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PARTISAN REVIEW
in Mr. Leon Edel's biography of Henry James: "Dressing the balance
between remaining abroad and returning home, James etc." Mr. Edel
writes .and thinks in French as easily as in English and he undoubtedly
thought:
dresser le bilan,
but understanding the phrase full well he
translated only half of it. In the nature of things, I can only men–
tion, not specify, other types of blunder that, like everybody else, I
must have made in the course of scholarly work, when translating
from languages that one can read and "understand," but that one
will never know as strictly as one must in order to put oneself for–
ward as a translator.
Blindness being the fundamental, hidden, and recurring diffi–
culty, it must be consciously and perpetually guarded against. For–
tunately there are tricks and tools that the careful workman can use.
One obvious device is to lay aside the first draft of the translation
until the original has faded from the mind, and to take it up for
revision by itself, quite as if it were an original composition. It
is
easy then to catch some of the unnatural turns. But the laying aside
requires time, for the primary idiom lingers
in
the memory an aston–
ishingly long while; and, reviving at sight of the equivalent, makes
deceptively meaningful whole sentences that are in fact senseless to
the monolingual reader for whom they are intended. Many translators
cannot afford the pause; others, as they have told me, do not recog–
nize the need. They work as
it
were always in the teeth of the original
and think they are thereby insuring fidelity. It is painful to reflect
that we may owe to this misguided zeal the faults that mar most of
Croce's works in English and many a dubious passage in the devoted
rendering of Gide's
Journal-four
volumes which will not soon
be
done again, but in which we read, for example, that a play of
Moliere's ends "atrociously" when Gide means "cruelly"
(atroce–
ment);
and in which the purity of style the author prized so highly
is blemished by continual lapses from idiom: "it is not one of the
least interests of this book," etc.
A second point of method for the translator is to bring to con–
sciousness all the differences of form, rhythm, sense, and habit that
he can find between his two languages. (I assume that no translator
other than a hack or a genius will attempt more than two, and to
simplify discourse I
shall
continue to generalize from the experience
of turning French into English.) Any published translator
will
tell
