Lecture 6. Translation activity in Europe in the 2nd half of the 18th - 19th centuries

Lecture 6.

Translation activity in Europe in the 2nd half of the 18th - 19th centuries

Translation activity in Europe in the 2nd half of the 18th - 19th centuries

1. Views of German romanticists on translation.

2. Translation activity in England.3. Golden Age of Russian literary

translation.

Views of German romanticists on translation.

In the age of Classicism and Enlightenment French was the most respected literary language in Europe.

It often served as an intermediary language for translators.


French translators felt justified in adapting translated texts in such ways as to make them conform not only to the grammatical, lexical and semantic norms and conventions of the French language, but also to typological and aesthetic models prevalent in French literature.


French cultural predominance was reflected in many German imitations of French literary models and translations from French into German.


One of Romanticism's key ideas is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy.

Romanticists focused on the development of national languages, literatures and folklore.


In the course of the 18th century German writers gradually shifted from broad acceptance of French models to their rejection.

This shift meant emancipation from French intellectual and cultural dominance and propagation of an independent German national literature.


Translation was seen by German writers and poets as a way connecting national culture in its West-European context with the rest of the world.


Ideas of Johann Breitinger, who insisted that the translation should not violate the thoughts of the original or deviate from the source text in any other way, were further developed by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who invested the “spirit” of the original with the ultimate authority.


For Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832), as for many of his German contemporaries, translation was a gateway between on the one hand the strengthening notions of nationality and the Western tradition, and on the other the broader world (especially the ‘Orient’).


Goethe wrote about two maxims in translation:

one requires that the author of a foreign nation be brought across to us in such a way that we can look on him as ours;

the other requires that we should go across to what is foreign and adapt ourselves to its conditions, its use of language, its peculiarities.


Goethe believed that a high-quality translation should be identical with the original, so that “one would not be valued instead of the other, but in the other’s stead”.


August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845) a German poet, translator, critic, and a leader of German Romanticism.

His translations of Shakespeare’s plays made the English dramatist's works into German classics.


Schlegel’s principles of translation were based on the interpretation of works of art as organisms.

Sharing Herder’s view, he considered every literary work as an entity comprising form and content.

Unlike Herder and the Sturm and Drang poets, who argued that this entity was unconsciously created by a genius, Schlegel considered this entity as an “organic created nature” (organische Kunstform) which resulted from a conscious, intentional creative effort.


Accordingly, each Shakespearean drama was a skilfully constructed organism, in which every detail (each scene, character etc.) was related to the whole by inherent necessity, and from which, in turn, it derived its meaning.

So a translator can do justice to the original only by paying attention to and translating every detail, and any change distorted and destroyed the perfect organism.


The language had to be light and pleasing and the reader was to get the impression that s/he was reading an original German text, not a translation.


In other words, Schlegel tried to combine the “objective” and the “subjective” aspects of translation:

fidelity to the source text, on the one hand,

and the creative transformation and naturalization in accordance with target-side requirements, on the other.


The Romatic concept of translation expressed in Schlegel’s theory and practice of Shakespeare’s translation, was systematically analyzed by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), an influential German theologian and one of the key scholarly figures of German Romanticism, in his lecture ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, delivered to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1813.


Schleiermacher insisted that the reader should be brought to the author, that the reader should learn to accept ‘alienation’, or what would now be called foreignization of translations.


In his lecture, Schleiermacher distinguishes between interpreting (‘Dolmetchen’), by which he understands not only oral interpreting, but also business-related translation,

and the translation proper (in the fields of art and scholarship).


Two basic methods of translation proper:

moving the author to the reader (naturalization method)

or the reader to the author (alienation or foreignization method).


Translators who follow the first method often claim that they want to make their author speak the way he would have spoken if he had written the work in the

translator’s language.


In his lecture, Schleiermacher criticizes this formula implying that this method often turns out to be imitation in disguise.


Thus, there seems to be only one option left for the translator who wants to transmit ‘the living power’ which ‘creates new forms by means of the plastic material of language’:

the reader has to be brought to the author.


Schleiermacher’s metaphoric formula to describe this translation:

it will be ‘perfect when one can say that if the author had learnt German as well as the translator has learnt Latin he would not have translated the work he originally wrote in Latin any differently than the translator has done.’


And while at one point Schleiermacher

talks about moving the reader to the author, he also describes them as meeting ‘at a certain point in the middle’,

i.e. they meet through and ‘in’ a translator who opens up the gateway of the foreign.


However, this foreignizing method challenges the reader and it places a strain on the language of the translation.


Schleiermacher not only sees translation as a crucial national enterprise, but he also dreams of the German language as a linguistic empire where the various works of world literary history are all gathered together.

Translation activity in England.

Alexander Fraser Tytler’s (1747–1813) Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791) is often seen as the first extended thesis on translation written in English.


Tytler’s Essay reacts against Dryden’s concept of paraphrase and the loose translations that resulted from it.

According to Tytler, translation should give a complete transcript of the idea of the original work, the style and manner of writing should be the same as in the original, and translation should have all the ease of the original.


At the same time, Tytler allows the translator to ‘add to the idea of the original what may appear to give greater force or illustration’.

Thus Tytler gives the translator a partnership role with the original authority and the right to intervene, when necessary, in order to perfect the text.

For Tytler, the aim of translation is the production of an equivalent effect that goes beyond linguistic and cultural differences.


I would therefore describe a good translation to be that, in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language, as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as strongly felt, by a native of the country to which that language belongs, as it is by those who speak the language of the original work.

(A. Tytler)


Tytler sees a translator as a judge, combining the qualities of a critic and a highly professional writer, whose task is to present the original author, as he himself would have wished to be presented, free of drawbacks and faults.


The translator, in effect, functions as a

kind of censor, who always has the

true interest of author and reader in

view.


For Tytler, then, the status of a translator could hardly be higher, as an ideal translator should possesses genius similar to the genius of the original author.


During the 19th century Britain was the scene of much translation activity and translation was taken very seriously.

The debate about translation was fuelled by a strong belief that translation is crucial for literary life in Britain.


Edward FitzGerald (1809–83), a poet and a letter-writer, translated Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, probably the most popular English poem of the nineteenth century.


In 1869 the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton reviewed FitzGerald’s translation in the most flattering terms:

‘He is to be called ‘‘translator’’ only in default of a better word, one which should express the poetic transfusion of a poetic spirit from one language to another, and the representation of the ideas and images of the original in a form not altogether diverse from their own but perfectly adapted to the new conditions of time, place, custom, and habit of mind in which they reappear.’


FitzGerald outlined his approach to translation in a letter to James Russell Lowell, the American poet, essayist, and editor:

I am persuaded that, to keep Life in the Work (as Drama must) the Translator (however inferior to his Original) must re-cast that original into his own Likeness, more or less: the less like his original, so much the worse: but still, the live Dog better than the dead Lion …


The free, domesticating approach to

translation seen in FitzGerald’s

translation of Omar Khayyam

contrasts sharply with Robert

Browning’s (1812–89) ultraliteral

translation of Aeschylus’

Agamemnon (1877)


Robert Browning defended his

translation, proclaiming his belief in

the need for translation to be ‘literal

at every cost save that of absolute

violence to our language’.


FitzGerald was translating a non-Western text

Browning was translating one of the canonical works of Western literature.


Translation of Homer’s epics was one of the key

issues of contemporary literary activity in

Britain.

This was the source of the well-known controversy

between Matthew Arnold (1822–88), poet and

professor of poetry at Oxford, and Francis W.

Newman (1805–97), professor of Latin at

University College London.


Arnold criticized (in his lectures ‘On

Translating Homer’, 1861) Newman’s

translation of the Iliad.

Newman wrote a detailed reply and Arnold

responded in his ‘Last Words on

Translating Homer’.


Newman’s aim was ambitious, as he

wanted to attract a broad readership

while at the same time staying true to

the various ‘peculiarities’ of Homer’s

epic, and the broad range of expressions

he found in it.


Newman felt that Arnold was attacking the

scholarly basis of his translation.

Arnold in his turn claimed that it was not so

much in the realm of scholarship as in

poetic delivery that Newman has failed.


For all their differences, Arnold and Newman

were both children of the Romantic

revolution.

Both shared the Romantic view of the

translator’s duty to be faithful to the

original and of the necessary union of a

translator with his original in a good

translation.


Their disagreement was not so much about aims as about

means.

Arnold: since Homer is a classic, the translation should

adopt the language of the undoubted classic, the 1611

Bible (the Authorized King James Version).

Its metre should imitate the original.

Newman: saw Homer as primitive and popular,

used ballad metre and

what he called a “Saxo-Norman” language.


Arnold’s authority was widely

acknowledged in the 19th century and

well in the 20th.

Newman’s practice was largely ignored.


Yet, Newman’s practice represents an important tendency to “foreignize” the original and make readers conscious of the gap between their own culture and the culture represented by the original.


Newman was the first among Victorian translators who developed foreignizing strategies and opposed the fluent, domesticating method that dominated English translation since the 17th century.


Francis W. Newman:

One of these [dogmas] is, that the reader ought, if possible, to forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work. Of course a necessary inference from such a dogma is, that whatever has a foreign colour is undesirable and is even a grave defect. The translator, it seems, must carefully obliterate all that is characteristic of the original, unless it happens to be identical in spirit to something already familiar in English.


Francis W. Newman:

From such a notion I cannot too strongly express my intense dissent. I am at precisely the opposite — to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as I am able, with the greater care, the more foreign it may happen to be,— whether it be a matter of taste, of intellect, or of morals. […] the English translator should desire the reader always to remember that his work is an imitation, and moreover is in a different material; that the original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlike our native compositions.


Italian culture was spread in England by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), painter and poet, who was bilingual in Italian and English.

In 1861, Rossetti published his influential collection The Early Italian Poets.


In his preface Rossetti, while insisting on the need for inspiration also fully acknowledged the limits that a desire for fidelity imposes:

The task of the translator … is one of some self-denial. […] His path is like that of Aladdin through the enchanted vaults: many are the precious fruits and flowers which he must pass by unheeded in search for the lamp alone; happy if at last, when brought to light, it does not prove that his old lamp has been exchanged for a new one,—glittering indeed to the eye, but scarcely of the same virtue nor with the same genius ...

Golden Age of Russian literary translation.

The 19th century - the golden age of

Russian translation.

If the 18th century had made translation

a professional activity, the 19th c.

raised this activity to the level of high

art.


The new Russian school of translation:

Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826)

Vasiliy Zhukovskiy (1783-1852)


Karamzin regarded translation as an effective tool for

improving a writer’s style as well as an invaluable source

of information.

He saw the purpose of translation in

satisfying curiosity,

establishing historical texts,

entertaining women,

providing material for new magazines,

acquainting Russian readers with books that have not yet

become well known.


Vasiliy Zhukovskiy,“the genius of translation”

(Pushkin).

He translated Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Walter Scott

and other prominent writers.

The range of his creative translation activity

covered a wide variety of genres, from fairy

tales by Charles Perrault and the Grimm

brothers, to Homer’s Odyssey and Old Russian

epic Slovo o polku Igoreve.


Like Karamzin, Zhukovskiy advocated free

translation, which sometimes resulted in

paraphrase or even a new story on the

subject of the source text.


The practice of taking liberties with the

source text was also characteristic of

prose translations of the period.


Irinarkh Vvedenskiy (1813-1855), a very popular

translator of many novels by Charles Dickens

and William Thackeray, justified his free

treatment of the original by the desire to

please the reader, claiming that the

translator had the right to freely recreate the

spirit of the source text, to give a new life to

the ideas of the author in a new situation,

“under another sky”.


Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov made a

significant contribution to the improvement of

literary translation in Russia.

In their poetic paraphrases and imitations they

managed to reproduce the most important

features of foreign poetry and, above all, their

renderings were remarkable works of art in

their own right, in no way inferior to their

original masterpieces.


These free translations served as a model for

other translators and established an

important principle:

a good literary translation should be an

integral part of the national literature

in the target language.


Pushkin always showed great interest in the problems of translation.

He emphasized the importance of the initial selection of the literary works to be translated.

His insistence on faithfulness to the source text along with the high quality and expressiveness of the translator’s literary style was a positive influence on the best Russian translators of the 19th and 20th centuries.


P.Vyazemskiy, N. Gnedich and A. Fet insisted on

complete faithfulness to the source text, on

literalism even at the cost of sense and clarity.

However, they did not always practise what they

preached. Sometimes the translator’s artistic

intuition and talent broke through the barrier of

literalism.


Free translation was sometimes practised as a means

of promoting democratic ideas, which would not

have escaped official censorship in original works.

Some translators introduced in their translations subtle

changes which caused associations with the Russian

context.

It was during this period that using translation as a

vehicle of dissent became part of the Russian

tradition.

Documents

Lecture 6. Translation activity in Europe in the 2nd half of the 18th - 19th centuries