Let’s do something a bit different this week. This, an essay by Ernet Franklin Bozman, is one of my favourite texts on the subject at hand. Enjoy!

Translation, “Le Style c’est l’homme”

GERMANY

The from the German into the English language translation by no means a so easy task as it appears is. It is ever important for a translator on the one hand to preserve as far as possible the delicate shades of meaning of the author’s thoughts, the height-depth and the light-darkness of his not only never-decreasing but also ever-increasing ego-personality, and on the on the hand to render him into recognizable English while at the same time retaining the wonderfully variable if perhaps rather sometimes often somewhat over-flexible German idiom.

A translation is a union-conjunction of two embodied soul-spirits, the author self-revealed through his writing consciousness for the one part and the translator self-submerged while at the same time self-expressed for the other part. By the finished two-product the reader is enabled to explore through a language perhaps known and perhaps unknown to the author the recesses and abscesses of his mind-brain through the spiritual medium of the interpreter-translator. The author and the translator twin-kindred soul-minds together-linked in self-subconscious personality-union must be; so a wonder-fine translation produced is. Naturally!

FRANCE

To translate from the French tongue is quite another thing. He has it in the French tongue a clarity and lucidity who engages one to logical thought. It is necessary that one knows that which one wants to say, and then says it. With the French it is not necessary to say him two times; one time suffices. Through consequences, then, it is rigorous for the translator to decide what the author wants to say and having decided to select English words who will give him signification. This is not always easy because many of the English words have not of intention; nevertheless one cannot omit them. It is curious. By cause of this it is possible that the traducer loses that which there is to it of clarity within the mentality of the author. Precise thought, that exists not without precise expression; one can hope, nevertheless, that he who reads an English traduction of a French book can ordinarily obtain the original French, to which he can refer when he wishes to discover that which the author wishes to say.

The French books do not cost so dear as the English traductions.

 

RUSSIA

No one can read Russian. That is why their books must be translated. The Russian language is very queer. It is very much like English in many ways, but is has not the jollity of George Gissing or A.E. Housman. Go, little translator, and render the big Russian books into your little mother-tongue.