’t be expressed. The translator is forever weighing meanings and equivalents. There is no scale more delicate than the one on which synonyms are balanced. ”

“ If any one, on a rainy day or a lonely evening, wishes to drive away the blue devils by the perusal of some laughter-compelling volume, we can recommend for the purpose no better reading than the tragedy of Hamlet done into French verse by the Chevalier de Chatelain, a gentleman well known as a very successful translator of English poetry. With singular good sense and feeling he has selected, not the play as Shakespeare wrote it, but the stage-version thereof, as the foundation of his work. For which Heaven be praised! for what he has done is sufficient, in all conscience. ”

“ Of all this there is not a notion, but the poems are praised and blamed by passages. The reviewer, as he himself confesses, has marked so much that pleased him, that he cannot quote it all in print. When they even meet the highly meritorious translation of Shakspeare with the exclamation: "By rights, a man like Shakspeare should not have been translated at all!" it will be understood, without further remark, how infinitely the Universal German Library was behindhand in matters of taste, and that young people, animated by true feeling, had to look about them for other guiding stars. ”

“ Such a work should be the common property of man. It is, indeed, impossible to transfer the graces of style and diction from one language to another as much of the spirit is lost with the translation. ”

“ If the genius and character of all languages were the same, it would be an easy task to translate from one into another; nor would anything more be requisite on the part of the translator, than fidelity and attention. But as the genius and character of languages is confessedly very different, it has hence become a common opinion, that it is the duty of a translator to attend only to the sense and spirit of his original, to make himself perfectly master of his author’s ideas, and to communicate them in those expressions which he judges to be best suited to convey them. ”

“ The more he studies a scrupulous imitation, the less his copy will reflect the ease and spirit of the original. How then shall a translator accomplish this difficult union of ease with fidelity? To use a bold expression, he must adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through his own organs. ”

“ No translation of a piece of literary art can ever be entirely satisfactory. The original work has a distinct individuality that it is impossible to reproduce, an individuality which is determined not only by the substance of thought embodied in it, but by the aesthetic form in which it is cast and the language in which this thought finds expression. Indeed, a perfect translation is as impossible as the duplication of an individuality, and approximations to perfect translation are difficult in proportion to the richness and complexity of the original. ”

“ NO translation can expect to equal, much less to excel, the original. The excellence of a translation can only be judged by noting how far it has succeeded in reproducing the original tone, colors, style, the delicacy of sentiment, the force of inert strength, the peculiar expressions native to the language with which the original is written, or whatever is its marked characteristic. The ablest can do no more, and to want more than this will be demanding something impossible. ”

“ Common sense, as well as the verdict of literary history, supports the contention that any translation which is to survive must be the work of somebody possessed of a certain individual bigness, somebody who himself has something to say, something original with which to replace that delicate and volatile essence that is inevitably lost in the process of transference. Of all the arts and crafts, translation is most closely akin to acting. The translator, like the actor, must temporarily sink his personality in that of another ”

“ It is a curious fact that a Book written in one tongue should have come to its largest power in other languages than its own. The Bible means more to-day in German and French and English than it does in Hebrew and Chaldaic and Greek—more even than it ever meant in those languages. There is nothing just like that in literary history. It is as though Shakespeare should after a while become negligible for most readers in English, and be a master of thought in Chinese and Hindustani, or in some language yet unborn. ”