Chapter 3

Poetics

Etienne Dolet advises the translator to “link and arrange words with such sweetness that the soul is satisfied and the ears are pleased.” Accordingly, translators often try to recast the original in terms of the poetics of their own culture, simply to make it pleasing to the new audience and, in doing so, to ensure that the translation will actually be read.

Few would go as far as Antoine Houdar de la Motte, who reduced the twenty-four books of the Iliad to twelve in his translation, not only for reasons of propriety—he left out the “anatomical details of wounds”—but also because he read the original in terms of the genre that dominated the poetics of his time: the tragedy. He therefore feels quite justified in asking: “Would a theater audience accept having characters come out during the intervals in a tragedy to tell us all that is going to happen next?” Consequently, he cuts all the passages in the Iliad where this can be said to happen.

Translators not infrequently use their translations to influence the evolution of the poetics of their time. Schlegel, for instance, objects to the fact that “our best dramatic works were written completely with French models in mind,” and prescribes Shakespeare as an antidote for the German theater. The compromises translators find between the poetics of the original and the poetics of their culture provide fascinating insights into the process of acculturation and incontrovertible evidence of the extent of the power of a given poetics.

Etienne Dolet, 1509−1546. French poet, translator, printer, and publisher. Burnt at the stake because his translation of Plato contained some errors. Proof negative of the importance of patronage.

Extracts from De la manière de bien traduire d’une langue en autre (“On the Way of Translating Well from One Language into Another”), published in 1540.

First, the translator must understand to perfection the meaning and the subject matter of the author he translates. If he understands this he will never be obscure in his translation and if the author he translates is in no way obscene, he will be able to make him easily and perfectly intelligible.

The second point required in translation is that the translator should know the language of the author he translates to perfection and that he should have achieved the same excellence in the language he wants to translate into. In that way he will neither violate nor denigrate the splendor of one language or the other. You must understand that every language has its own characteristics, and therefore its diction, its patterns of speech, its subtleties, and its power must be translated accordingly. If the translator does not know this, he will hurt the author he translates and also the language he translates him into, for he will neither represent nor express the dignity and the riches of the two languages he has taken in hand.

The third point is that when you translate you should not enter into slavery to the point of rendering word for word. Whoever translates in this way does so because his mind is poor and deficient. If he possesses the qualities mentioned above (and a good translator must possess them) he will work with sentences and not care about the order of the words, and he will see to it that the author’s intention is expressed while miraculously preserving the characteristics of both languages. It is therefore wrong to believe (should I call that belief stupidity or ignorance?) that you should start your translation at the beginning of a sentence. But if you express the intention of the author you translate you will be above reproach, even if you distort the syntax. I shall not pass over in silence the folly of some translators who bow to servitude instead of acting freely. They are such fools that they try to render line by line, or verse by verse. When they make this mistake they often adulterate the meaning of the author they translate and convey neither the elegance nor the perfection of either language. You must guard against this vice with all your might, since all it demonstrates is the translator’s ignorance.

The fourth rule I want to offer here must be observed with greater diligence in languages that have not yet become established in the field of art than in others. I would call the following languages not yet established in the field of art: French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, and other vulgar tongues. If you translate a Latin book into one of these languages (even into French), you should not usurp words which are too close to Latin or have been little used in the past. Be satisfied with common usage and do not foolishly introduce novelties spawned by curiosity which can only be called reprehensible. If you observe some translators doing so, do not imitate them, since their arrogance is not worth a thing and cannot be tolerated among the learned. But do not think I am telling you the translator should completely abstain from using words outside common usage, since it is well known that Greek or Latin are richer in diction than French. This often forces us to use rare words, but we should do so only in cases of dire need.

Let us now come to the fifth rule a good translator needs to observe. It is such an important rule that all compositions are heavy and unpleasant without it. What is it then? Merely that the translator should observe the figures of speech, namely that he should link and arrange words with such sweetness that the soul is satisfied and the ears are pleased. He should never object to harmony in language. And I would once again like to admonish the translator to observe the rules I have given. If he does not, he will not be able to write any remarkable composition whatsoever: his sentences will not sound serious and they will not achieve their legitimate weight, as required.

Antoine Houdar de la Motte, 1672−1731. French writer, critic, and translator.

Extract from the preface to his translation of the Iliad, published in 1714.

I have a double reply to my critics: I have followed those parts of the Iliad that seemed to me worth keeping, and I have taken the liberty of changing whatever I thought disagreeable. I am a translator in many parts and an original author in many others.

I consider myself a mere translator wherever I have only made slight changes. I have often had the temerity to go beyond this, however: I did cut out whole books, I did change the way matters were set forth, and I have even invented new material.

Length is one of the factors that have been detrimental to our French poets: our poets have been beset by the wrong idea of emulation, and they have thought they had to run a course as long as that of Homer and Virgil.

The other reason that should have led our epic poets to reduce the size of their poems is that our lines of verse tend to fall in too uniform a cadence, which is pleasing for a while, but tiresome in the end.

For these reasons I have reduced the twenty-four books of the Iliad to twelve, which are even shorter than Homer’s. At first sight you might think that this could only be done at the expense of many important elements. But if you pause to reflect that repetitions make up more than one-sixth of the Iliad, and that the anatomical details of wounds and the warriors’ long speeches make up a lot more, you will be right in thinking that it has been easy for me to shorten the poem without losing any important features of the plot. I flatter myself that I have done just that and I even think I have succeeded in bringing the essential parts of the action together in such a way that they form a better proportioned and more sensible whole than Homer’s original.

I would not have had to correct anything in the Iliad, except for the fact that what is moving in the poem has been weakened by detailed preparations that rob the events of all their surprise value and lessen the impression they make, or if these moving passages had not been interrupted by long episodes centered around indifferent characters, so that the reader loses sight of the characters he wants to keep track of. I thought I had to remedy these two defects by suppressing the unnecessary preparations and by cutting down on the uninteresting episodes. Would a theater audience accept having characters come out during the intervals in a tragedy to tell us all that is going to happen next? Would it approve if the actions of the principal characters were interrupted by the business of the confidants? Certainly not.

I have, therefore, only corrected—as far as possible—those defects in the poem that have a shocking or boring effect, since those are unforgivable. I have left the gods their passions, but I have always tried to preserve their dignity. I have not deprived the heroes of their unjust pride, which often appears as “grandeur” to us, but I have deprived them of the avarice, the eagerness, and the greed with which they stoop to looting, since these faults would bring them down in our eyes.

I have tried to make the narrative move at a faster pace than Homer does: the descriptions are grander and less weighed down with trivia, the comparisons less frequent and more exact. I have taken out of the speeches whatever I thought might run counter to the passion they express, and I have tried to put into them that mixture of power and sense that guarantees the best possible effect. Finally, I have tried to ensure continuity of character since it is this point—which has become so well established in our time—to which the reader is most sensitive, and that also makes him the sternest judge.

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 1694−1778. French philosopher, dramatist, historian, satirist, and translator.

Extract from a letter written to Anne Dacier in 1720.

I am convinced that we have two or three poets in France who would be able to translate Homer very well; but I am equally convinced that nobody will read them unless they soften and embellish almost everything because, Madame, you have to write for your own time, not for the past.

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

Extract from “Etwas über Wilhelm Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters” (“Something about William Shakespeare on the Occasion of Wilhelm Meister”), 1796.

Over thirty years ago a writer [Wieland], who seemed least destined to become a translator because of the fertility of his own mind but who later became a classic for us in this field as well, dared to undertake the Herculean labor of translating most of Shakespeare into German for the first time. That labor was all the more Herculean then, because there were fewer aids to learning the English language, and because not much had been done to explain this often difficult and occasionally quite unintelligible poet—not even in English.

[Wieland] was not immediately given the credit he deserved, and that is not surprising, because our theaters were still generally dominated by inspired imitations from the French, and even our best dramatic works were written completely with French models in mind. Who would have dared to imagine then that such pagan, unruly, and barbaric plays ascribed by obscure rumor to an Englishman, a certain William Shakespeare, would ever have been allowed to be shown before our eyes? Lessing, that valiant enemy of prejudice, was the first to reveal French tragic wit in its nakedness, and to emphatically defend Shakespeare’s merit. He also reminded the Germans that they possessed a translation of that great poet, and that they would be able to learn from it for a long time before they would need a new one, even if the translation they had was not perfect.

To be sure he could not have foreseen what happened a few years later. The style of his own dramatic works, especially Emilia Galotti, helped to make his fellow citizens more receptive to Shakespeare. Together with a few other factors, the publication of Goetz von Berlichingen was to usher in a whole new epoch in our theaters, for better or for worse. Not long before that, only the Englishman had been praised with a glowing eloquence that would silence his opponents even if it failed to convince them, and the truth was impressed upon us all that the entire set of rules regulating fashionable refinement simply could not be used as a yardstick to measure his creations. Only nine years after the publication of Wieland’s translation the need was felt, not for a reprint, but for a better Germanization of all of Shakespeare’s works. Since Wieland himself could not undertake the task it fortunately fell to one of our most learned and most discerning men of letters [Johann Joachim Eschenburg], whose sound knowledge of the language, uncommon ingenuity in explication, and assiduous care gave the translation what it had been lacking until then: overall completeness and precision of detail.

Even though the knowledge of English has spread widely in Germany, it very rarely reaches the level required if one is not to be continuously interrupted in one’s pleasure, or even scared away from reading the poet altogether. How few are there among those who can read him in his entirety (that is to say, those passages excepted where the English themselves need a commentary because the words have become obsolete, the allusions unknown, or the texts corrupt) without interruption—how few are those who can feel and recognize all the more refined beauty, the tender nuances of expression on which the harmony of poetic representation rests, with a facility equal to the one they possess in their mother tongue? How few have mastered English pronunciation to the extent that they can read the poet aloud with the required euphony and emphasis? Yet all of this greatly increases his impact, since poetry is obviously not a silent art. Readers of Shakespeare who have passed all the tests described above would, moreover, not be adverse to relaxing on their own turf now and then, for a change, in the shadow of his works, so to speak, provided those works could be transplanted without too great a loss of their beautiful foliage. Would it not be a good thing, therefore, if we had a translation? “But we have one already, and it is complete, faithful, and good.” So it is! We had to have that much to be able to wish for more. The desire for luxury follows the satisfaction of basic needs. Now the best is no longer good enough for us. If Shakespeare could and should be translated only into prose we ought to remain satisfied with what has been achieved so far. But he is a poet, also in the very connection of his words to the use of meter. If it were possible to recreate his work faithfully and poetically at the same time, if it were possible to follow the letter of his meaning step by step and yet to capture some of the innumerable, indescribable marvels that do not reside in the letter, but float above it like a breath of spirit! It would be well worth the effort.

Edward Fitzgerald, 1809−1883. English translator and poet.

Extract from the preface to his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859.

The original Rubaiyat (as, missing an Arabic Guttural, these Tetrastichs are more musically called) are independent stanzas, consisting of four lines of equal, though varied prosody, sometimes all rhyming, but oftener (as here attempted) the third line suspending the Cadence by which the last atunes with the former two. Something as in the Greek Alcaic, where the third line seems to lift and suspend the wave that falls over the last. As usual with such kind of Oriental Verse, the Rubaiyat follow one another according to Alphabetic Rhyme—a strange Farrago of Grave and Gay. Those here selected are strung into something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the “Drink and make merry,” which (genuine or not) recurs over-frequently in the Original.

Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorff, 1848–1931. German philologist and translator.

Extract from “Die Kunst des Übersetzens” (“The Art of Translation”), 1924.

Everyone should know by now that this whole direction [of metrical translation] is wrong, that it goes against the very nature of language, because the Germanic languages, or rather all contemporary European languages, do not have long and short, but stressed and unstressed syllables. Poets have, in fact, abandoned that direction by now, and only the hexameter and the distichon, with perhaps a couple of meters taken from the odes, are still put to use occasionally, though not a single one of them has become popular.

But how should we render the poetry of antiquity? One thing must be stated first: Homer is untranslatable because we do not have an epic meter, because we do not write stories in verse. Any meter that is even slightly stanzaic disrupts the free movement of the Homeric story, and a pair of rhymes already amounts to a distichon. But the style, too, is inimitable because of its ornamental words and because it is formulaic in many respects. Homer is not popular poetry but definitely the poetry of high art. A Homer in prose must divest himself of his jewels, in other words lose all the color of life. The dialogue of Greek drama stands a better chance, because in this case we have our classical style and a verse form that can be modified to suit comedy as well, even if we still have to find a poet who can do this for Menander. As to the epigram, one could take Goethe’s distichs (rarely, I believe), but they are of no use for the Greek elegy, nor for Propertius, for instance, because they are Ovidic. And no rules at all can be given for all the poetry that was sung, for all lyrical poetry, and for the Hellenistic and Roman poetry that belongs to high art. Whoever wants to try them should, in any case, look for a German form analogous to the original in mood and style. Let him decide to what extent he can adapt himself to the form of the original. His intention as a translator will be a decisive factor, as will be his understanding of the text.

We are faced with a totally different matter when a creative poet takes up an ancient work and transforms it recreatively in his own spirit. This is quite legitimate, even great, but it is not a translation. For translation only wants to let the ancient poet speak to us clearly and in a manner as immediately intelligible as he did in his own time. He must be given words, he must speak through our mouth. “True translation is metempsychosis.” This implies that the ancient poet, whose own lines lead an immortal life, must time and again cast his spirit on a new translator, because translations are mortal, indeed even short-lived. And if an old philologist who has often tried his hand at this is to say how it should be done, he can suggest how it should not be done, but for the rest he will know better than to give recipes. Necessary though it is, learning is not sufficient, not even to understand the text, and when translation is also something like the writing of poetry the Muse’s help is most definitely needed.