Emancipating Translation

On Sir John Denham (1615-1669):

He appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines, and interpreting single words. How much this servile practice obscured the clearest, and deformed the most beautiful parts of the ancient authors, may be discovered by a perusal of our earlier versions; some of them are the works of men well qualified, not only by critical knowledge, but by poetical genius, who yet, by a mistaken ambition of exactness, degraded, at once, their originals and themselves.

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1959; 1779–81), I, p. 59.

Book Tips from the 1600s

 BOOKS. AUTHORS.
   I. THE giving a bookseller his price for his books, has this advantage; he that will do it, shall be sure to have the refusal of whatsoever comes to his hands, and so by that means get many things, which otherwise he should never have seen. So it is in giving a bawd her price. 

   II. In buying books or other commodities, ’tis not always the best rule to bid but half so much as the seller asks: witness the country fellow, that went to buy two broad shillings; they asked him three shillings, and he bade them eighteen pence*.

   III. They counted the price of the books (Acts 19. 19) and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver; that is so many sextertii, or so many three halfpence of our money, about three hundred pound sterling.

   IV. Popish books teach and inform what we know; we know we know much out of them. The fathers, church story, schoolmen, all may pass for Popish books; and if you take away them, what learning will you leave? Besides who must be judge? The customer or the writer? If he disallows a book, it must not be brought into the kingdom; then Lord have mercy upon all scholars. These Puritan preachers, if they have anything good, they have it out of Popish books, though they will not acknowledge it, for fear of displeasing the people. He is a poor divine that cannot sever the good from the bad.

   V. ’Tis good to have translations, because they serve as a comment, so far as the judgment of the man goes.

   VI. In answering a book, it is best to be short, otherwise he that I write against will suspect I intend to weary him, not to satisfy him. Besides in being long I shall give my adversary a huge advantage; somewhere or other he will pick a hole.

   VII. In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.

   VIII. Quoting of authors is most for matter of fact and then I cite them as I would produce a witness, sometimes for a free expression; and then I give the author his due, and gain myself praise by reading him.

   IX. To quote a modern Dutchman, where I may use a classic author, is as if I were to justify my reputation, and I neglect all persons of note and quality that know me, and bring the testimonial of the scullion in the kitchen.

John Selden, Table talk: being the discourses of John Selden, Esq. (London: printed for Joseph White, 1789; 1689), pp .21-22.

*emended, from peace.

Translation is Not Quite Impossible

Translating is not quite impossible. But it is damnably difficult. And that is why , as has been said by others, the good translator of poetry is a rarer apparition even than the good poet.

Donald Davie, 'The Translatability of Poetry', The Listener, 78 (28 Dec. 1967): 838-840 (p. 840).

The Very Secrets of Writing

It may be, then, that translation from one language into another may lay bare for us something of the very productive mechanisms of textuality itself—may figure as some kind of model or paradigm of the very secret of writing.

Terry Eagleton, ‘Translation and Transformation’, Stand, 19/3 (1977), 72-77 (p. 73).

An Apt Translation

Mary Shelton gives a little gasp, and flushes as if some gallant had pinched her. Jane Rochford drawls, ‘Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare.’ She translates for Mary: ‘Apt.’

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: 4th Estate, 2019; 2009), p. 299.

To English

 The general trend of translation over the last century and more has been away from smoothness and towards authenticity, away from a reorganising interpretativeness which aims for the flow of English prose, towards a close-reading fidelity – enjoy those tannins! – which seeks to echo the original language. We no longer use the verb ‘to English’ – it sounds proprietorial, even imperialist – but when Flaubert was first being translated it was still in use: thus the first London and New York edition of Salammbô – published in 1886, the same year as Marx Aveling’s Madame Bovary – is described on its title page as having been ‘Englished’ by (wait for it) ‘M. French Sheldon’.

Julian Barnes, ‘Translating Madame Bovary’, in Through the Window (London: Vintage, 2012), pp. 146-74 (p. 153).

My Father Wrought

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 63:

   Almost thirty years ago, in a poem called ‘Follower’, I wrote about myself as a child dragging along behind my father when he was out ploughing. The poem began:
                     My father worked with a horse-plough,
and as unremarkable as this may have been as a line of verse, it was still the result of some revision. Originally I had written:
                     My father wrought with a horse-plough,
because until relatively recently that verb was the common one in the speech of mid-Ulster. Country people used the word ‘wrought’ naturally and almost exclusively when they talked about a person labouring with certain tools or animals, and it always carried a sense of wholehearted commitment to the task. You wrought with horses or with a scythe or with a plough; and you might also have wrought at hay or at flax or at bricklaying. So the word implied solidarity with speakers of the South Derry vernacular and a readiness to stand one’s linguistic ground: why, then, did I end up going for the more pallid and expected alternative ‘worked’?
   The answer is, I suppose, because I thought twice. And once you think twice about a local usage you have been displaced from it, and your right to it has been contested by the official linguistic censor with whom another part of you is secretly in league. You have been translated from the land of unselfconsciousness to the suburbs of the mot juste.

A Good Translation

From an Interview with Geoff Brock (1950-) by Maggie Paul. Poetry Santa Cruz: http://www.baymoon.com/~poetrysantacruz/interviews/brock.html

A good translation should breathe on its own and not require the original text as a heart and lung machine. And yet it should find ways to give expression to the most important features (formal as well as semantic) of the original text. All that is part of what might be called fidelity, which is often confused with literal accuracy. Pedants are fond of pointing out that perfect translation is impossible. Of course it is—in this, it is like everything else that’s worth doing.

Spiritualist Philology

In the biography of his brother, G. Wilson Knight records the classicist Theodore Haarhoff’s contact with the spirit of the Roman poet Vergil, and its possible influence on W.F. Jackson Knight’s translation of the Aeneid. G. Wilson Knight, Jackson Knight: A Biography (Oxford: The Alden Press, 1975), p. 467:

   On 2 February 1966 Haarhoff reports another contact. Jack [W. F. Jackson Knight] was said to be expressing appreciation of the work being done about his writings. Then:
 
As a test I asked V. what the first word of the Aeneid was as written by him originally. The medium was unresponsive to any language not Eng. or German but when I suggested ‘arma’—there was a decided and emphatic No. Then she said it sounded like ill-ill ... which would be the first of the ‘rejected’ lines
                    ille ego qui quodam ...
The medium is utterly and completely ignorant of Latin.
 
These ‘rejected’ lines had been used by Jack in his translation: ‘I am that poet who in times past made the light melody of pastoral poetry...’ Perhaps earlier directions from Haarhoff’s contacts had advised their inclusion.

The ‘rejected’ opening lines of Vergil’s Aeneid are:

Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus auena
carmen et egressus siluis uicina coegi
ut quamuis auido parerent arua colono,
gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis
arma virumque cano...    
 
I am he who tuned a song on a slender reed,
Departed from the woods, and bade the fields concede          
To obey the tiller—ever keen for the farm’s
Pleasant labour. But now I sing the bristling arms
Of Mars and man...

My translation.

St Jerome on Translation

St Jerome, Prologus in Pentateucho:

Aliud est enim vatem, aliud esse interpretem: ibi spiritus ventura praedicit, hic eruditio et verborum copia ea quae intellegit transfert; nisi forte putandus est Tullius Oeconomicum Xenofontis et Platonis Protagoram et Demosthenis Pro Ctesifonte afflatus rethorico spiritu transtulisse, aut aliter de hisdem libris per Septuaginta interpretes, aliter per Apostolos Spiritus Sanctus testimonia texuit, ut quod illi tacuerunt, hii scriptum esse mentiti sint. Quid igitur? Damnamus veteres? Minime; sed post priorum studia in domo Domini quod possumus laboramus. Illi interpretati sunt ante adventum Christi et quod nesciebant dubiis protulere sententiis, nos post passionem et resurrectionem eius non tam prophetiam quam historiam scribimus; aliter enim audita, aliter visa narrantur: quod melius intellegimus, melius et proferimus. Audi igitur, aemule, obtrectator ausculta: non damno, non reprehendo Septuaginta, sed confidenter cunctis illis Apostolos praefero. Per istorum os mihi Christus sonat, quos ante prophetas inter spiritalia charismata positos lego, in quibus ultimum paene gradum interpretes tenent.
 
Indeed, it is one thing to be a prophet and another to be a translator: in the case of the first, the Spirit foretells things to come, in the case of the later, learning and power of expression translates what it understands. Unless perhaps Cicero ought to be understood to have translated the Oeconomicus of Xenophon, the Protagorus of Plato and the Oratio pro corona of Demosthenes under the inspiration of the rhetorical spirit, or that the Holy Spirit carefully build up evidence through the Seventy translators in one way, and through the Apostles in another way, so that the Seventy passed over in silence what the Apostles feign to have been written. What now then? Do we condemn the old? Not at all, but after we labour over the works of those who came before us, we do what we can in the house of the Lord. The Seventy translated before the coming of Christ and when faced with what they did not understand they rendered it into dubious translations. But after His Passion and Resurrection we write not so much prophecy as history; for what we have heard we tell one way and what he have seen we tell another way: what we understand better we translate better. Now listen, envious one. Hear me, critic. I do not blame the Seventy, but I dare to place the Apostles before them all. Christ speaks to me through the mouths of those whom I read [in 1 Cor. 12:28] are placed before the prophets on account of their spiritual gifts, in which the translators hold almost the highest place.

Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. by B Fischer, I. Gribomont, et al., 5th edn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006), pp. 3-4. My translation.

Word For Word

Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560), from the second preface to L’Olive (1550):

Et puis je me vante d’avoir inventé ce que j’ai mot à mot traduit les aultres.

I pride myself on having invented what I have translated word for word from others.

Joachim du Bellay, Œuvres poétiques, 8 vols, ed. by Henri Chamard & Geneviève Demerson (Paris: E. Cornély, 1908-1985), I (1908), p.19. My translation.