Talks on Writing English. First Series

by Arlo Bates

It follows that the best that a translator can hope to do is to give the nearest approximation to the original that the language into which he is changing it is capable of. The problem is not unlike that of the engraver who is endeavoring to reproduce a picture painted with the brush. At every point he is forced to decide what combination of lines and spaces will best represent the work before him. He knows that it is impossible by any arrangement of lines actually to reproduce the brush-work of the painter, and so he goes on considering what effect among those within his reach most nearly approaches this.

The methods of the translator of course vary with the nature of the original with which he has to deal. In rendering documents which have to do with practical affairs the chief consideration is strict exactness of idea. If one attempts to translate a scientific treatise, the most important point is absolute accuracy. It is in any case necessary to write correct and clear English, but Force and Elegance may for the moment be left practically out of consideration,—or, rather, are considered as in importance subordinate to Clearness. To say in our tongue as precisely as possible what the author has said in his is the translator’s first care, and to express, too, the material, literal, scientific meaning of this as it would appear to a reader of the original. Here there is no question of atmosphere, of suggestion, of connotation. The emotional element of literature may and indeed must be ignored here. The intellectual quality is the only thing to be regarded.

All this is comparatively easy. If one knows the languages from which and into which he is translating, he should have no especial difficulty in changing a scientific paper from one to another. His knowledge of the subject will of course affect the ease and accuracy of the result; and of course the comparative richness of the scientific vocabulary of the languages is to be taken into account. In general terms, however, this sort of translation calls for the exercise of the intellectual faculties only; and whatever depends upon the intellect may be acquired by any one who has an intellect, if he choose to take the trouble.

When it is a question of a version in another tongue of literature in its higher sense the matter at once becomes more complicated. Here there is not only the idea to be considered, but the suggestion, the flavor, the peculiar quality of style and individuality. There must be an attempt to give some impression of the effect produced in the original by euphony, by what we speak of as word-color, meaning thereby the melody and the peculiar quality which terms have from suggestions so subtle that it is all but impossible to analyze them. All these requirements thrust themselves upon the translator, and he must struggle to achieve the impossible in transferring these from one language to the other. The difficulties of the undertaking are well illustrated by George Henry Lewes, in the following passage:—

Words are not only symbols of objects, but centres of associations; and their suggestiveness depends partly upon their sound. Thus there is not the slightest difference in meaning expressed when I say, “The dews of night began to fall,” or, “The nightly dews commenced to fall.” Meaning and metre are the same; but one is poetry, the other prose. Wordsworth paints a landscape in this line:—

The river wanders at its own sweet will.

Let us translate it into other words: “The river runneth free from all restraint.” We preserve the meaning, but where is the landscape? Or we may turn it thus, “The river flows, now here, now there, at will,” which is a very close translation, much closer than any usually found in a foreign language, where, indeed, it would in all probability assume some such form as this, “The river, self-impelled, pursues its course.” In these examples we have what is seldom found in translations, accuracy of meaning expressed in similar metre; yet the music and the poetry are gone, because the music and the poetry are organically dependent upon certain peculiar arrangements of sound and suggestion.—Life of Goethe, 2d ed., p. 466. Quoted in Genung’s “Practical Rhetoric.”

It is in the rendering of works which belong to that department of literature to which is given the name belles-lettres that translation is most difficult and also most common. Poetry, fiction, essays, and kindred forms are most frequently the subject of the worker at this craft. Here the form is often of importance as great as that of the idea. To give merely a literal version of the exact ideas in the original would do no more toward reproducing it than a photograph does toward reproducing the Sistine Madonna or a plaster cast the Venus of Melos. Indeed, of the formally literal translation it is hardly too much to say that it really represents the original no more than a collection of paint-tubes containing all the colors in a painting would represent the picture. The value in the painting lies in the manner in which the tints have been arranged and varied, blended here and contrasted there. In literature, the value lies in the cunning blending and contrasting, the arrangement and variety with which ideas are presented. Shelley said of the chant of the archangels which opens the “Prologue in Heaven” of Goethe’s “Faust” that not only is it “impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification,” but that “even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation.” Every one who has attempted to translate a work of imaginative merit must appreciate this.

Of course, the first thing which a translator considers is the setting over of the ideas from one tongue to another, yet it seems to me a great mistake to make first a version which is simply literal, and then to try to mould it over into forms of literary grace. Of course, this is a matter which must to a certain extent depend upon individual temperament, but it is certainly true here as in other work that a phrase or a sentence can be more readily shaped and modified while it is fresh than when it has cooled and hardened. Translation is no mechanical operation, and no mechanical excellence will suffice. It is therefore well to aim at excellence of quality from the first, instead of attempting to add it as it were by an afterthought.

The first and essential requisite in making a translation is that it be English. By this is meant not only that it shall be made up of English words. It is not even sufficient that it be made up of English words so arranged that they may be understood. It is necessary that the English shall be sound and idiomatic. The ideal translation preserves nothing in its style to indicate that it was not originally written in the tongue in which it stands. It is the aim of the translator to approximate as closely to this standard of excellence as he is able. The sentence-structure of the German is more elaborate and more extended than our own. It is necessary that the translator of German works do not model his English version after this peculiarity of the original. The paragraph structure of the French is peculiarly broken and brief; yet the writer who sets work over from French into English is not permitted to let this fact determine the manner of his paragraphing in the latter language. Still more important is it that the idiom of the alien speech shall not leave its traces upon the style of the translation. This is the point in which all mechanical training fails. A friend gave me the other day a copy of the sign which was placed above the electric-light button in the chamber that he occupied in a hotel at Geneva: “One is begged on entering the room to press the button to let the light, and on parting again to extend it.” The man who wrote this rather remarkable direction knew his vocabulary tolerably well, but he had no idea of the English idiom. You have all of you seen innumerable examples of the same sort of blunder, and it is one which can be avoided only by an intimate acquaintance with the tongue into which one is translating.