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CONCERNING TRANSLATION

On Translating Homer. By MATTHEW ARNOLD. George Routledge. 1905.

Collection d'Auteurs Etrangers. Paris: Mercure de France. 1898.

The Works of Anatole France in English. John Lane, The Bodley Head. 1908.

The Odyssey of Homer.

Done into English by S. H. BUTCHER and

A. LANG. Macmillan. 1887.

5. Essay on the Principles of Translation. LORD WOODHOUSELEE. J. M. Dent.

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By ALEXANDER FRASER TYTLER, 1906.

The Works of Marcel Proust. Translated by C. K. SCOTT-MONCRIEFF. Chatto and Windus. 1922,

Memoirs of Bertrand Barère.

Translated by DE V. PAYEN-PAYNE

NICHOLS.

1895.

SOME

OME superior person-I forget exactly who it was-boasted that, given a grammar and a dictionary, he would undertake to translate anything. If he ever attempted to give effect to this brag, he can hardly have avoided adding one more example to the long list of traduttori who are traditori. If ever one proverb contained more truth than another, it is this one which tells us that all translators are traitors, every man Jack of them. That this is no calumny but a sober statement of fact; that there is, in very truth, no such thing as translation, is what I shall attempt, in this article, to demonstrate.

It may be supposed that the accusation of treachery, levelled against the whole confraternity of translators, has reference to mere mistranslation, to isolated misunderstandings of an author's meaning, to "howlers," as the grosser instances are termed. But the trouble is more deeply seated than this. A translation may be plentifully strewn with "howlers " and yet, viewed in its total result, be much closer to the real meaning, to the true spirit of the original, than a rival version that is disfigured by no such aberrations.

That translator would betray a rashness amounting almost to ßpis who should condemn a version, out of hand, because it contained a howler or two. He laughs best who laughs last; and one can never be quite sure that one's own turn will not come

some day. The Authorized Version, so rich in noble beauty, is rich also in mistranslations, of which "Peace on earth and good will towards men " is one of the most familiar. But such little blemishes as these are not visible in the blaze of glory which is King James's Bible. I would not then wholly condemn a translation because of a sprinkling of such inaccuracies. It might, like Florio's "Montaigne" and Urquhart's "Rabelais," come much nearer to the spirit of the original than the laboured effort of some industrious pedant striving after mere verbal fidelity, one whose "faith unfaithful holds him falsely true."

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But howlers, however deplorable in themselves, have their compensations, their beneficent uses: they add to the gaiety of nations. We are most of us familiar with the story of the young lady who on being asked, in an examination, to give the French for "the Eastern Hemisphere," puckered her brows, and after a moment's excogitation, rapped out brightly, "le demi-monde oriental." We might have been tempted to wonder whether this example was not ben trovato, had we not discovered in a recent version of Oscar Wilde's "Intentions " a whole series of gaffes equally full-blooded. Two of them, at least, clamour for quotation. For "Nature is no great mother who has borne us we read "Ce n'est pas une grand'-mère qui nous a enfantés "; while the sentence," Those who do not love Plato cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe" has been deliciously rendered "ne peuvent pas entrer à l'Académie." The same translator's rendering of " that new journalism which is but the old vulgarity writ large " by "qui n'est que la vieille vulgarité écrite au large," is equally striking but somewhat less easy to account for. "Au large," that is to say, out at sea," seems indeed to have been the situation of the translator himself. The book exhibits at least a dozen other contresens of this calibrerather a liberal allowance it must be confessed, for a single volume. After this, one need no longer question the authenticity of such classic examples of the genus howler as "One of the king's whiskers was there" for " un des favoris du roi était là "; or "she put up at the Pier Hotel" for "elle s'arrêta au pied de l'autel "; or "one foot in the grave " for " un pied à terre."

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But it is time to quit the subject of howlers which, if fascinating, is a little frivolous, and to consider the basic problems which confront the translator. If translation were a mere grammar

and dictionary" affair, the path of the translator, though it might be tedious, would be beset by no insuperable difficulties. Patience and a stout heart would bring him to his goal at last. True, the dictionary may lead the thoughtless into some terrible quagmires. That is a truth of which the fate of a certain young French lady, who was translating an English novel, affords a lasting memorial. She came to the phrase," her bosom rose and fell.” Consulting her dictionary, she discovered that an equivalent for " rose " was " pink or pale red," and that " fell " meant " cruel," " fierce," " terrible," so that the whole phrase in French appeared as " sa poitrine rouge-pâle et atroce."

That is an example of how far astray the dictionary may lead the thoughtless or the unwary. But, banishing from the discussion all such arguments as these, granting that the translator possesses enough knowledge, and is fortified by sufficient common sense, to put his grammar and his dictionary to their proper use ; granting, too, that he is thoroughly aware of the structural differences that mark the languages with which he is dealing; allowing, in short, that he is as completely equipped for his task as training can make him, he must fail, and may fail lamentably, in his undertaking. Even if, in addition to this equipment, he possesses the gift of style and the faculty of entering into the spirit, into the heart and mind of the original author, yet he will fail none the less; he will fail, honourably indeed, and not through any shortcomings of his own, but because from the very nature of the case, his task is beyond the possibility of accomplishment.

Those who essay to translate, those who assume that translation is a possible thing, involve themselves, consciously or unconsciously, in one of the greatest of literary heresies: namely, the belief that the idea, and the language in which it is clothedla forme et le fond can be discriminated the one from the other.

Thought and speech," says Newman, " are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language. . . When we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex and the concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought to tread speech under foot, and hope to do without it."

Words are not inert or lifeless things, they are not mere frigid signs manufactured ad hoc, like the words of some artificial language such as Esperanto or Volapuk; but the slow growth

of the ages. There are, indeed, words that are not words, just as there are books that are not books, but these have to do with scientific or technical jargon and have no more concern with literature than have the cigars or packs of cards enclosed in cases backed to resemble books. Words are the outcome of centuries of leisurely growth: they smack of the soil from which they spring, they are imbued, so to speak, with the hues of their native skies, they are saturated with tradition, they are the indexes of the history-moral, political, literary-of the people of whose language they are the component parts. They must, if they are to be really part of us, be drunk in with our mother's milk. Any subsequent acquisition of them by means of artificial instruction-as an Englishman learns French, for example-robs them of their bloom. From the critical point of view, Professor Emile Legouis can doubtless tell me a great deal more about Wordsworth, and M. Abel Lefranc a great deal more about Shakespeare, than I know, or am ever likely to know; but I doubt that the music of either Shakespeare or Wordsworth echoes in their hearts with the same intimacy like the voice of one's mother, with which it sounds in my own. If, then, Shakespeare and Wordsworth must, in this more intimate sense, remain strangers to Monsieur Legouis, or to Monsieur Abel Lefranc, who are as much masters of our language and as deeply versed in the knowledge of our literature as it is possible for foreigners to be, how much farther off from understanding them must be one who can only apprehend Shakespeare or Wordsworth through the medium of a translation.

How (asks Newman) can languages reasonably be expected to be all equally rich, equally forcible, equally musical, equally exact, equally happy in expressing the idiosyncratic peculiarities of thought of some original and fertile mind who has availed itself of one of them? A great author takes his native language, masters it, partly throws himself into it, partly moulds and adapts it, and pours out his multitude of ideas through the variously ramified and delicately minute channels of expression which he has found or framed : does it follow that this, his personal presence, (as it may be called) can forthwith be transferred to every language under the sun?

And he concludes by saying that if, as Sterne would have it, an author, if really great, must admit of translation, and that we have a test of his excellence when he reads to advantage in a foreign language as well as in his own, "then the multiplicationtable is the most gifted of all conceivable compositions, because it loses nothing by translation."

Perhaps it may not be over fanciful to say that every writer is, in a sense, a translator, inasmuch as every writer is confronted with the task of translating into words the idea, the image, the vision which he contemplates with his mind's eye. He has to find appropriate words and so to set them in order as to convey or suggest to others the thoughts by which he is animated, the emotion by which he is stirred. The higher, the more imaginative those thoughts and emotions, the more difficult and delicate the task. On these ethereal heights, the tolerably good, the good enough for all practicable purposes" is of no avail. There are certain words, and those words alone, and a certain harmonious disposition of them, and that disposition alone, which will meet the case. As Pater says in a memorable passage:

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All art constantly aspires to the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation should be nothing without the form . . . that the form should penetrate every part of the matter.

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To the consideration of the indissolubility of form and matter, I shall beg leave to return later. Here let me repeat that, in a sense, every writer is a translator, since he has to translate, to fix, to crystallize his own floating, evanescent, elusive thoughts into words a task which becomes increasingly difficult in proportion as those thoughts are touched and heightened by emotion; in proportion as they have to do, not only with the processes of his intellect, but with the promptings of his heart. But the task of the translator proper is—if he takes a just view of his callingmore difficult still; it is, as Samuel Butler would term it, a double dislocation." Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a Frenchman essays to make "Hamlet" intelligible to his fellow countrymen. What is required of him? Nothing less than to throw himself into the mind of Hamlet's creator; not merely to grasp the mental, the intellectual process which produced the idea of "Hamlet," but to awaken within his own being the thrill of emotion, something of the "fine frenzy " which accompanied the birth of that idea, and then to convey that idea, that emotion, in words of an alien language.

Hitherto, I have dwelt mainly on the characteristics of words in themselves. I have remarked that they are not inanimate,

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