Translator

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Merely to pronounce a word must be, in such a case, to see it and realize, half-unconsciously perhaps, its various parts. Even if half-unconscious, the nuances of meaning conveyed by them must have hung about the spoken word and given it a distinct flavour which, without them, would be absent.
Now what is a translator to do? Shall he render the word in the flat, dictionary sense, or shall he permit himself to add to it what it conveys to an educated Chinese? Clearly neither the one nor the other in all cases; but one or the other, which the context must determine. ”

“ The Shakespearian character of the play, displayed in the freedom with which the author brings in everything that seems to him likely to complete the portrait of his hero, has been recognised by the translator, as is shown by his use of a combination of prose and verse passages.
A real translator must be equally at home in the language of the work translated and in the language into which he translates it. He must be in thorough sympathy with the mental attitudes of the two nations whose speeches he is transmuting one into the other. ”

“ For example, there is a proverb in German: "Quand le cheval est sellé il faut le monter;" in French there is a proverb: "Quand le vin est tiré il faut le boire." Well, a translator who would translate quand le cheval, etc., by quand le vin, etc., is an ass, and does not know his business. In translation, only a strictly classical language should be used; no word of slang, or even word of modern origin should be employed; the translator's aim should be never to dissipate the illusion of an exotic. ”

“ The translator who makes verbal literalness his chief care ‘will’, says a writer in the National Review whom 33I have already quoted, ‘be appreciated by the scholar accustomed to test a translation rigidly by comparison with the original, to look perhaps with excessive care to finish in detail rather than boldness and general effect, and find pardon even for a version that seems bare and bold, so it be scholastic and faithful’. ”

“ The author desires to express his appreciation of the work of the translator, whose collaboration was all the more valuable as the revision of the book had to be made, after an interval of almost two years, under most unfavorable conditions, aggravated by the distance between the writer and the place of publication. The readers will themselves judge of the skill with which the translator has acquitted herself of her task, and the author gladly leaves to her the honor and the responsibility for the translation.
But how can I express all I owe to M. Israel Levi, my honored master? ”

“ This lightness of manner and importance of matter form a combination the translation of which into a different language is naturally a matter of considerable difficulty. It was, in any case, a task which the present Translator, not being an original writer in the English language, would hardly have ventured to undertake, had there not been other considerations. ”

“ Unfortunately for this theory, it is the ordinary English reader who is going to decide what he thinks of a foreign author given to him in translation; he, and no one else, is the man who must be satisfied. And you can satisfy him only by remembering constantly that a translator is an interpreter and guide. It is not enough for him to know exhaustively the meaning of the original, but he must also realise the limitations of his English audience and foresee what portions of a foreign-work will be unintelligible for other reasons than that of a foreign tongue. ”

“ French translation is the only translation; in England you still continue to translate poetry into poetry, instead of into prose. We used to do the same, but we have long ago renounced such follies. Either of two things—if the translator is a good poet, he substitutes his verse for that of the original;—I don't want his verse, I want the original;—if he is a bad poet, he gives us bad verse, which is intolerable. Where the original poet put an effect of caesura, the translator puts an effect of rhyme; where the original poet puts an effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of caesura. ”

“ He turns away from the one best word or phrase in the English lines he quotes, whereas the translator seeks precisely that one best word or phrase (having all the resources of his language at command) , to represent what is said in another language. More than this, his task is not simply mechanical: he must feel, and be guided by, a secondary inspiration. ”

“ In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas North translated from the French Amyot's wise observation: "The office of a fit translator consisteth not only in the faithful expressing of his author's meaning, but also in a certain resembling and shadowing forth of the form of his style and manner of his speaking"; but few English critics, in the period under our consideration, grasped thus firmly the essential connection between thought and style and the consequent responsibility of the translator. ”

“ Each language—the spoken, the poetic, the literary, the documentary—has its own construction, its own class of characters, and its own symbolism. A translator must therefore make a special study of whichever he wishes to render. ”

“ In preparing so beautiful a rendering as the present, the difficulties can have been neither few nor small in the way of preserving, in various parts of the work, the exactness of the translation, combined with that uniform harmony and clearness of style which imparts to the volumes before us the air and spirit of an original. Though the translator never obtrudes himself upon the reader with any notes or comments of his own, yet he is evidently a man who has a familiar knowledge of the whole subject ”

“ It is certainly the duty of a translator to be thoroughly convinced of the intrinsic merit of any work he may propose to translate, for he will be in a measure responsible for its influence upon the minds of those to whom he may introduce it. No hope of sudden success should dazzle him into unworthy labor. ”

“ So the translator really has no good model before him for any part of his work, and has to invent everything for himself. He is to be rapid in movement, plain in speech, simple in thought, and noble; and how he is to be either rapid, or plain, or simple, or noble, no one yet has shown him. ”

“ Even in the first perusal of a work in any foreign language which we understand, we are apt to attribute to it more excellence than it really possesses from our own pleasurable sense of difficulty overcome without effort. Translation of poetry into poetry is difficult, because the translator must give a brilliancy to his language without that warmth of original conception from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord. But the translator of a living author is incumbered with additional inconveniences. ”

“ A translator has three courses open to him, to translate more or less verbally, so as to run the risk of being unintelligible to a reader unacquainted with the original, to generalize what is special, and to borrow something of the imitator's licence, introducing a modern speciality in place of an ancient. ”

“ One might just as well say "no prose translation can give the sense and spirit of the original; it can only substitute the sense and spirit of the words and phrases of the translator's language;" and then, these two assertions balancing each other, there will remain in the metrical translator's favor, that he may come as near to giving both the letter and the spirit, as the effects of the Babel dispersion will allow. ”

“ In original writing the ear and taste of a good craftsman will keep him safe from both extremes. But in a translation, as all translators know, there is a temptation almost irresistible to take advantage of any licence the metre allows, a little here and a little there, till at last the accumulated result goes far beyond what the translator had meant or what the reader can readily approve. ”

“ The Translator has, however, striven to maintain fidelity to the sense of the original, and has occasionally somewhat sacrificed euphony to fidelity.
It is not to be expected that the people's poet of one nation and of a former age will become, through translation, the people's poet of another nation in a later generation. Individual translations may win for themselves a place side by side with the favourite songs of native growth. ”

“ It is of the first importance that the translator write good English, but it is hardly to be supposed that the use of grammar and lexicon will give a writer that intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with foreign idioms without which it is impossible to make a version satisfactory in the modern sense.
Mrs. Wister is an excellent example of what might more correctly be called a “paraphraser” than a “translator.” It has been her custom to select some popular German novel, and from that to make a story which seemed to her likely to please the American public. ”

“ Even in the age of Pope, when, if ever, it was safe to be dogmatic and when the theory of translation seemed safely on the way to become standardized, one still hears the voices of a few recalcitrants, voices which become louder and more numerous as the century advances; in the nineteenth century the most casual survey discovers conflicting views on matters of fundamental importance to the translator. ”

“ How immense and instructive a field of comparison between languages does this fact lay open to us; while it is sufficient to drive a translator with a high ideal of the task which he has undertaken well- nigh to despair. ”

“ The regular translator, in fact, is nothing less than a literary ghoul, who lives upon the mangled carcasses of the departed—a mere sack-'em-up, who disinters the dead, and sells their remains for money. You, sir, might have been better and more honestly employed than in wasting your time upon a translation. These are works that no men or class of men, except bishops, chandlers, and pastrycooks, ought to have anything to do with ”

“ It may be confidently asserted, that the Translator who shall endeavour to conform himself to these rules, even with the licence allowed of sacrificing to sense, perspicuity, and harmony, will produce, on the whole, a very sorry composition, which will be far from reflecting a just picture of his original. ”

“ It is much to be regretted that the French translator, in accordance with the literary licence of an age in which the principles of the art of translation were perhaps less generally understood than at any known literary epoch, should have thought himself entitled to deal with the original text in a manner which in the present day, more strict upon the question of fidelity and local colouring, would certainly have been visited with the severest reprobation. ”

“ SMITH AND SON, GLASGOW:—MILLIKEN AND SON, AND HODGES AND M'ARTHUR DUBLIN:—DOBSON, PHILADELPHIA:—AND GOODHUGH, NEW YORK.
1841.
"Every translator ought to regard himself as a broker in the great intellectual traffic of the world, and to consider it his business to promote the barter of the produce of mind. For, whatever people may say of the inadequacy of translation, it is, and must ever be, one of the most important and meritorious occupations in the great commerce of the human race."—Goethe, Künst und Allerthum. ”

“ To one principle, however, he will commit himself: the translator must observe common English usage. "We are not lords of the common speech of men," he writes, "for if we were, we would teach them to use their terms more properly; but seeing we cannot change the use of speech, we follow Aristotle's counsel, which is to speak and use words as the common people useth." ”

“ But, since every language is so full of its own proprieties, that what is beautiful in one, is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense. ”

“ If it is necessary that a translator should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work, it becomes a question, whether it is allowable in any case to add to the ideas of the original what may appear to give greater force or illustration; or to take from them what may seem to weaken them from redundancy. ”

“ He must ascertain with precision to what class it belongs; whether to that of the grave, the elevated, the easy, the lively, the florid and ornamented, or the simple and unaffected; and these characteristic qualities he must have the capacity of rendering equally conspicuous in the translation as in the original. If a translator fails in this discernment, and wants this capacity, let him be ever so thoroughly master of the sense of his author, he will present him through a distorting medium, or exhibit him often in a garb that is unsuitable to his character. ”