Victor Hugo

“ Idea into form, form into human, human into activity, with Shakespeare, as with Aeschylus, as with Plautus, as with Cervantes, this is the phenomenon that is summarized concretely as follows: life into drama. In a masterpiece, all is an act of will. Shakespeare wills his subject, such a one and no other. Shakespeare wills its development, Shakespeare wills its characters, Shakespeare wills its passions, Shakespeare wills its philosophy, Shakespeare wills its action, Shakespeare wills its style, Shakespeare wills its humanity; he creates it to resemble humanity – and himself. ”

“ Like Aeschylus, Shakespeare has the prodigality of what can’t be plumbed. What can’t be plumbed is inexhaustible. The more thought, the more animated is expression. Color emerges from blackness. Abyssal life is not unheard of. The fire in the center makes the volcano produce lava, the lava breeds oxide, the oxide looks for, finds and fertilizes the root, the root creates the flower; in this way the rose comes from the flame. The image likewise comes from the idea. Deep-seated work goes on in the brain of a genius. Idea, abstraction in the poet, becomes marvel and reality in the poem. ”

“ Every language possesses a certain number of meanings. Some it has, others it doesn’t. This deep realization is concealed in the following trite saying: one language is rich, another is poor. Great writers are those who enrich languages. Writers create words; the throng of ordinary folk come up with sayings; the people and the poet work in common. Homer and La Halle fling out metaphors. Shakespeare’s trivial and sublime bravado rivals that of John Bull. But do what they will, they cannot fully tap the human mind and put it all in language. What is all pertains only to the Word. ”

“ The Bible is well situated atop this matter. In a word, we are born and we die. Something obscure is over us. There above our heads is the infinite, blue by day and starlit at night; a mysterious pressure; such an obsession calls for a solution. Virtually eliminating someone’s distress is the way all religions end up successful. Once rid of concern about what’s above, the mind is then more alert in computing and negotiating things. We rather quickly quit believing something once and for all and we are at rest internally. Such is what we see in England. Theocracy requires no more than that. ”

“ What is more, semi-translators are useful initiators. They gradually accustom the eye. Every slight shift of dawn brings daylight. Bit by bit, such is the rule for translations. Poets of one stock can’t be presented in one fell swoop into the mind of a nation that hasn’t borne them. It’s smart at first to profile their introduction. One transition at a time is the way the public ends up accepting them. Anyone wanting in one fell swoop to heap Boileau’s taste on Aeschylus’ genius would fail. ”

“ Issuing like that from a deep source, every idea of the poet, one with the word, sums up in its microcosm, the poet’s entire element. A single drop, it’s all water. So that every detail of style, every term, every word, every expression, everything spoken, every meaning, every extension, every construction, every turn of phrase, often even the punctuation itself is metaphysical. The word, as we’ve said elsewhere, is the embodiment of the idea, but that body is alive. ”

“ With all due reservations and to a certain degree, we favor all translations just as we favor all religions. Religions and translations, things that are more similar than one first supposes, are always suited to states of mind. They are all bad and they are all good, until the moment when it is possible to acknowledge definitive truth, on the one hand in art, on the other in philosophy. Translators, revealers of a sort, provide you with all the just-about-right stuff that you can handle. They do not work on the infinite as does the founder of a religion, but their work is similar. ”

“ Shakespeare, like Aeschylus, like Job, like Isaiah, is one of the almighty ones of thought and of poetry, who, so to speak, can deal with anything mysterious and have the very depth of creation and who, like creation, externally transpose and present that depth through a prodigious profusion of forms and images, tossing out the darkness on flowers, on foliage, and on animate sources. ”

“ Like all such poets, Shakespeare has an absolute personality. He has a manner of his own for imagining, a manner of his own for creating, a manner of his own for producing; imagination, creation, production, three concentric phenomena mingled together in genius. Genius is the sphere of those bright flashes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their blood is their own. For them, to produce is a way to be alive. They create because they are. They breathe and what do you know, a masterpiece. Their style is wholly identical with their selves. For the genuine critic who is a chemist, their totality is compressed into the least detail. This word is Aeschylus; that word is Juvenal; that word is Dante. All of Lady Macbeth is contained in this word: unsex, that is peculiar to Shakespeare. There is not an idea in the poet, just as there isn’t a leaf on the tree, that doesn’t have its root therein. ”

“ It’s miniature, has no form, is misshapen; there’s something of a monster in this dwarf; the little runt’s sucking action wears out the giant. That’s how old Vulgar Latin drew on Latin. Such heavy draining eventually kills even the hardiest language. The parasite language, just being provisional, likewise dies. It can’t live without support. The acorn doesn’t keep living on the oak tree. It’s like the time when Latin breathed its last. Old Vulgar Latin decomposed, and then room was made for new complete and viable languages, daughters of the deceased great grandmother. ”

“ What they ponder, what they study, what they translate, isn’t beyond the pale of humankind, but merely beyond the pale of a people. It isn’t the Spirit, it’s a spirit, it isn’t the Word, it’s an idiom, it’s not heaven, it’s a book. ”

“ It can be said about translation itself, what Cicero has to say about a story: “No matter how it’s written, it’s enjoyable.” We do not refuse to put up with any translator, even those who are, unwittingly, virtually parodists. They too have their own justification. A grimace gives shape to the face. Those flat valves will end up forming a speaking mouth. If something ridiculous imposes itself upon something sublime, it mars it, no question about that, but it also makes it known. ”

“ Struggle with that style to express it, with that thought to extract it, with that philosophy to grasp it, with that poetry to embrace it, with that will to comply with it. To comply, that is what manifests the translator’s power. Brumoy, Bitaube, Artaud, Poinsinet de Sivry, Florian are all noncompliant. They know much more than the instructors. They are more mischievous than genius, such imbeciles. The true translator, the overwhelmingly definitive translator, being intelligence itself, subordinates him- or herself to the original and subordinates him/herself with authority. ”

“ Setting aside England’s enormous and majestic politics, the country lives a life that is simultaneously material and mystical. In England matter is sovereign; and, let us add, it is sovereign in a useful and splendid way; names by which it is called include: bank, stock market, industry, commerce, production, circulation, exchange, wealth, prosperity; in England matter hampers progress wile goading it on; it is massive and tumultuous; it overwhelms a person and gains the upper hand; it fills him full of lead and covers him with wings; the wings are power, the lead is gold. ”

“ Keeping due measure between a person of first rank and one of second rank, La Mennais, a sharp and solid intelligence, even if his translation isn’t the best, is able, without any shortcoming, to approach Dante. Horace, who’s always possessed happiness, has just met up with Jules Janin, who has the same sprite charm as Horace and, over and above Horace, a generous heart. Translators have a part to play in civilization. They serve as bridges between peoples. They pass along what’s in the mind of human beings from one to another ”

“ In the meantime the universe holds humans, angels, fairies; the grave appears with its worker at one end and its occupant at the other, the gravedigger and the ghost; cynical night displays some other thing besides its face, a “buttock of the night”; the witch stands up, Eumenides is rough and ready, a caricature sketched on the vague wall of a dream with a piece of coal from hell, and bent over this world willed by him, contemplating his premeditation, the great poet looks, lists, tallies, sobs, sniggers, loves, muses. ”

“ It is here that the identity of the human mind and of the divine mind shines forth. Thought has no limits. Expressing what has no limits can’t be done. When faced with this inherent enormousness languages falter. One picks up on one thing, another on something else. ”

“ It’s not the universe with its soul, God, it’s the masterpiece with its soul, the poet. It’s hard work. They do what they can. If they don’t tell you everything, it’s less their fault than your own. It isn’t the public that makes the poet, but it is the public that makes the translator. Translators have an illustrious ancestor, Moses. We accept this contested fact the way we accept all history, it too open to challenge, virtually everywhere. Moses is a revealer of two sorts; on Horeb he is God’s translator. In the Bible he is Job’s translator. ”

“ It is always a tough thing to deal with and requires the translator to be a historian as much as a philologist, a philosopher as much as a grammarian, mind as much as intelligence. So, what is it when the writer is a poet? And what is it when the poet is a prophet? Check out the Bible where philosophical, chronological, historical, and even religious questions have the power to give rise to the Elohim bit and the Yahweh bit that are so inextricably combined in the Pentateuch. ”

“ Religion is an outpouring of the infinite that soaks through a person; but religions are a whitewashing. One layer of faith over vices is all that’s needed. It’s obvious among Catholics as well as Protestants. The one insists slightly more on the New Testament, the other on the Old Testament. All cults contain a Jesuitical streak. Theocracy, particularly in England, just so long as it is in control, is a good ruler; it’s happy with causing some stupefaction. On the inside, it plies the person with vain imaginings and prejudices ”

“ The best translator complies with the poet the way the mirror complies with the light, reflecting the light back to you. Being such a living mirror is the rare honor Moliere was looking for when dealing with Plautus and Chateaubriand, when dealing with Milton. Greater faithfulness yields greater brilliance. Is it appropriate, at the point where we are in the 19th century, to afford Shakespeare such a mirror in France? ”

“ England (and we do praise it) sends out its merchant marine in all directions over the ocean routes. London is all hustle and bustle, getting around is virtually dreadful; the mob on London Bridge is like an endless chain, and the entire mob runs and dashes about; no stopping and looking; that’s what a daydreamer does; no one strolling. A busy throng and matters requiring haste everywhere. The Thames vanishes beneath the swarm of steamboats. London’s carriage horses for public transportation keep at it on average for 21 hours a day. ”

“ To condense into a translation all the radiance of such a great hearth, to have such flamboyance converge on our literature alongside the splendors of our homebred poets, to introduce into French light and clarity and, what is more, a fraternal flash of light, is that something doable today? ”

“ It let’s someone move about freely on the outside but blocks him in his mind; the material man can do what seems good to him, while the conscientious man is blockaded; while freedom of conscience does exist, still, its freedom is being manipulated beyond any doubt and it unwittingly turns upon itself, always on the other side of an invisible obstacle ”

“ Dante’s Italian equals Tacitus’ Latin. Shifts from one language to another, from the past to the future, from dusk to dawn, from death to life, are laborious. Translations help there, they extend a helping hand, reducing their toughness, making them easy. Every translation contains an amalgamation. Transformations of languages require a previous mixture. Such a blending of languages’ common basis is a preparation. The human mind, while essentially one, turns into various minds through corruption. Geographic borders and antipathies truncate and localize the mind. ”