Evolution of Translation in Europe During the 18th-19th Centuries

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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

5. Views of German romanticists on translation. French cultural predominance was reflected in many German imitations of French literary models and translations from French into German.

6. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

7. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

8. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

9. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

10. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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’).

11. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

12. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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”.

13. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

14. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

15. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

16. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

17. Views of German romanticists on 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.

18. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

19. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

20. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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).

21. Views of German romanticists on translation. Two basic methods of translation proper: moving the author to the reader (naturalization method) or the reader to the author (alienation or foreignization method).

22. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

23. Views of German romanticists on translation. In his lecture, Schleiermacher criticizes this formula implying that this method often turns out to be imitation in disguise.

24. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.

25. Views of German romanticists on translation. 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.’

26. Views of German romanticists on translation. And while at one point Schleiermachertalks 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.

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

28. Views of German romanticists on 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.

29. 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.

30. Translation activity in England. 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.

31. Translation activity in England. 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.

32. Translation activity in England. 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)

33. Translation activity in England. 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.

34. Translation activity in England. The translator, in effect, functions as a kind of censor, who always has the true interest of author and reader in view.

35. Translation activity in England. 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.

36. Translation activity in England. 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.

37. Translation activity in England. 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.

38. Translation activity in England. 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.’

39. Translation activity in England. 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 …

40. Translation activity in England. 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)

41. Translation activity in England. 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’.

42. Translation activity in England.

43. Translation activity in England. 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.

44. Translation activity in England. 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’.

45. Translation activity in England. 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.

46. Translation activity in England. 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.

47. Translation activity in England. 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.

48. Translation activity in England. 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.

49. Translation activity in England. Arnold’s authority was widely acknowledged in the 19th century and well in the 20th. Newman’s practice was largely ignored.

50. Translation activity in England. 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.