674
PARTISAN REVIEW
on French
art
and letters address the student thus: "The reverie, face
to face with wide horizons, serene and tender piety, sometimes even
a real gladness, are blended in those accents, the character of which,
well defined, remains as striking as in former times." One dare not
assume that the secret of such prose has been lost. It was only a few
months ago that the English edition of Simone de Beauvoir's book
about the United States added to her grievous misconceptions about
this country no less grievous misreadings of her text. We could all
smile and make the mental correction when we read there that Ger–
hardt Eisler was indicted for conspiracy, falsifying passports, and "de–
spising Congress"; we recognized translator's English in quaint asides
like "Thirty-six hours in Chicago, this was little"; but there was no
way of guessing the author's mind from misconstrued tenses and
wrong words. Here was an American speaking to Madame de Beau–
voir:
"If
everyone had good faith, all would be well; and he added
forcefully,
'All
would be well.'" This stood for:
"'If
everyone showed
a little good will ['was cooperative' is what I bet he said] things would
go all right, said he cheerfully. And he added with spirit: 'Things
wiU
go all right.' "
I have not said anything about translating poetry, a distinct prob–
lem about which Dudley Fitts, a translator of the first rank, has made
frequent comments in book reviews. He should theorize at greater
length for the benefit of the future Institute, even though verse trans–
lators seldom fail from haste or indifference, and are perhaps not
greatly improvable by instruction. Indeed, Father Ronald Knox's ex–
cellent little book
On Englishing the Bible
would lead one to infer
that in poetical and spiritual matters a good many readers prefer
gibberish and contortions to simplicity and sense. And it could be
argued that if the Western world has survived the dire mistranslations
of the Bible it can survive anything. Are we then to be forced at last
to the conclusion that a rough approximation of anyone's meaning,
that of the saints and the prophets included, is quite good enough
for a busy world? This might be the reason why translators are "a
dispirited race," as Francis Steegmuller recently called them. Were
one driven to believe this, the temptation would be great to retire from
the intellectual scene altogether; retire on a
diete
of dry buns and
beat one's breast with loud lament, or as we say in English, pushing
the cries of a desesperate.
