Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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It is disputed what aim a translator should propose to himself in dealing with his original. Even this preliminary is not yet settled. On one side it is said that the translation ought to be such ‘that the reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work—something original’ (if the translation be English), ‘from an English hand’. The real original is in this case, it is said, ‘taken as a basis on which to rear a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers’. On the other hand, Mr Newman, who states the foregoing doctrine only to condemn it, declares that he ‘aims at precisely the opposite: to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be’; so that it may ‘never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material’. The translator’s ‘first duty’, says Mr Newman ‘is a historical one, to be faithful’. Probably both sides would agree that the translator’s ‘first duty is to be faithful’; but the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists.