The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

their language. As Jorge Luis Borges said,
‘Conrad and Henry James wrote novels of
reality because they judged reality to be
poetic’. See also CATHARSIS, DRAMA.
See A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean
Tragedy (1904); J. Jones, On Aristotle and
Greek Tragedy (1962); Dorothea Krook,
Elements of Tragedy (1969); F. L. Lucas,
Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to
Aristotle’s Poetics (1927, repr. 1961);
F. W. Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann, The
Birth of Tragedy (1967); G. Steiner, The
Death of Tragedy (1961); N. Frye, Fools of
Time (1967); R. P. Draper (ed.), Tragedy:
Developments in Criticism (1980);
R. B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy
(1980); John Drakakis and Naomi Conn
Liebler (eds), Tragedy (1998).
PM
Translations The literary translator
has at all times been extremely influential,
and the branch of literary criticism
concerned with translation brings close
analysis of language to bear on crosscultural
literary questions in a way central
to COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, since a
unique creative energy is generated where
languages converge.
The NEW CRITICAL insistence on the
inseparability of form and content questioned
the possibility of translation: and
one could cite a number of poets, from
Shelley’s likening of translation to subjecting
a violet to chemical analysis to
Robert Frost’s working definition of
poetry as ‘what gets left out in translation’
to demonstrate that writers have had
grave doubts about it. Yet, Shelley (e.g.)
was himself an admirable translator: and
it seems that he was primarily stressing
the impossibility of exact correspondence
between source and target texts, rather
than rejecting translation; he believed that
‘the plant must spring again from the
seed, or it will bear no flower’. Some
Translations 243
elements in the source text elude the net
of the target language: others stretch it
and call attention to the device by which
they are admitted: the process is controlled
by the translator, who must be a
scrupulous critic and a creative writer to
locate the ‘seed’ and make it grow.
Dryden, regrounding the classics in
a contemporary idiom, was much concerned
with translation. Unaware of modern
conceptions of the relation between
form and content, he could happily advocate
reasonable freedom, demanding that
the translator should first ‘know what is
peculiar to the author’s style’, and then
‘tis time to look into ourselves, to
conform our genius to his, to give his
thoughts either the same turn, if our
tongue will bear it, or, if not, to vary
but the dress, not alter or destroy the
substance.
This kind of translation, called by
Dryden paraphrase, is, however, sharply
distinguished from impermissibly free
imitations. Modern translators, not sharing
Dryden’s conviction that human
nature is everywhere the same, and concerned,
like modern critics, with the phenomenology
of a given work, have paid
more attention to imitation as a mode of
translating at least lyric poetry, and have
often worked in the territory between
two languages, rather than offering to
reconstruct one on the foundations of
another. Lowell’s ‘Imitations’ are representative
of, fifty years earlier, Pound’s
‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. Louis
Zukovsky’s recent translations of Catullus
have created an even more striking synthetic
language that mimes or mouths the
Latin of the original in a way that is deliberately
indecent. See also PARAPHRASE.
See W. Arrowsmith and R. Shattuck (eds),
The Craft and Context of Translation
(1961); W. Benjamin, ‘The Task of the