Translation a secondary activity
Alexander Fraser Tytler, author of The Principles of Translation the first book exclusively on translation in English, tried to systematize the process of translation further. He outlined three principles:
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The translation should recreate the original
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It should resemble the original in style and manner
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It should read easily like the original
What is significant about the Tytler principles is that they do not give much freedom to the translator. The translator is seen as somewhat less than the writer. Moreover, they assume that there is a spirit or essence of a work of art that is reproducible.
The idea of reproducibility was severely contested in the Romantic Age that believed in the primacy of the imaginative faculty. Poetry was divinely inspired and the real meaning of a poem lay between the lines. The Romantics did not really believe that a poem could be translated. Translation was seen as a secondary and derivative activity that did not require the creative originality of writing. However there were others who perceived translation as a means of communication and therefore to be a category of the human thought process.
A notable figure of the century is that of the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834) who advocated a different language for translation. He wanted word for word translation; he felt that the effect should be one of ‘foreignness’. He was of the view that “the more closely the translation follows the turns taken by the original, the more foreign it will seem to the reader ” (qtd in Venuti, 4). This method was adopted by other translators like William Morris. The Victorians, notably Carlyle and Arnold, and the pre-Raphaelites like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, shared this view. The main drawback of this method was that the translation, because of its ‘foreignness’, alienated the common reader and appealed only to an elite minority. An embodiment of this can be seen in Matthew Arnold’s views on the subject. Arnold advocated an implicit surrender to the SL text without thought for the TL reader. The intention was not to enrich the TL culture, but to bring another work to the reader’s attention.
This attitude is represented by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who translated Dante’s Divine Comedy into English. The other extreme is Edward Fitzgerald who translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Longfellow, because of his reverence, aims to carry across the SL text as it is whereas Fitzgerald, because of his condescension towards the ‘inferior’ SL text, decides to uplift it by ‘englishing’ it. Susan Bassnett terms him “a skilful merchant offering exotic wares to the discerning few.” |
