THE ART OF TRANSLATING

THE

ART OF TRANSLATING

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO

CAUER'S DIE KUNST DES UEBERSETZENS

BY

HERBERT GUSHING TOLMAN, PH.D.

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

ov TroXX* dAAa TTO\V

BENJ. H. SANBORN & CO.

BOSTON, U. S. A.

1901

COPYRIGHT, 1900, BT

BENJ. H. SANBORN & CO.

TO

MY SISTER

ANNA TOLMAN

IN TOKEN OF HER MANY YEARS' WORK

IN THE

FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

PREFACE.

I have read no book during my eight years of teaching which

has been so suggestive as Cauer's "ZH'e Kunst des Uebersetzens."

That work has proved itself to me what the author

entitles it: "Ein Hilfbuch fur den lateinischen und griechischen

Unterricht." I have found the principles therein laid down not

only sound theoretically, but of practical benefit in the teaching

of the classics. These same principles we ought, I believe, to

extend and apply in the translation of any language, ancient

or modern.

Our teaching of a foreign tongue is apt to be too mechanical.

The student must be made to feel that the language he is studying

is not something strange and mysterious, but natural and

simple. This he cannot do until he changes his position and

looks at the unfolding of the thought from the standpoint of

the original. It is then, and not till then, that he really reaches

the heart of his Latin or Greek, his French or German. It is

then that he is prepared to enter upon what is as much an art

as that of the sculptor, of the painter, of the designer ; I mean

the art of reproducing into living English his appreciation of

all that the original has brought to him.

This little book is not based on that of Cauer in the sense

that it is a translation or an adaptation of his work. I alone am

responsible for many of the views herein expressed. Whatever

I have translated from the German is indicated by quotation

marks. Wherever an idea of Cauer's has been put in my own

VL PEEFACE.

language, his name follows within parentheses, or reference is

given in a footnote. Due recognition has been made of other

writings. Especially I would thank Professors W. G. Hale,

H. C. G. von Jagemann, G. H. McKnight, and E. H. Babhitt,

for their cordial permission to quote the passages given. In

regard to Professor Hale I feel that it is not out of place in

the preface of a book of this kind to state that to him more

than to any other American scholar we owe the practical

method of reading Latin now so generally adopted. The extracts

from Tyrrell, Lowell, and Bayard Taylor I have used by

special arrangement with and permission of Houghton, Mifflin

& Company, the authorized publishers of Tyrrell's

" Latin

Poetry," the writings of James Russell Lowell, and Bayard

Taylor's translation of "Faust." Several excellent translations

of the late Professor Lane have been cited with the sanction

of his son, Mr. G. M. Lane. I wish also to express my gratitude

to my dear friends Dr. C. E. Little and Mr. Edwin Wiley

for their careful criticism of my manuscript. My assistant,

Dr. Benjamin M. Drake, has given valuable help in the reading

of the proof.

The subject is such a broad one that I feel I have merely

touched upon it here and there, but my hope is that these

principles will be found at least suggestive in the reading and

teaching of foreign languages.

HEBBFBT GUSHING TOLMAN.

VANDEBBILT UNIVEBSITY,

November, 1900.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE

READING THE ORIGINAL

THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR ....

TRANSLATION NOT EXPLANATION 35

THE CHOICE OF WORDS

PRIMITIVE SIGNIFICATION 44

SYNONYMS 47

ETYMOLOGY 52

THE ORDER OF WORDS 55

FIGURES OF SPEECH '"

THE GREEK PARTICLES ?6

THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

READING THE ORIGINAL.

In reading a foreign tongue one must not tnink of

translation : reading a language is one thing, translating

it is another. At the very outset we must immerse

ourselves in the current of the native thought

and feeling. Vast the gulf between translation and

its original. "The stream that escapes from the

waste pipe of a fountain gives no notion of the rise

and fall and swirl and spray and rainbow glitter of

the volume of water that rejoices to return the

sportive touch of the sunlight."

l

To him alone who has entered the living heart of

the French come the pathos and the power of Victor

Hugo's famous lines ;

O ma pauvre opprimee !

Ma Blanche ! mon bonheur ! ma fille bien-aim6e !

Lorsqu'elle etait enfant, je la tenais ainsi.

Elle dormait sur moi, tout comme la voici ! .

Quand elle reveillait, si vous saviez quel ange !

Je ne lui semblais pas quelque chose d'etrange,

1 Gildersleeve, Introductory Essay to Pindar.

10 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

Elle me souriait avec ses yeux divins,

Et moi je lui baisais ses deux petites mains !

Pauvre agneau ! Morte! oh non! elle dort et repose.

Tout a 1'heure, messieurs, c'etait bien autre chose,

Elle s'est cependant reveillee. Oh ! j'attend.

Vous 1'allez voir rouvrir ses yeux dans un instant !

Vous voyez maintenant, messieurs, que je raisonne,

Je suis tranquille et doux, je n'offense personne ;

Puisque je ne fait rien de ce qu'on me defend,

On peut bien me laisser regarder rnon enfant.

J'ai deja rechauffe ses mains entre les miennes ;

Voyez, touchez les done un peu ! . . .

Le Hoi s'amuse, Act V, Scene 5.

As one whose eye is trained to receive a finer

vision of the landscape detects delicacies of shade

and outline on a great master's canvas, so the more

the reader feels the heart throb of the original, the

more he sees the skill of the poet translator who has

rendered

Mypoor down-trodden child!

My Blanche, my joy, my well-beloved one !

When she was but a child, I held her thus ;

She slept upon my breast, even as you see.

And when she woke oh, could you know the angel

That looking from her eyes, saw me nor strange

Nor terrible, but smiled with heavenlike eyes

The while I kissed those poor small childish hands !

Poor lamb ! Dead ? Nay, she sleeps and takes her rest.

You will see soon, gentles, it is naught, 't is naught :

BEADING THE ORIGINAL. 11

Even now she wakes to life oh ! I am watching

You will see her ope her eyes one moment yet !

She will ope her eyes you see my sense is clear

I brave no man I am calm, I pray you see !

And seeing I have no will but to obey you,

I pray you let me look upon my child.

No furrow on her brow, no out-worn grief :

Already I have warmed her hands in mine.

Come, feel them now !

It is because the spirit of Tennyson is native to us

that we appreciate how admirably Strodtmann has

reproduced the familiar stanza :

The splendor falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story;

The long light shakes across the lakes

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow ; set the wild echoes flying.

Blow, bugle ; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying.

Es fallt der Strahl auf Burg und Thai

Und schneeige Gipfel, reich an Sagen ;

Viel' Lichter wehn auf blauen Seen,

Bergab die Wasserstiirze jagen!

Bias, Hufthorn, bias, in Wiederhall erschallend

Bias, Horn Antwortet, Echos, hallend, hallend, hallend.

And so we see that we are compelled to grasp the

idea from the standpoint of the original, a standpoint

which may be, and often is, entirely different

from or directly opposed to that of the English. Let

12 THE AKT OF TRANSLATING.

us suppose the student is reading Greek and meets

the simple Greek idiom /caXw? e%iv. In nine cases

out of ten he is first taught the idiomatic English

translation and then endeavors to work backward

to the standpoint of the Greek. This is a sad case

of hysteron-proteron. He is looking at the construction

with English eyes, and it appears as foreign to

him as if he were in a strange country ; he does

not and cannot feel the spirit of the Greek, since

instinctively there steals into his mind the feeling

that Ka\a)<f ex^tv by some mysterious process becomes

the equivalent of *:a\o<? elvai. This is all

wrong. He should be led to appreciate fully the

Greek point of view before even attempting to render

the phrase into the idiom of his own language.

Again, one ought to associate the words of a foreign

language with the objects themselves, of which

words are but vocal pictures. Take German, for

instance : when the reader meets the word Baum

there should recur at once to his mind the object

itself, and not the English word tree ; I mean by this

that the mental process should be, not Baum, tree,

the object, but Baum, the object and then the English

tree. This last stage ought only to be reached when

the reader assumes the role of a translator. While

he is merely reading German, the English tree should

not intrude into the thought.

There is some truth in Dr. Jagemann's words :

" It is not necessary to translate Iphigenie into EngREADING

THE ORIGINAL. 13

lish in order to obtain the greatest possible amount

of mental discipline which Goethe's wonderful work

can yield. The mental process of translation consists

of two parts : first, we must grasp the thought

of the author ; second, we must express this thought

in the language into which we are translating. Now,

in making the translation from German into English,

only the first part of this mental process has any

effect upon the student's knowledge of German;

consequently, for the study of German we may be

content if the student grasps the author's ideas, and

this he can do without translating."

l

I am very sure, to generalize from my own experience,

that every American who has studied at the

German universities has tried at first to take in

English the notes of his professor, and desperately

failed. It is only when he forgets English and

grasps the idea in German itself that he can carry

away any satisfactory conception of what he has

heard. The reason of this is plain enough. It is

that the mind has not to go through any intervening

stage before gathering the idea from the spoken

language.

A student spends six years in the study of Latin,

let us say, and at the end of that time has to worm

his way painfully through a Latin sentence, often

with slavish dependence on a dictionary. Or he

1 Transactions of Modern Language Association, Vol. I, pp. 226,

226.

14 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

devotes five years to French and does not acquire

such freedom in the spoken language as a child gains

during a six months' stay in Paris in constant

association with French playmates. When this

state of things exists there must be something wrong

with our method of instruction. Where is the

fault? Undoubtedly, it lies in the fact that the

student is made to feel that the language he is studying

is foreign to his way of thinking. Something

comes between him and the text which he is reading.

If it be Latin, for example, he unfortunately

has the misconception that he must strain and twist

his English to fit the Latin form of expression.

There will never be a remedy for this until the pupil

is taught to think in Latin, until he is brought to

feel that the Latin sentence is natural, not mysterious.

It is the spirit of the original that he must

get this is the life of the sentence ; and until he

breathes this spirit, Latin or any other language will

be in too true a sense a dead language.

Professor Hale put it strongly and concisely when

he said : "

Reading the original is the one method that

should everywhere be rigorously used from the day

of the first lesson to the last piece of Latin that the

college graduate reads to solace his old age. Only,

the process which at first is at every point conscious

and slow, as it was not with the Romans, becomes in

Latin of ordinary difficulty a process wholly unconscious

and very rapid, precisely as it was with the Romans.

HEADING THE ORIGINAL. 15

. . . We must for some time think out, at every

point, as the sentence progresses (and that without

ever allowing ourselves to look ahead), all those conveyings

of meaning, be they choice of words, or choice

of order, or choice of case, or choice of mode, or

choice of tense, or whatever else which at that point

suffice for the Roman mind. And, when these indications

which after all are not so many in number

have come to be so familiar to us that most of

them are ready to flash before the mind without our

deliberately summoning them, we shall be very near

the point at which, in Latin graded to our growing

powers, we shall interpret indications unconsciously.

And the moment we do that we shall be reading

Latin by the Roman's own method." 1

Read the original, think in the original, that is

the whole story. The advice of a famous German

professor for the acquisition of a vocabulary applies

here equally well : "Lesen, viel lesen, seTir viel lesen,

sehr viel viel lesen."

It is only by reading the foreign tongue that we

really enter, as we must, its life and strength. How

widely different its spirit often is from that of our

own has been well observed in De Quincey's splendid

differentiation of Greek and English tragedy: "To

my own feeling the different principle of passion

which governs the Grecian conception of tragedy as

compared with the English, is best conveyed by say-

!The Art of Beading Latin, pp. 15-17.

16 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

ing that the Grecian is a breathing from the world of

sculpture, the English a breathing from the world of

painting. What we read in sculpture is not absolutely

death, but still less is it the fullness of life. . . .

It affects us profoundly, but not by agitation. Now,

on the other hand, the breathing life life kindling,

trembling, palpitating that life which speaks to us

in painting, this is also the life that speaks to us in

English tragedy. Into an English tragedy even festivals

of joy may enter ; marriages and baptisms, or

commemorations of national trophies; which, or

anything like which, is incompatible with the very

being of the Greek. In that tragedy what uniformity

of gloom; in the English what light alternating

with the depths of darkness! The Greek,

how mournful ; the English, how tumultuous ! Even

the catastrophes how different! In the Greek we

feel a breathless waiting for a doom that cannot be

evaded ; a waiting, as it were, for the last shock of

an earthquake, or the inexorable rising of a deluge ;

in the English it is like a midnight of shipwreck,

from which up to the last and till the final ruin

comes, there still survives a sort of hope that clings

to human energies."

But De Quincey's words give us only one point of

view. While it is true that we have to transport our

sentiments and feelings to what is distinctly foreign,

and to immerse ourselves, as I have said, in the life

and thoughts of other lands and peoples in order to

HEADING THE ORIGINAL. 17

imbibe their spirit, yet the great lessons of mankind

are the same for all ages, because the human heart

and human life must always wrestle with the problems

of duty and trial. How admirably is this

brought out by Symonds in his feeling comments on

the matchless choric odes of ^Eschylus' "Agamemnon

"

: " To read the Greek aright in this wonderful

lyric, so concentrated in its imagery, and so direct in

its conveyance of the very soul of passion, is no

light task ; but far more difficult it is to render it

into another language. Yet, even thus, we feel that

this poem of defrauded desire and everlasting farewell,

of vain outgoings of the spirit after vanished

joy, is written not merely for Menelaus and the

Greeks, but for all who stretch forth empty hands to

clasp the dreams of dear ones, and then turn away,

face-downward on the pillow, from the dawn, to

weep or strain hot eyes that shed no tears. Touched

by the same truth of feeling, which includes all

human nature in its sympathy, is the lament, shortly

after uttered by the Chorus, for the numberless fair

men who died before Troy town. Ares, the grim

gold-exchanger, who barters the bodies of men, sends

home a little dust shut up within a narrow urn, and

wife and father water this with tears, and cry,

Behold, he perished nobly in a far land, fighting for

a woman, another's wife. And others there are who

come not even thus again to their old home ; but

barrows on Troy plain enclose their young flesh, and

18 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

an alien soil is their sepuicher. This picture of

beautiful dead men, warriors and horsemen, in the

prime of manhood, lying stark and cold, with the

dishonor of the grave upon their comely hair, and

with the bruises of the battle on limbs made for

love, is not meant merely for Achaians, but for all

for us, perchance, whose dearest moulder on Crimean

shores or Indian plains, for whom the glorious faces

shine no more ; but at best some tokens, locks of

hair, or books, or letters, come to stay our hunger

unassuaged. How truly and how faithfully the

Greek poet sang for all ages, and for all manner of

men, may be seen by comparing the strophes of this

Chorus with the last rhapsody but one of the chants

outpoured in America by Walt Whitman, to commemorate

the events of the great war. The pathos

which unites these poets, otherwise so different in

aim and sentiment, is deep as nature, real as life ;

but from this common root of feeling springs in the

one verse a spotless lily of pure Hellenic form, in

the other a mystical thick growth of fancy, where

thoughts brood and nestle amid tufted branches ; for

the powers of classic and of modern singers upon

the same substance of humanity are diverse." l

Translation is like the art of painting. No artist

feels ready to paint until he knows what he is going

to paint. He does not paint a bush and then a tree

and then a stone as they come along, but first of all

i The Greek Poets, Vol. I, pp. 425, 426.

HEADING THE OEIGINAL. 19

he gets a grand vision of the landscape, he lets it

sink into his soul, and then he is ready to begin his

painting. Precisely so with the art of the translator.

He should never attempt to translate until the

idea of the original is clearly before his mind. How

many jump at a Greek sentence in the following

way : "

Tijv8\ this one ; 'opa?, you see ; Sa/iapra, wife;

a-r)v, thy." To use our figure again, this method of

translating is like painting bit by bit, without the

extended vision. Get first the Greek idea, regardless

of corresponding English words; then when called

upon to translate, reproduce the Greek thought in an

English sentence which will conserve the emphasis ;

for example,

" In her you behold your wife." Morris

may render the words of "Ast ego quae divum incedo

regina

"

(Vergil, ^En. i, 46),

" I who go for the queen

of the gods," but Thornhill gives us the spirit in " I

who queen it through these courts of heaven."

As E. H. Babbitt remarks in his article on " Mental

Discipline of Modern Languages

"

: "

Suppose that

the pupil has a clear understanding of a French sentence

: his work is only half done ; he has then to

make English of it. Here the difficulty is that the

pupil will render words without much regard to

their sense when taken in connection with the whole.

. . . The aim should be to get a clear conception of

what the author means, and then bearing in mind

that nothing has often been said in French or German

which cannot be said equally well in English,

20 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

insist on having an English rendering which expresses

the idea correctly, and does no violence to

the English idiom."

The more one enters into the spirit of the language

he is reading, the more he appreciates the responsibility

of the translator, and realizes that many times

it is impossible to bring over into English the heart

of the original construction. Just as the eye of the

artist, which by training enters more deeply into the

soul of nature, realizes more than the inexperienced

eye the difficulty of the task, and is more keenly

aware of the powerlessness of the brush to portray

all that is in the landscape, so the trained translator

appreciates how exacting is his art. Take Cicero's

fine translation from the "

Cresphontes

"

of Euripides

and note how Tyrrell has delicately reproduced the

same :

Nam nos decebat coetu celebrantes domum

Lugere ubi esset aliquis in lucem editus,

Humanae vitae varia reputantes mala ;

At qui labores morte finisset graves

Hunc omni amicos laude et laetitia exsequi.

Tusc. Disp., i, 115.

When a child 's born, our friends should throng our halls

And wail for all the ills that flesh is heir to ;

But when a man has done his long day's work

And goes to his long home to take his rest,

We all with joy and gladness should escort him. 1

i Tyrrell, Latin Poetry, p. 19.

BEADING THE ORIGINAL. 21

" The task of the translator," says Bayard Taylor,

"is not simply mechanical; he must feel, and be

guided by, a secondary inspiration. Surrendering

himself to the full possession of the spirit which

shall speak through him, he receives, also, a portion

of the same creative spirit."

1

Here are four simple rules which, if observed, will

lead, I believe, to a deeper appreciation of a foreign

tongue: (1) Read, READ, READ the original without

endeavoring to translate. (2) Cultivate independence

of the lexicon. (3) Acquire vocabulary.

(4) Cease to fear the foreign sentence as something

strange or uncanny. The test is not what

one has read, but the ability he has acquired from

reading what he has, to read more just like it with

greater ease.

In one word, we must think in the original. That

is no impossible ideal ; it is the only true goal of

language study. When this is acquired, Latin and

Greek, French and German, will not be laid aside on

leaving the college walls, for it is true that what is

once learned can never be unlearned, what is once

gotten can never be forgotten. Then the wish of

Goethe respecting the classics will be fulfilled : " Moge

das Studium der griechischen und romischen Literatur

immerfort die Basis der hoheren Bildung bleiben."*

1 Translation of Faust, Preface, p. vlil.

2 Sprtiche in Prosa.

22 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR.

Before the translator begins his task he must nave

read thoroughly the sentence in the original and

grasped its meaning. Should he attempt translation

before this, he is like the builder who essays to build

a house before knowing its plan. No architect allows

a single block of stone to be put in place without

having before him the design of the completed structure.

So if one plunges immediately into translating

the words in the order in which they come without

knowing the idea of the finished sentence, he is like

one who is simply building blocks, but not erecting

an edifice after some great pattern.

Remember that translation is not rendering the

words of a foreign language into English, but it is

the metamorphosis of the feeling, the life, the power,

the spirit of the original. In other words, and I

put them in italics for their emphasis, translation is

arousing in the English reader or hearer the identical

emotions and sentiments that were aroused in him who

read or heard the sentence as his native tongue. Translation

is nothing more than this, and it certainly is

nothing less. As Wilamowitz puts it : " The translator's

object must be to construct a sentence which will

make upon readers of to-day exactly the same imTHE

WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 23

pression that was made by the original upon people

who were contemporaries of the author, awakening

as nearly as possible the same thoughts and sentiments."

l

Let us illustrate again by the art most nearly like

the art of translating, that is, painting. The subject

of the painting may be the war-steed. The trained

hand portrays him with flashing eye, arched neck,

expanded nostrils ; the artist feels the martial spirit

and reproduces it in his work. The unskilful hand

and the untrained eye give us only legs and head and

body. Perhaps we cannot deny that the object is a

horse, but one thing surely is not there, that is, the

spirit of the original. In the same way one translator

reproduces the idea of a sentence with all the

feeling, grandeur, beauty, and delicacy that it contains

; the other gives us in shabby garments the idea

which had been clothed by the writer in majestic

robes. The strong line of Ennius, which, as Tyrrell

says, has been compared to the voice of an oracle,

Moribus antiquis stat Res Romana virisque,

one may render,

" The Roman State stands on its

ancient customs and men "

; another,

Broad-based upon her men and principles

Standeth the state of Rome. ( Tyrrell.)]

Perhaps we can't deny that both translations contain

the same idea ; but where the spirit in the former ?

< Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 5.

24 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

It is just as much the duty of the translator to transfuse

the force of the original into his translation as

it is the duty of the artist to reproduce the grandeur

of nature in his picture. Anything short of this is

failure. Anything short of this does not constitute

translation. But how difficult the task ! Note the

confessions of some of the greatest translators.

"All translation," writes Wilhelm von Humboldt to

Wilhelm von Schlegel, the German translator of

Shakespeare,

" seems to me but an attempt to accomplish

what is impossible. Every translator must run

shipwreck on one of two rocks : either at the cost of

the style and idiom of his own nation, he will hold

too closely to the original, or at the cost of the

original, he will hold too closely to the peculiarity of

his nation. The middle ground between these is not

only hard, but absolutely impossible."

1

It was Haupt who said of translation that it was

death to understanding. Julius Keller, in his "Die

Grenzen der Uebersetzungskunst" remarks that language

is not a garment which can be replaced by

another,

2 but it grows inseparably with the thought,

at once both form and parcel of its content.3 The

1 Cf. Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 4.

2 "<Artthou that Virgil?' the question of Dante must be put

to every adventurous spirit who attempts to clothe Virgil in the garb

of a new tongue." Tyrrell.

8 Most aptly does Keller remark: "Das wirklich Uebersetzbare an

der Dialektdichtung, d. h. der begriffliche Kern, 1st nichts welter als

der gerupfte Vogel."

THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 25

translator must seek out those elements in the grammatical

and logical framework of speech which with

some surety may be taken as similar, and which may

serve as a scaffolding for translation. In spite of the

limitations of translation, he should adyance towards

an intelligent and expressive use of this art. 1

Significant are the following words of Cauer : " A

double task confronts the translator; first, the language

into which he translates must be genuine living

(English), not an artificial, Grecized or Latinized

(English); else how can it come near to our feelings

? In the second place, the peculiar style of the

old poet or author must be preserved. Homer

must be translated into different (English) from

Vergil, Tacitus from Cicero. For the first task the

translator must have mastery over his own language.

For the second, the translator must breathe the spirit

of his author and from that standpoint build his

(English) sentence. From this it is obvious that

there must be a distinct art of translating for each

separate author. One must constantly be on guard

against too great literalness. The translation which

follows the original, word by word, and sentence by

sentence, may give us an idea of the author's peculiarities

of form, but in ugly diagram. So Don

Quixote (x, 10) compares translation to the wrong

side of a Dutch tapestry, where the figures appear, it

is true, but are obscured by the crossing of diagonal

1 Cf. Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 5.

26 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

threads.1 On the other hand, if one strives to do

away with great and small blemishes, there is danger

that while the picture may be made more regular, it

will lose the characteristics of the original. While

the translator cannot reach an absolute settlement

between these conflicting demands upon his art, yet

should he abandon his effort he becomes like the

painter who refuses to paint the landscape or human

face because he cannot reproduce each individual

part, twigs, leaves, wrinkles, hair. It is his art that

can bring out the living delineations which photography

by pedantic faithfulness annihilates." 2

Our translation must be genuine English. Wilhelm

Munch, in his "Kumt des Uebersetzens aus dem

Franzosischen" says : " There has arisen in translation

a jargon which advances in an inflexible armor that

is peculiarly foreign." It behooves every teacher of

the classics to banish this " school jargon."

3

Certainly

no author more than Homer abounds in opportunities

to bring a translator down from a stilted style. In

1 " Alwaies conceiving how pedanticall and absurd an affectation it

is, in the interpretation of any Author, to turn him word for word ;

when, according to Horace and other best lawgivers to translators, it

is the part of every knowing and judicial! interpreter, not to follow the

number and order of the words, but the material things themselves,

and sentences to weigh diligently ; and to clothe and adorn them with

words, and such a stile and form of oration as are most apt for the

language into which they are converted." Chapman's Translation

of Homer, 1598.

2 Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 7.

8

Cf. Lattmann, Der Schul-Jargon des latein. Unterrichts.

THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 27

the majority of cases the beginner will translate, "In

very truth you are a base man," whereas he ought to

say, if faithful to his English idiom,

" You are a villain,

no doubt about it" (</. Cauer).1 How many

students render, Is M. Messala et M. Pisone consulibus,

" He, in the consulship of Messala and Piso." They

forget that the natural English order is,

" In the consulship

of Messala and Piso he made a conspiracy."

Often the cumbersome and prosaic

" that one "

grates

upon the ear and mars what might otherwise be a

good translation. Render multum ille et terris iactatus

et alto,

" much tossed that man by land and sea

"

(Lane). Our English abstract idiom requires that

we translate, Quid hostis virtute posset et quid nostri

auderent periclitabatur,

" He was testing the valor of

the enemy and the courage of our men." 2

The Greek a /3ou\o/z<u is " my wishes," not " those

things which I wish." Don't translate "Alcestis,"

1036, X/3oV&> 8e /cat a~v p atVetret? i<rft)?,

" In time you

will approve me perhaps," but "

Perhaps the time will

come when you will thank me." Avoid rendering

ov a ari&v " not dishonoring you," but say

" with

no disrespect to you." In "

Alcestis," 1095, eV^i/eo-'

a\d%(p TTio-ro? OVVCK el <f>i A.09, Heracles would hardly

have said,

" I praise you because you are a faithful

1 Excellent examples are cited by G. Lejeune-Dirlchlet, Die Kunst

des Uebersetzens in die Muttersprache. Jabrb. Philol. Padag. 150

(1894), p. 514 fg.

2 Hints for Translating, Harper and Tol man's Caesar, p. 326.

28 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

friend to your wife," but rather,

" I commend you for

being so loyal to your wife." In Plato's "

Republic

"

the natural English equivalent for wcnrep avrbs wv 6

X/3wr?79 is not the literal translation of the words, but

" he takes the person of Chryses

"

(Jowett).

It demands some patience on the part of the

teacher to secure a natural and free rendering of

such French expressions as : Je sais qu'on vous a

rendu justice, "I see that you have met your deserts."

Si vous ecrivez a Jean dites-lui bien des choses de

ma part,

" If you write to John remember me to

him." II pleut dejd moins fort, "It does n't rain so

much as it did." Nous avons arrete ensemble que

vous deviez en agir ainsi (Merimee's

" Colomba,"

xiv), "We have decided to do so." De quel cote

allait-il? (Merimee's "Colomba," xv), "What way

did he take?"

The English translator of the satirists has a language

at his command peculiarly fitted (especially in

its Saxon element) to lash, gall, and sting with a

vehemency unsurpassed and well-nigh unrivaled.

He should bring out the sharp edge of satire with

such effect that every word of his vocabulary should

cut as keenly and pierce as deep as the original;

for example :

Cum iam semianimum laceraret Flavins orbem

Ultimus, et calvo serviret Roma Neroni.

Juvenal, iv, 37.

THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR, 29

When Flavius, drunk with fury, tore

The prostrate world which bled at every pore,

And Rome beheld in body as in mind

A bald-pate Nero rise again to curse mankind.

Tyrrell.

"Translation," says James Russell Lowell, "compels

us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice

a discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and

shade of meaning, that we now first learn the secret

of the words we have been using or misusing all our

lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth

even the plainest matter as it should be set forth is

not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought

and practice, but an affair of conscience as well.

Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only

that there is a best way, but that it is the only way.

Those who have tried it know too well how easy it

is to grasp the verbal meaning of a sentence or of a

word. That is the bird in the hand. The real

meaning, the soul of it, that which makes it literature

and not jargon, that is the bird in the bush which

tantalizes and stimulates with the vanishing glimpses

we catch of it as it flits from one to another lurking

place.

" Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.

" It was these shy allurements and provocations of

Omar Khayyam's Persian which led Fitzgerald to

80 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

many a peerless phrase and made an original poet of

him in the very act of translating."

Since translation is the reproduction of the spirit

of the original, we ought to be faithful to the imperfections

as well as to the beauties of the author we

are translating. Rothfuchs lays down the rule that the

translator should not weed out the weaknesses of a

writer, for by doing this he destroys his peculiarities

of style. The omission of videor or mihi videtur in

Cicero annihilates a marked flavor of his diction.

We must leave him the satisfaction he felt in tossing

about upon the waves of empty words.1

Cauer suggests that the translator should always

observe any broken syntax or obscurity there may be

in the original. In Vergil's ^Eneid, iv, 625, Exoriare

aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor, how vivid the transfer

from the second to third person, "Arise, some

avenger from our bones."

Don't make the translation more elegant than the

original, for if the original creeps, the translation

should not soar. That is Frazer's mistake, if you

can call it such, in his monumental work on Pausanias.

The style of Pausanias is broken and

slovenly, but Frazer has rendered the Greek in a

stately English. This is like an artist giving to a

picture a higher coloring than that of the scene before

him, or converting into a grand edifice on his

copy what is but a rude building in the landscape.

1 Cf. Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 78.

THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 31

How effective is the plain, almost homely form of

expression, La verdad adelgaza, y no quiebra, y

siempre anda sobre la mentira, como el azeyte sobre el

aqua (Don Quixote, v, 10), "Truth may be thin,

but has no rent, and always mounts above the lie

as oil above the water." We can compare Jonson's

blunt diction :

Get money ; still get money, boy ;

No matter by what means ;

or Cowper's familiar style :

The man that hails you Tom or Jack,

And proves by thumps upon your back

How he esteems your merit,

Is such a friend that one had need

Be very much a friend indeed

To pardon or to bear it.

Very cleverly has Rabutin translated Martial's epigram

:

amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare ;

Hoc tantum possum dicere ; non amo te.

Je ne vous aime pas, Hylas ;

Je n'en saurais dire la cause ;

Je sais seulement une chose,

C'est que je ne vous aime pas.

Every school boy is familiar with Tom Brown's

happy rendering of the same, a rendering which, we

32 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

may say, has immortalized Dr. Fell, then dean of

Christ Church, Oxford :

I do not love thee, Doctor Fell,

The reason why I cannot tell ;

But this I 'm sure I know full well,

I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.

The doggerel appended to five of Euripides'dramas

r&v 8aifj.ovt(av,

xa} TO. duxtjOivr oux

T&V #' adoxijruiv iropov ijupe

roiovS" dnlr rods

hardly warrants a more dignified translation than

the jesting one which Gildersleeve gives it :

How many the shapes of these devilish japes !

And much that is odd 's fulfilled by the gods ;

That comes not about for which you look out;

What you don't expect that God does effect,

And such was the course of this story.

Essays and Studies, p. 194-

When Sallust, Livy, or Tacitus, under influence of

vivid description, ignores tense and person, and uses

the so-called historical infinitive, the translator should

endeavor to convey into English the excitement and

confusion of the original ; for example, Interea Catilina

in prima acie versari, laborantibus succurrere,

THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 33

(Sallust, Catiline, 60, 4),

" Catiline meantime bustling

round in the forefront of battle, helping them that

were sore bestead

"

(Lane).

A word of caution is needed in reproducing such

a simple style as that of Homer. We must not fail

to remember that the Homeric narrative was accentuated

by voice and gesture. The spirit of the original

can only be preserved by an endeavor to convert

these into language. Cauer gives a good illustration

of this in his remarks on the Homeric tenses : " In

relating past events Homer always uses the same

tense, without considering in what relation the individual

events stand to one another. He only

shows their remoteness from the standpoint of the

relater. Odysseus says to Nausicaa, 'I marvel at

the palm tree, for no such stalk had ever sprung

from earth,' eTrel OVTTCO rolov avfavdev etc Sdpv 701779

( 167). If in such cases we should use simply

the (English) preterite in place of our natural

pluperfect, we should be like a painter who intentionally

ignores the art of perspective and represents

a landscape in the childishly helpless manner of

earlier times, a manner which pictures trees, houses,

and men all of equal size and of equal distinctness,

as if all were at an equal distance from the beholder.

This treatment is so foreign to us that it interferes

with our understanding and enjoyment. We are

consequently so much the more justified in altering

such treatment in translating, since by so doing we

34 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

are only replacing a part of the help which was furnished

to the hearer by accentuation and gesture.

In later Greek also it is often the case that an aorist

or an imperfect in a subordinate clause must be

replaced by the (English) pluperfect; for example,

01 Kepicvpaioi }^.v\\ijvijv ro 'HXeiW 'eirtveiov everrpv)-

trav, OTI vavs icai ^prjfiara Trapea^ov "KopivBiois

(Thucydides, i, 30),

' the Corcyreans burned Cyllene,

the arsenal of the Eleans, because they had furnished

the Corinthians with ships and money.' The whole

system of the Greek tenses rests on a manner of

thought essentially different from that of (English)

German or Latin. To the Greek the most important

thing in what he was narrating was the manner of

the action. The different stages of the past did not

come into the expression. The temporal relation

between numerous past actions was unspecified, so

that the reader or hearer had to conclude from the

context the order of events." 1

1 Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 81.

TRANSLATION NOT EXPLANATION. 35

TRANSLATION NOT EXPLANATION.

One thing I wish to emphasize strongly, translation

is not interpretation. The work of the translator

is one, the work of the exegete is another. Very true

are the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt: "Eine

Uebersetzung kann und soil kein Kommentar sein" If

the original be ambiguous, a faithful translation should

be just as ambiguous as the original.

" Here are tears

for sorrows and hearts grieve for mortal lot

"

is certainly

a translation, however far short of the meaning

of the original it may come, of Vergil's exquisitely

touching line

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt ;

but Tyrrell's

" E'en things inanimate [res, the material

picture] can weep for us, and the works of man's

hands [mortalia] have their own pathetic power" is

a crowding it full of ingenious interpretations and laborious

speculations.

Indefiniteness, often intentional on the part of a

writer, as well as the suspense which the developed

inflectional system of Latin and Greek readily introduces

into a sentence, must be imitated as far as our

idiom will allow. In the "Agamemnon

"

of ^Eschylus,

36 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

ovro} 8'

'Ar/je'ct)? TratSa? 6 fcpeicrcrcov |

eir

'

A\e!;dv&pa> 7re/i-

?ret feVto? | Zev?, 7ro\vdvopo<t apfyl yvvaiicos, note how

indefinite the poet has made the lines. When the

Greek met the emphatic tcpeiao-wv, he did not yet know

to whom it referred ; he mounts a ladder of which

eVto? is the next step and reaches the summit Zew.

The order of thought is : " And so a greater power

sends against Alexandros the sons of Atreus, a power

that guards hospitality, a power which is no other

than Zeus himself." Vergil's picture of Helen

crouching by the altar grows darker with each succeeding

word :

Ilia sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama Teucros,

Et poenas Danatim et deserti coniugis iras

Permetuens, Troiae et patriae communis Erinnys,

Abdiderat sese atque aris invisa sedebat.

She, shrinking from the Trojans' hate,

Made frantic by their city's fate,

Nor dreading less the Danaan sword,

The vengeance of her injured lord :

She, Troy's and Argos' common fiend,

Sat cowering, by the altar screened.

Conington.

Goethe, in imitation of the Homeric style, writes :

So sprach, unter dem Thore des Hauses sitzend am

Markte,

Wohlbehaglich zur Frau der Wirth z\im goldenen

Lowen.

Hermann und Dorothea, i, 20.

TRANSLATION NOT EXPLANATION. 37

We are at liberty to supply ellipses only when the

sense of the English sentence would be absolutely

defective without doing so. A free supplying of

words or phrases, to use a figure of Cauer, can

"

easily play a role similar to that which the subsidiary

line often plays in the construction of a planimetric

problem. It ought never to enter simply as

a deus ex machina." 1

1 Cauer, Die Kunst ties Uebersetzens, p. 69.

NOTE. As a good illustration of what a translation ought not to be

I might cite such a rendering as that given by Professor Max Mtiller

to Chandogya Upanishad, i, 1, 7. An exact translation of the original

Sanskrit would run :

" By that [syllable] the threefold knowledge advances;

OM he utters, OM he chants, OM he sings, for the glor7 of that

syllable because of its power and essence." Max Miiller translates:

' By that syllable does the threefold knowledge (the sacrifice, more

particularly the Soma-sacrifice, as founded on the three Vedas) proceed.

When the Adhvaryu priest gives an order, he says Om. When the

Hotri priest recites, he says Om. When the Udgatri priest sings,, he

says Om, all for the glory of that syllable. The threefold knowledge

(the sacrifice) proceeds by the greatness of that syllable (the vital

breaths), and by its essence (the oblations)."

Such a " translation " is not a translation ; it is an interpretation so

stuffed with padding as even to obscure the sense of the passage.

38 THE ART OP TRANSLATING.

THE CHOICE OF WORDS.

The choice of words in translation is what the

selection of color is in painting. It often happens

that no English word exists that contains all the fullness

of meaning of the foreign word ; while on the

other hand, it is often the case that we can find no

English word but what is stronger than the idea contained

in the original. Let us illustrate by Greek

and English. The figure that Cauer has borrowed

from Schopenhauer is admirably adapted to illustrate

the frequent overlapping of ideas. Let us draw two

intersecting circles. If we take the idea in the English

horse and that in the Greek tWo?, the circumferences

of the two circles must nearly coincide. But

if we put, for example, the idea in (r<a(f>pcov into one

circle and the idea in our English discreet into another,

it will follow that a part of the idea in the

circle discreet comes witliin the Greek circle o-<a<f>pa)v,

but a part of the circle crwfypwv lies outside of the

circle discreet, as also a part of the circle discreet lies

outside of the circle o-axfrpcov. The task of the translator

is to get an English word whose circle will be

as nearly coincident with that of the Greek word as

possible. Accordingly he should not hesitate to use a

different English word for a-afypwv in a different appliTHE

CHOICE OF WORDS. 39

cation, since if he always renders a-oKfrpcov by the same

English word, he may introduce a quality not in the

Greek at all. To make this clear we will use a diagram.

Let a quality x of the Greek "circle a-wcppav be characteristic

of an object z, then the English discreet can

also apply to z, since x represents what crco^pwv and

discreet have in common. On the other hand, let a

quality y of crtu^pcoi/ be characteristic of an object w,

then we see that the English word discreet would be

inapplicable to w, since the quality of <To><j>pa>v represented

by y lies outside the circle discreet.

Right here, let us note, is where the classical student

gets the fullest disciplinary value in his study

of Latin and Greek. The struggle in the discrimination

of words which he encounters in the selection

of the most appropriate English term for <r<o<j>p(0v in

different applications is the same that increases his

power to choose the exact English word for his ideas.

All this is correspondingly true of modern languages,

40 THE ART OF TRANSLATING.

especially in the case of poetry.

" In German," says

Bayard Taylor,

" a word which in ordinary use has

a bare, prosaic character, may receive a fairer and

finer quality from its place in verse. The prose

translator should certainly be able to feel the manifestation

of this law in both languages, and should so

choose his words as to meet their reciprocal requirements.

A man, however, who is not keenly sensible

to the power and beauty and value of rhythm is likely

to overlook these delicate yet more necessary distinctions.

The author's thought is stripped of a last

grace in passing through his mind, and frequently

presents very much the same resemblance to the original

as an unhewn shaft to the fluted column." l

The English, above all languages abounds in niceties

of expression, a neglect of which is stultifying.

When we strain the unfortunately elastic power of