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also presupposes the certainty of being understood and because
language itself can only be thought of as a product of simultaneous
interaction in which one is not able to help the other, but
everybody at the same time has to carry in himself both his own
work and that of all others. The artist s imagination, too, cannot
be drawn from what is real; it originates in a pure energy of the
mind and in nothing, in the purest sense of that word. Yet as soon
as it has originated it enters life and is now real and lasting. What
man has not created shapes of fantasy for himself even outside the
fields of artistic production or the production of genius often in
early childhood, and what man has not often lived more intimately
among them than among the shapes of the real? How, therefore,
could a word whose meaning is not immediately given through the
senses be totally identical with a word in another language? It
must of necessity exhibit differences and if one makes a precise
comparison of the best, the most careful, the most faithful
translations one is amazed at the difference that is there, where the
translator merely tried to preserve equivalence and identity. It
Longer statements 137
could even be argued that the more a translator strives for fidelity,
the more deviant the translation becomes since in that case it also
tries to imitate fine peculiarities: it avoids mere generalities and
can, in any case, do little more than match each peculiar trait with
a different one. Yet this should not deter us from translating. On
the contrary, translation, and especially the translation of poets, is
one of the most necessary tasks to be performed in a literature,
partly because it introduces forms of art and human life that
would otherwise have remained totally unknown to those who do
not know a language, and above all because it increases the
significance and the expressiveness of one s own language. For it is
a marvelous feature of languages that they all first reach into the
usual habits of life, after which they can be improved on ad
infinitum into something nobler and more complex by the spirit of
the nation that shapes them. It is not too bold an assertion to say
that everything, the highest and the deepest, the strongest and the
most tender, can be expressed in every language, even in the
dialects of very primitive peoples we do not know well enough at
this moment. This should not be taken to mean, however, that one
language is better than another or that some languages are forever
out of reach. It is just that in some cases the tones slumber as in
an instrument that is not played, until the nation knows how to
draw them forth. All signs of a language are symbols; they are not
the things themselves, nor signs agreed on, but sounds which,
together with the things and concepts they represent, find
themselves through the operations of the mind in which they
originated and keep originating in a real and, so to speak, mystical
connection which the objects of reality contain as it were dissolved
in ideas. These symbols can be changed, defined, separated, and
united in a manner for which no limit can be imagined. A higher,
deeper, or more tender sense may be imputed to these symbols,
but this happens only if one thinks, expresses, receives, and
represents them in a certain way. And so language is heightened
into a nobler sense, extended into a medium that shapes in more
complex ways, without any really noticeable change. As
understanding of language increases understanding of a nation
widens. What strides has the German language not made, to give
but one example, since it began to imitate the meters of Greek,
and what developments have not taken place in the nation, not
just among the learned, but also among the masses, even down to
women and children since the Greeks really did become the
138 Translation/History/Culture
nation s reading matter in their true and unadulterated shape?
Words fail to express how much the German nation owes
Klopstock with his first successful treatment of antique meters, and
how much more it owes Voss, who may be said to have
introduced classical antiquity into the German language. A more
powerful and beneficial influence on a national culture can hardly
be imagined in an already highly sophisticated time, and that
influence is his alone. For he invented the established form even if
there is still room for improvement which alone makes possible
the rendering of the ancients into our language, now and for as
long as German is spoken. He was able to do so only because of
his talent and the dogged perseverance that enabled him to keep
working indefatigably at the same object. Whoever creates a true
form may rest assured that his labor will last, whereas even a
product of the highest genius remains without consequence for
further progress along the same path if it remains an isolated
phenomenon lacking in such a form. If translation is to incorporate
into the language and the spirit of a nation what it does not
possess, or possesses in a different manner, the first requirement is
simple fidelity. This fidelity must be aimed at the real nature of the
original, not its incidentals, just as every good translation
originates in simple and unpretentious love for the original and the
research that love implies, and to which the translation must
return. A necessary corollary to this conception is that a
translation should have a certain foreign coloring to it, but the line
beyond which this undeniably becomes a mistake is easy to draw.
Translation has reached its highest goals as long as what is felt is
not strangeness as such but merely a touch of the foreign. Where
strangeness appears as such, probably even obscuring the foreign,
the translator betrays that he is not up to the original. In such a
case the unprejudiced reader s feelings do not easily miss the
dividing line. If a translator goes beyond this, in fearful awe of the
unwonted, and tries to avoid the strange itself, he destroys all
translation and whatever advantages translation may bring to a
language and a nation. Never mind that we have heard it said that
the translator should write the way the author of the original
would have written in the language of the translator, since such a
thought must have been formulated without reflection on the fact
that no writer would have written the same thing in the same way
in another language, except for scientific matters and descriptions
of physical objects. How else can it be explained that not the
Longer statements 139
slightest shred of the spirit of antiquity has entered the French
nation, indeed that not even the national understanding of
antiquity (we cannot speak of single scholars here) has increased in
the least, even though all the Greeks and Romans have been
translated into French and some have even been translated very
well in the French manner?
To come to my own work after these general observations, I
have tried to approximate the simplicity and the fidelity described
above. With every rewriting I have tried to remove more of what
was not contained in the text in the same simple manner. The
inability to reach the characteristic beauty of the original all too
easily entices the translator to lend it a strange glitter from which, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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