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of the author are generally recognized; but in the case
of works that have entered the public domain there is
no applicable sanction. Many times the alteration is
done in the name of the supposed demands of the
target language; details judged useless are eliminated,
paragraphs are shortened, sometimes entire chapters
suppressed, to the point of altering the dénouement,
and often even the deeper meaning of the work. One
hopes that this practice, entirely to be condemned, will
gradually disappear with the development of the
translator’s sense of professionalism: in demanding
respect for his own work and the recognition of his
rights, he will have to become the defender of the
rights of the author.
Often these arbitrary changes are disguised
through being self-indulgently labeled as adaptation.
One cannot affirm a priori that all adaptations are to
be condemned. There are genres in which this is more
admissible than in others. It can be more easily
defended in works for the theater than in fiction. At
any rate, the cover of a book that is an adaptation
should identify this fact unequivocally, as is done with
theatrical posters.
Where adaptation has a special role is in literature
for adolescents. For a long time, condensations have
been made for young people of such important and
serious books as Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe,
and Don Quixote. But at the moment, there seems to
be an excess of these works in the market. Sometimes
we see works originally written for young people
being abbreviated, where the adaptation was
unnecessary; sometimes more tragic, adult works
(such as those of Kafka) are weakened and
domesticated, and the adaptation is an absurdity. In
both cases, the publishers have an eye toward
simplifying the works for readers with small
vocabularies and minimal culture. And if they don’t,
how can they compete with the crushing competition
from comic books and television And the works thus
adapted no longer belong to the author and come to
belong to the adapter, often a writer of merit, and who
seeks thus to add to his meager income. Perhaps when
the translator’s rights to his work are acknowledged
we will see the plethora of adaptations of dubious
merit decrease.
In general, it is to be preferred that the translator
consider himself the proxy of the author, rather than
his collaborator. Opinions differ as to the extent of his
collaboration. All will agree that he can and should
correct the typographical errors of the original,
mistaken words and confused names. But, according
to Valery Larbaud, he should go no further than this:
“One who calls himself a translator calls himself a
servant of the truth: the text to be translated may seem
specious to us, filled with errors in judgment or wrong
ideas, but inasmuch as it is a text to be translated, a
verbal edifice that has a precise meaning, it is truth,
and deforming it or mutilating it is offending against
the truth.”
One must be extremely cautious, even in the case
of the most obvious corrections. Robert W. Corrigan 5
recalls that various characters in Chekov’s plays
misquote passages from Shakespeare. Translators with
the best of intentions, in translating these dramas into
English, charitably restore the correct quotations — a
mistake on their parts, since the mistakes were
intentional. Does this mean that a good translation
cannot be better than the original Elsa Gress 6 will
allow exceptions. Softening the tone of a pretentious
text, or adding a touch of irony to another text that
would be insufferably serious if faithfully translated
into Danish — a language, it seems, that is muffled,
hushed, full of understatement and irony — would
simply be to obey the unwritten laws of the language
and thus to serve the original.
Elsewhere, I will speak of a recent trend that
favors poetic translation that is almost entirely free
and might better be called adaptation or imitation.
Ezra Pound is an exemplar of this approach. Here, I
will limit myself to discussing alterations undertaken
for non-aesthetic reasons, as for example that of
Richard Francis Burton, 7 one of the translators of the
Lusiads. He does not hesitate to insert into the poem
an entire strophe of his own devising, in order to vent
his displeasure on a polemic on the sources of the
Nile, which he claimed to have found!
In the history of adaptations for the theater, the
case of Brecht is noteworthy because he adapted a
large number of works and presented them under his
own name. But when he learned that a theater
company was to make an alteration in his text, Brecht
was the first to squeal, to invoke the sacred rights of
the author, and to threaten those responsible with
protests. 8
What is to be done when the text, which is
insufficiently clear for readers from another country,
demands explanations One can make use of
footnotes, either at the foot of the page or at the end of
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