Translations from Verse into Prose
Whenever this is attempted, great licence must be allowed to the translator in getting rid of all those poetical common forms which are foreign to the genius of prose. If the work is to be translated into prose, let it be into such prose as we write and speak among ourselves. A volume of poetical prose, i.e. affected prose, had better be in verse outright at once. Poetical prose is never tolerable for more than a very short bit at a time. And it may be questioned whether poetry itself is not better kept short in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.
Translating the Odyssey
If you wish to preserve the spirit of a dead author, you must not skin him, stuff him, and set him up in a case. You must eat him, digest him and let him live in you, with such life as you have, for better or worse. The difference between the Andrew Lang manner of translating the Odyssey and mine is that between making a mummy and a baby. He tries to preserve a corpse (for the Odyssey is a corpse to all who need Lang’s translation), whereas I try to originate a new life and one that is instinct (as far as I can effect this) with the spirit though not the form of the original.
They say no woman could possibly have written the Odyssey. To me, on the other hand, it seems even less possible that a man could have done so. As for its being by a practised and elderly writer, nothing but youth and inexperience could produce anything so naïve and so lovely. That is where the work will suffer by my translation. I am male, practised and elderly, and the trail of sex, age and experience is certain to be over my translation. If the poem is ever to be well translated, it must be by some high-spirited English girl who has been brought up at Athens and who, therefore, has not been jaded by academic study of the language.
A translation is at best a dislocation, a translation from verse to prose is a double dislocation and corresponding further dislocations are necessary if an effect of deformity is to be avoided.
The people who, when they read “Athene” translated by “Minerva,” cannot bear in mind that every Athene varies more or less with, and takes colour from, the country and temperament of the writer who is being translated, will not be greatly helped by translating “Athene” and not “Minerva.” Besides many readers would pronounce the word as a dissyllable or an anapæst.
The Odyssey and a Tomb at Carcassonne
There is a tomb at some place in France, I think at Carcassonne, on which there is some sculpture representing the friends and relations of the deceased in paroxysms of grief with their cheeks all cracked, and crying like Gaudenzio’s angels on the Sacro Monte at Varallo-Sesia. Round the corner, however, just out of sight till one searches, there is a man holding both his sides and splitting with laughter. In some parts of the Odyssey, especially about Ulysses and Penelope, I fancy that laughing man as being round the corner. [Oct. 1891.]