Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

happy gods, who laugh Olympianly to their
heart’s content in the leisure of eternity.” This
sentence truly intoxicated me. I thought I perceived
a marvelous antiquity through that
Middle Ages which only Gautier could reveal
to me. 2
Proust annotates the sentence thus, in the translation:
Actually, this sentence is not found, at
least in this form, in le Capitaine Fracasse.
Instead of “as it appears in the Odyssey of
Homer, poet of Greek fire,” there is simply
“according to Homer.” But since the expressions
“it appears from Homer,” “it appears
from the Odyssey,” which are found elsewhere
in the same book, gave me a pleasure of the
same quality, I have taken the liberty so that
the example might be more striking for the
reader, of fusing all these beauties into one,
now that, strictly speaking, I no longer have a
religious respect for them. Elsewhere in le
Capitaine Fracasse Homer is qualified as poet
of Greek fire, and I have no doubt that this too
enchanted me. However, I am no longer able to
bring back accurately enough those forgotten
joys to be assured I have not exaggerated and
gone too far in accumulating so many wonders
in one single sentence! Yet I do not believe so.
And I think with regret that the exaltation with
which I repeated the sentence from le
Capitaine Fracasse to the irises and periwinkles
leaning at the river’s edge, while I trampled
underfoot the stones of the path, would
have been still more delicious had I been able
to find in a single sentence by Gautier so many
charms which my own artifice gathers together
today without, alas, succeeding in giving me
any pleasure. 3
Those of you familiar with this remarkable essay
may recall that it lavishes perhaps four of its thirty
pages on Ruskin. But it is fairly straightforward in its
suggestion that one of the things we do in translating,
or even in recalling an original text, is to try to make
it what we want it to be. As I am fond of saying to my
translation students, most of whom are also pursuing
the MFA in creative writing, “You know how you can
read something and wish with an unusually strong
and deep pang that you had written it yourself? Well,
if it’s in a language other than yours, maybe you can.”
I am not trying to be cavalier or provocative. I do not
mean that even creative writers often have good reasons
for appropriating, colonizing, or otherwise stealing
work from other languages for the gratification of
their own particular voices. But I do believe that
translation is best done by those who understand,
respect, and even rejoice in its impossibilities.
Pope may have said it better, in the preface to his
Iliad:
I know no Liberties one ought to take, but
those which are necessary for transfusing the
Spirit of the Original, and supporting the
Poetical Style of the Translation: and I will
venture to say, there have not been more Men
misled in former times by servile dull
Adherence to the Letter, than have been deluded
in ours by a chimerical insolent Hope of
raising and improving their Author. 4
I have committed my share of chimerical insolences.
Some I have excused by noting their thumping
obtrusiveness: there is clearly no way the original
could have done or said exactly what I have decided
to have the translation do or say, for the sake of some
gesture I can’t duplicate but would like to suggest.
One tiny example, which comes to mind partly
because we are where we are: In Plautus’ Curculio—
The Weevil—the main character, a clown and parasite,
is briefly pretending to be the representative of a
miles gloriosus who is absent because, the parasite
says, he is supervising the construction of a sevenfoot
gold monument to his latest exploits. He is asked
what those were, and Curculio replies, in my rendition:
Monumental! The Persians,
Paphlagonians, Sinopians, Arabs, Carians,
Cretans, Syrians, Rhodes and Lycia, Upper
Devouria
and Lower Bibula, Centauromachia
Translation Review 13