670
PARTISAN REVIEW
carp at this and other decisions. There are two schools of thought
about translation, and the professional worker should read the argu–
ments of Tytler, Postgate, Rudler, Belloc, and the rest. For my part,
I side with those who maintain that not poetry alone but even the
flattest of flat prose consists of words plus echoes. Some of these
echoes are fixed (and recognized) in idioms, cliches, and dead meta–
phors; others exist more vagr.antly, in literature, in capricious habit,
sometimes in mere sounds. For example, the young Berlioz writes to
his
father that a piece of music was thirty times more impressive than
he expected. Who does not feel at once that in English "thirty"
is
all wrong? It suggests an exact measurement, our ears demand the
familiar "fifty times." To make thirty equal fifty
is
therefore to trans–
late more exactly, not less.
If
this rule is ill-observed, it is perhaps because carrying it out
would demand encyclopedic experience and attention. Nothing is
more difficult than to keep abreast in two languages of the ceaseless
variations of rank, color, and popularity within the vocabulary. To
take a trivial instance, how could a non-resident foreigner learn that
in
American English the simple word "appliance" is almost never
spoken, though it appears on nearly every hardware shop and the
letterheads of countless manufacturers? Out of such minutiae arise the
differences between Britain's English and ours-differences which, as
they affect literature, have just recently been charted by Mr. G. V.
Carey in his little book,
American into English.
How much more pro–
found and harder to chart the differences between languages that are
only cognate, and that keep shifting independently, with no contacts
save through translators themselves!
III
From here on the consideration of linguistic detail merges
with the great questions of cultural exchange, political friction, and
popular superstition. The unsophisticated American returns from his
first trip abroad convinced that the entire French people is touched
with philosophy and hourly inspired to the picturesque because the
common folk use such delightful latinized expressions. In reverse, I
have listened to a demonstration showing that the phrase "How do
you do" could only become current among such practical peoples as
