1536—1546: Ten Years that Changed
The Perception of the Translator
ATA
Chronicle, December, 1995
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Those
who suppose translators lead hard lives today might
want to consider the fate of their Sixteenth Century
colleagues. During the ten years between 1536 and 1546,
three famous translators met their death. One was tortured
first and then burned at the stake in that great center
of civilization, Paris. The second was strangled and
then burnt in the city of Antwerp. And even though our
third colleague died more naturally, it wasn't because
half of Europe didn't long to see him hanged, drawn,
quartered, and impaled in pieces.
In
the most dramatic of these cases, the ostensible reason
for the translator's execution was that he had inserted
three extra words in his translation, words not clearly
present in the original. And in this one particular
case, the "accreditation experts" were at
least literally correct. The original Greek from Axiochus,
a philosophical dialogue attributed to Plato, ran
as follows, as transliterated into English:
Hoti
peri men tous zôntas ouk estin, hoi de apothanontes
ouk eisin· hôste oute peri se nun estin,
ou gar tethnêkas oute ei ti pathois, estai
peri se· su gar ouk esei.
The
translation by Étienne Dolet, our profession's
most famous martyr, did in fact add three extra words
and a great many others besides, though one of his
biographers defends their use as adding to the clarity:
Pour
ce qu'il est certain que la mort n'est point aux
vivants: et quant aux defuncts, ilz ne sont plus:
donques la mort les attouches encore moins. Parquoy
elle ne peult rien sur toy, car tu n'est pas encores
prest à deceder; et quand tu seras décédé,
elle n'y pourra rien aussi, attendu que tu ne seras
plus rien du tout. (Sixteenth Century text as
cited by Ballard and Copley-Christie)
The
Greek is difficult, to say the least, though not because
the words are at all obscure or exotic: in fact any
second-year Greek student is likely to have encountered
them. It is the particle-ridden and elliptical nature
of these outwardly simple words that presents the
problem, and few translators could make any sense
of the passage without adding words to the
text. I will take the easy way out and first translate
Dolet's own translation from the French:
Since
it is certain that death is not at all among the
living: and as for the dead, they no longer are:
therefore, death touches them even less. And hence
death can do nothing to you, for you are not yet
ready to die, and when you have died, death will
also not be able to do anything, since you will
no longer be anything at all.
In
both the French and the English, it is the last three
italicized words that furnished the grounds for execution.
I am grateful to our colleague Dr. John Siolas for
providing a more literal rendering of the Greek text
(which he studied in school), as it highlights some
of the problems this text has presented for various
translators:
Hence,
this is not for those who have lived, and not for
those who have died; therefore, neither one [is]
for you, you have not died, nor have you suffered;
these have not yet happened to you.
Experienced
translators are likely to recognize the nature of
the problem. One requires truly deep knowledge of
such texts to be absolutely certain of their meaning.
So much is elliptical or left unsaid or couched in
extremely simple terms that the worst offense Dolet
can be charged with is perhaps excessive zeal. Unfortunately
his accusers of 1546 were equally zealous, and it
was their judgment which finally brought him him,
at the age of 37, to the stake.
A
humanist to the core, Dolet spent his early youth
in the Montparnasse of his day, the University of
Padua, where pantheism and materialism both flourished,
making it almost de rigueur to deny the immortality
of the soul. Always a bit headstrong, at the age of
only 25 Dolet killed a man, and a part of his life
was spent in prison or on the run. He numbered Rabelais
among his friends.
But
Dolet's greatest interest for ATA members is his work
as a translator and printer. He translated scores
of works himself and published many others by his
colleagues. He is also acclaimed in France as the
first true theoretician in our field, though Luther
or even Cicero might have equal claim.
Such
a title springs from a thin pamphlet of 1540 with
the title La manière de bien traduire
d'une langue en aultre. It reduces translation
to five fairly familiar points, one of which bears
repeating in the light of Dolet's subsequent fate.
Following Cicero, he wrote:
"The
third point is that while translating, you must
not be enslaved to the extent of rendering word
for word. And if anyone does so, this comes from
his impoverishment and deficiency of wit. Because
if he possesses the above-mentioned qualities (which
are needed in a good translator), without having
regard for word order, he will concentrate on the
meaning and handle things so that the intention
of the author is expressed, while heedfully maintaining
the propriety of both languages. And in this regard,
it is excessive superstition (might I say stupidity
or ignorance?) to begin one's translation at the
start of the sentence. But if by reversing the word
order, you express the intention of your author,
no one can take you to task for it. I do not wish
to remain silent here about the foolishness of some
translators, who instead of freedom submit to servitude."
This
rule is routinely followed today by most translators
of literary works, stage plays, advertising texts,
and almost all titles, headlines or slogans, while
even those who work with diplomatic or legal texts
have often found that what may be the mot juste
in one language may not be the mot juste in
another. Granted, this advice may be less useful for
technical translators, though they too are likely
to encounter passages where it makes sense. It might
perhaps prove useful to obtain a ruling from the ATA
Accreditation Committee on Dolet's principle and to
discover whether they would have voted for or against
his execution. The worst that can happen to those
following such a rule today is that they will flunk
our exam. For Dolet the consequences were somewhat
more severe.
The
second translator to die for his transgressions was
William Tyndale, who came close to reaching the ripe
old age of 44. More motivated by religious devotion
than humanist passion, when he was only 20 he was
so impressed by Luther's teachings that his friends
in England expressed alarm. When he proposed imitating
Luther's feat and translating the Bible into English,
he was forced to flee to the then liberal shores of
Germany. He still had to dodge arrest and run from
printer to printer, but he finally succeeded in creating
an English version of both the Christian texts and
the Torah, which were then smuggled into England.
For this feat his fellow church revisionist and fellow
religious scholar Henry VIII put a price on Tyndale's
head and eventually had him arrested in Belgium, where
he was put to death in 1536 after spending a year
in prison. His translation of the Bible is credited
with influencing the later King James version.
The
last of our three "translator-warriors,"
the one man so many would have rejoiced to see crucified,
was the most successful both as a translator and as
a charismatic figure. Let's listen to him talking
about our craft:
And
it's often happened to us that we've searched and
asked for fourteen days—even for three or four
weeks—after a single word, and in all that
time we haven't found it.
And
I don't know if one can express the word Liebe
(love) just as sincerely and fully in Latin or in
other languages, so that it sounds and pounds through
all the senses, as it does in our language.
Dear
friend, now it's in German and finished; anyone
can read and study the text; you can let your eyes
run over three or four pages without ever hitting
on a snag; and you don't even notice the stones
and tree stumps that were there, because now you
pass over all that as though on a well-polished
surface; but we really had to sweat and take great
pains before we could clear that road of stones
and stumps.
In
their homespun, self-promoting, nationalistic tone,
these can only be the words of Martin Luther himself
in his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen of 1530. It
is easy enough to see from these passages how he would
have provoked strong reactions from supporters and
enemies alike.
Until
the passage of these ten pivotal years, translators
in the West had been viewed far more readily as heroes
than as villains. They had opened all the ancient
arts and sciences to the world around them, not only
philosophy, astronomy, and geometry but the more advanced
range of Arab mathematics, not to mention medicine,
optics, and other sciences. They had even opened the
door to the enormously popular studies of alchemy,
geomancy, and astrology. As Giordano Bruno himself
would say: "From translation all science had
its off-spring."
After
1546 this view of our field began to change, as both
Ballard and Steiner observe, and increasing emphasis
would be placed on the inadequacy of translators and
even the translation process itself. Despite the remarkable
work of poet-translators like Chapman, Dryden, and
Pope, it is this view which has largely prevailed
until the present day. Thus, whenever we claim that
we are going to change the public perception of the
translator—which this writer firmly believes
is possible—we are not speaking of a simple overnight
cure but of diagnosing and treating a complex and
durable set of social attitudes, which may indeed
have roots reaching back as long as 450 years ago.
The
author wishes to thank Marie-Madeleine Saphire and
Alex Schwartz for their assistance in researching
this piece.
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