Saying About Translation

[Laurence Horn]

>'Translations, like wives, are seldom faithful if they are in the least
>attractive.'
>Roy Campbell. Poetry Review (June/July 1949)
>
A couple of possible sources for the disjunctive version:

http://www.cali.co.uk/users/freeway/courthouse/sirthom.html
"The twentieth-century critic Bernard Levin has said that
translations, like women, are either belle or fidèle (either
beautiful or faithful) but rarely both."

http://europa.eu.int/comm/translation/theory/lectures/2001_01_18_history.pdf
Naturally, in an age when translation flourishes, it is regarded as
fundamentally
possible. Translation is commonly described at this time as changing
clothes, as transporting
something in a container, or as pouring a liquid from one vessel into
another. The inside-
outside imagery refers back to theories which conceive of linguistic
form as the outward cover
of an inner, transportable meaning, and thus affirm translatability.
Cast in mimetic terms a
translation is a painted copy, a portrait, or indeed a copy of a
copy, in that the original itself
was already an imitation of nature.
But as Quintilian already remarked, the copy is inferior to its
model. Value judgments
become part of the picture. Translation may be cast as no more than a
partial copy preserving
only the outward form, not the original's inner energy or power, just
as a portrait painter can
copy only the sitter's visible shape, not his or her soul; it is a
rough drawing after the life, a
distorted likeness; a faint echo; a reflected light, like that of the
moon rather than the sun; a
shadow rather than a substance; a disfigured or mutilated body, a
corpse, a carcass, a mummy
(e.g. Anne Dacier in 1699); the reverse side of a tapestry (Lazare de
Baïf in 1537; famously
Cervantes in Don Quixote part two,1615); a muddy stream rather than
clear water (Nicholas
Haward, 1564); fools' gold, or false pearls in place of diamonds (De
la Pinelière, 1635).
This is also where the gendered images come in. The first occurrence
I know of dates from 1603, when the English translator John Florio
apologizes for his translations ("this defective edition") as
"reputed females, delivered at second hand." Around the middle of the
seventeenth century translations are notoriously compared to women:
they can be either beautiful or faithful but not both ("belles
infidèles", after Gilles Ménage's witty remark about Perrot
d'Ablancourt ca. 1654, first attested in writing in translation - in
a Latin letter by the Dutchman Constantijn Huygens).
==================
[but technically, as we should have known, the disjunction REALLY
applies only to Frenchwomen...]

http://personal.vsnl.com/bhargava/BTDeftDefinitions.html
TRANSLATION It is like a French lady. It can either be beautiful or faithful.