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
such terms as good or thing, instead of using words
which might accurately express our ideas even to
the subtlest "shade of meaning, we sin against ourselves
as well as against our language. We shut
ourselves into a little circle and miss the vast outside.
We do not draw on our treasure house. It is
well to remember the words of Jacob Grimm, which,
coming as they do from a foreigner, carry with them
greater force. "In copiousness," he says, "in close
arrangement of parts, in keen understanding, not
one of the living languages can be matched with
i Translation of Faust.