Great translators are rarer than great creative authors. In order to achieve the best possible translation, one must in the first place have an absolute command of two languages, an accomplishment that is not nearly so common as is often supposed. Indeed, this is too often supposed erroneously by the translator himself.
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In the history of the literature of the world, there are four supremely great poets; no one can name a fifth who is in their class. Those four, in chronological order, are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. Every reader, every lover of good books, should know something of the work of these four mighty ones, for there is a perceptible difference between the best and the second best. Goethe’s masterpiece is Faust, and it so happens that we have an English translation of Faust that is so much better than all other English translations that no comparison is possible. This is by the American, Bayard Taylor.
It was the major work of his life; he spent many years of sedulous, conscientious toil perfecting it. It has three admirable features—the English style is beautiful; it is as literal as is consistent with elegance, in this work amazingly literal; it preserves in every instance the original metres which change so often in the German. If you wish to know how superior Taylor is to all other translators of Faust, just read aloud the four stanzas of the Dedication in any other English version and then try the same experiment with Taylor’s. Those who cannot read German and yet wish to come in contact with “the most spacious mind since Aristotle” have the satisfaction of knowing they are very close to the original—both in thought and in expression—in reading Taylor.
Goethe is not only one of the supreme poets of the world; he has the distinction of being the author of the best German novel, Wilhelm Meister. The best translation of this was written and published by Thomas Carlyle more than one hundred years ago. In reading this translation, therefore, one is reading in the same book the works of two men of genius. Carlyle had had almost no opportunity to hear spoken German; he was largely self-taught. But it was characteristic of his honesty, industry, conscience, as well as of his literary gifts, that he should have done his difficult work so well that no one has been able to equal it.
In the course of the novel occurs the exquisite lyric Know’st thou the land? The best English translation of this song was made about fifteen years ago by the late James Elroy Flecker.
No absolutely first-rate translation of Dante into English exists. The best plan is probably to read one in prose and one in verse; the prose by Charles Eliot Norton, the verse by Cary.
A large number of English writers have had a try at Homer. George Chapman, whose version inspired Keats, made a thundering Elizabethan poem. Pope, according to his contemporary, Young, put Achilles into petticoats, but Pope’s translation has anyhow the merit of being steadily interesting. Butcher and Lang wrought together an excellent prose version of the Iliad and Odyssey, while the latter poem was artistically translated into rhythmic prose by George Herbert Palmer.
There is an English translation of another work that stands with Taylor’s Faust as being all but impeccable. This is Edward FitzGerald’s version of the stanzas of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald really wrote a great English poem; it is only necessary to compare his version with a literal prose translation, in Nathan Haskell Dole’s admirable Variorum edition, to see how big is the debt we owe FitzGerald. If Omar and Edward have met in the other world, I am sure Old Fitz has received due acknowledgment.
The great Russian novelists, Turgeney, Dostoevski and Chekhov, have been magnificently translated by Constance Garnett. She has also Englished some of the novels of Tolstoi and Gogol. She has a positive genius for translation. In the centenary year—1928—began an entirely new version of the complete works of Tolstoi, by Aylmer Maude. Mr. Maude knew Tolstoi intimately and is himself an admirable writer.