Chapter 1

The role of ideology in the shaping of a translation

Translations are not made in a vacuum. Translators function in a given culture at a given time. The way they understand themselves and their culture is one of the factors that may influence the way in which they translate.

When Horace, for instance, speaks of a “faithful translator,” he has the person in mind, much more so than the work that person produces. Translators, in Horace’s understanding, thrive on the trust their patron and their public put in them. They do not have to translate “word for word” because both patron and audience literally “take their word” at face value.

Victor Hugo describes the other extreme: “When you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look on the translation as an act of violence against itself.” Translations can be potentially threatening precisely because they confront the receiving culture with another, different way of looking at life and society, a way that can be seen as potentially subversive, and must therefore be kept out. Luther describes a successful attempt at ideological control when he accuses a “scribbler” of stealing his New Testament and goes on to say: “his prince, in a terrible preface, forbade the reading of Luther’s New Testament and ordered the scribbler’s New Testament read.”

Ideology is often enforced by the patrons, the people or institutions who commission or publish translations.

Quintus Horatius, Flaccus, 65–8 BC. Roman poet.

Extract from the Epistula ad Pisones (“Letter to the Pisones”), also known as the Ars Poetica. Its exact date is unknown. It is usually dated around 10 BC.

Do not worry about rendering word for word, faithful translator, but render sense for sense.

Aurelius Augustinus, 354−430. Church father, theologian, writer.

Extract from De doctrina Christiana (“On the Christian Doctrine”), written from 397–428.

Knowledge of foreign languages is necessary because translations of the same text tend to differ from each other, as I said before. The number of people who were able to translate the scriptures from Hebrew into Greek can easily be counted, but those who translated them from Greek into Latin are without number. When anybody stumbled on a Greek manuscript in the first days of the faith, he would begin to translate it even if he thought his command of both languages was limited.

The real sense, which many translators try to express according to their personal judgment and ability, is not firmly established when it is not established in the original language, since a translator very often misses the real sense when he is not very learned. That is why you should try to learn the languages from which the scriptures were translated into Latin, or you should at least stick to the work of such translators who have rendered their own original word for word. Such literal translations are insufficient, of course, but they can serve to show whether or not the translations of those who want to translate more according to the sense than according to the way the words are phrased are correct or not. For often not just individual words are translated, but also syntactical features that are simply not acceptable in Latin usage, if one wants to preserve the traditional style used by Latin writers up to now. Such a literal translation is often not exactly a hindrance to understanding, but it does irritate those readers who enjoy the content more when its verbal expression has managed to preserve a certain purity.

Extract from the “Letter to Saint Jerome,” probably written in 392.

When one of our brothers, a bishop, had introduced the use of your translation in the church of which he is the pastor, the congregation hit upon a passage in the prophet Jonah which you translated in a very different way from the way it had established itself in the mind and memory of all, and the way it had been sung for such a long time. Great unrest arose among the people, especially since the Greeks protested and began to shout about falsification in a vituperative manner. As a result the bishop—it happened in the town of Onea—saw himself forced to rely on the Jews who lived in the city to clear up the matter. But they replied, either out of ignorance or out of malice, that the Hebrew manuscripts contained exactly what was also to be found in the Greek and Latin manuscripts. And then what? To escape from great danger the man was forced to correct himself, as if he had made a mistake, since he did not want to lose all the people in his church.

Martin Luther, 1483−1546. German theologian, polemicist, social thinker, and translator. Credited with setting off the Reformation by means of his translation of the New Testament.

Extract from his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen (“Circular Letter on Translation”), published in 1530.

There has been much talk about the translation of the New Testament and half of the Old. The enemies of truth pretend that the text has been changed or even falsified in many places. Therefore many simple Christians, including the learned who do not know Hebrew or Greek, are overcome by fear and terror.

We are aware of the scribbler in Dresden who stole my New Testament. He admitted that my German is good and sweet and he realized that he could not do better, and yet he wanted to discredit it. So he took my New Testament as I wrote it, almost word for word, and he took my preface, my glosses, and my name away and wrote his name, his preface, and his glosses in their place. He is now selling my New Testament under his name. Oh, dear children, how hurt I was when his prince, in a terrible preface, forbade the reading of Luther’s New Testament but ordered the scribbler’s New Testament read, which is exactly the same as the one Luther wrote.

I have not taken a penny for it, I have not looked for one and I have not earned one.

Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 1767−1845. German critic, translator, and historian of literature.

Extract from Geschichte der romantischen Literatur (“History of Romantic Literature”), 1803.

Yet what I have just praised as an advantage, namely diligence and skill in translating, is rejected by many as an erroneous habit. They say that it originates in mental sluggishness and servility, and that it leads to more of the same, to the point of rendering you incapable of personal creation and invention. As opposed to this, it is easy to demonstrate that objective poetic translation is true writing, a new creation. Or if it is maintained that you should not translate at all, you would have to reply that the human mind hardly does anything else, that the sum total of its activity consists of precisely that. But it would carry us too far to develop this point here. Suffice it to say that higher artistic recreation has a nobler aim than the common craftsmanship of translation which exists only to remedy literary indigence. Its aim is nothing less than to combine the merits of all different nations, to think with them and feel with them, and so to create a cosmopolitan center for mankind.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, 1766−1817. French novelist, social and cultural critic, and writer of travelogues.

Extract from Mélanges (Writings), 1820.

The most eminent service one can render to literature is to transport the masterpieces of the human spirit from one language into another. The best way to do without translations, I admit, would be to know all the languages in which the works of the great poets have been written: Greek, Latin, Italian, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German. But to do that you would need a lot of time and a lot of help and then you could never flatter yourself with the thought that knowledge so hard to acquire would, in fact, be acquired by all.

If translations of poems enrich literature, translations of plays could exert an even greater influence, for the theater is truly literature’s executive power.

Victor Hugo, 1802−1885. French novelist, poet, dramatist.

Extract from the preface he wrote for the Shakespeare translations published by his son, François-Victor, in 1865.

When you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look on the translation as an act of violence against itself. Bourgeois taste tends to resist the universal spirit.

To translate a foreign writer is to add to your own national poetry; such a widening of the horizon does not please those who profit from it, at least not in the beginning. The first reaction is one of rebellion. If a foreign idiom is transplanted into a language in this way, that language will do all it can to reject that foreign idiom. This kind of taste is repugnant to it. These unusual locutions, these unexpected turns of phrase, that savage corruption of well-known figures of speech, they all amount to an invasion. What, then, will become of one’s own literature? Who could ever dare think of infusing the substance of another people into its own very life-blood? This kind of poetry is excessive. There is an abuse of images, a profusion of metaphors, a violation of frontiers, a forced introduction of the cosmopolitan into local taste.