After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation by Steiner George

Author:Steiner, George [Steiner, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

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In the history and dieory of literature translation has not been a subject of the first importance. It has figured marginally, if at all. The exception is the study of the transmission and interpretation of the Biblical canon. But this is manifesdy a special domain, widiin which the matter of translation is simply a part of the larger framework of exegesis. There is no treatise on translation comparable in definition or influence to Aristode’s Poetics or Longinus on the sublime. It is only very recently (with the foundation of the International Federation of Translators in Paris in 1953) that translators have fully asserted their professional identity, that diey have claimed a world-wide corporate dignity. Until dien Valery Larbaud’s description of the translator as the beggar at the church door was largely accurate: ‘Le traducteur est meconnu; il est assis a la derniere place; il ne vit pour ainsi dire que d’aumones.’ Even today the financial rewards of translation are often ridiculously meagre when compared to the difficulty and importance of the work.1 Though the Index translationum issued annually by UNESCO shows a dramatic increase in the number and quality of books translated, diough translation is probably the single most telling instrument in the battle for knowledge and woken consciousness in the underdeveloped world, the translator himself is often a ghosdy presence. He makes his unnoticed entrance on the reverse of the tide-page. Who picks out his name or looks with informed gratitude at his labour?

On the whole it has always been so. It is doubtful whedier Florio or North would have their modest place in English literature, at least so far as scholars and poets go, were it not for the uses Shakespeare made of Montaigne and of Plutarch. Chapman’s version of Homer lives, under rather false colours as it happens, in Keats’s sonnet. Who can identify the principal translators of Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, or Marx? Who made Machiavelli or Nietzsche accessible to those who had no Italian or German? In each of these cases the moment of translation is that of decisive meaning, the leap from a local to a general force. We speak of the ‘immense influence’ of Werther, of the ways in which the European awareness of the past was reshaped by the Waverley novels. What do we remember of those who translated Goethe and Scott, who were in fact the responsible agents of influence? Histories of the novel and of society tell us of the impact on Europe of Fenimore Cooper and Dickens. They do.not mention Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defaucompret through whose translations that impact is made. It remains a piece of pedantic lore that Byronism, certainly in France, Russia, and the Mediterranean is mainly the consequence of the translations of Amèdèe Pichot. It is the translations into French, English, and German by Motteux, Smollett, and Tieck respectively of Cervantes which constitute the life at large, the intensity in the literate imagination, of Don Quixote. Yet it is only lately that the translator—such as Constance Garnett, C.

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