On Translating Goethe’s Faust
1980; Routledge; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/19306962.1980.11787246
ISSN1930-6962
Autores ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesTheodore Savory, in The Art of Translation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), p. 49, has an amusing list of six pairs of contrasting "instructions which would-be translators have received." Bayard Quincy Morgan prefaces his useful "Critical Bibliography of Works on Translation," in Reuben Brower, ed., On Translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 270–97, with a chronological list of contradictory pronouncements about translation made in each century from the fifteenth to the twentieth. In After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975), George Steiner discusses such contradictions at great length, including a fundamental one: translation is impossible, translation is essential.The doctrine is implicit even in Cicero's assertion that he "did not translate ... word for word (verbum pro verbo), but ... preserved the general style and force of the language" (quoted by Morgan, in Brower, On Translation, p. 274); it is implicit in Dryden's theory of paraphrase, through which "the spirit of an author may be transfused, and yet not lost" (quoted by Steiner, After Babel, p. 256). The idea is forcefully if cryptically developed in Walter Benjamin's suggestive essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers," Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), pp. 56–69. And this is, I think, the idea behind Roman Jakobson's doctrine of "creative transposition," tersely presented at the end of his "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation" (On Translation, pp. 232–38). Still more recently, see for example C. G. Bjurström, "Le traducteur dans le texte," in Theory and Practice of Translation: Nobel Symposium 39, Grähs, Korlen, Malmberg, eds. (Bern, Frankfurt and Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1978), pp. 107–116.Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, 14 vols., Erich Trunz, ed. (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1949), III, 27–28. All quotations from Faust are taken from this edition.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, tr. Walter Arndt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 17; Goethe, Faust, tr. Barker Fairley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 12.Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer (1861), in On the Study o f Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer (New York: MacMillan, 1899), p. 235.In Dichtung und Wahrheit, III, 11, for example, Goethe praises Wieland's and Eschenburg's prose translations of Shakespeare; before going on to praise Luther's Bible, he links his argument for prose translation with a remarkable statement about the nature of poetry: "Ich ehre den Rhythmus wie den Reim, wodurch Poesie erst zur Poesie wird, aber das eigentlich tief und gründlich Wirksame, das wahrhaft Ausbildende und Fördernde ist dasjenige, was vom Dichter übrig bleibt, wenn er in Prose übersetzt wird. Dann bleibt der reine vollkommene Gehalt, den uns ein blendendes Äußere oft, wenn er fehlt, vorzuspiegeln weiß, und, wenn er gegenwärtig ist, verdeckt." (Goethes Werke [Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1957), IX, 493). To Americans raised on some form of Robert Frost's dictum that "poetry is that which gets lost in translation," Goethe's statement should come as a salutary shock.George Steiner has an interesting discussion of Goethe's translation theory, with bibliographical references, in After Babel, pp. 256–260.André Lefevere, Translating Poetry (Assen/Amsterdam : Van Gorcum, 1975), pp. 37–42.Richard Macksey, "'Introduction: The Deserted Museum," Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literature Issue: Translation, XC (December, 1975), 733.Cf. Fairley himself on his own version of the "Byron elegy": "[it] reads more like a set of notes than a true poem, though the fault may be mine." (German Life and Letters, XXIII [October, 1969), 60). Fairley's agreeable modesty should not disarm us: what he says here of this section of his work is, alas, applicable to much of his translation–and the fault is indeed his.Bayard Taylor was a poet, too, and he produced a verse translation of Faust that satisfied generations of readers. That was over a century ago, however, and it has often been observed that if great original works grow in time, translations age. I have yet to meet a lover of English poetry who can stomach Taylor today.Examining the verse translations by Charles E. Passage (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) and Philip Wayne (Harmonds worth, England: Penguin Books, 1949), for example, yielded similar (but less interesting) results to those set forth in the present analysis of the more extreme case of Arndt. Such discussion would be less useful than the present one for another reason, too: Wayne's translation does not seem very popular in America; Passage's version, which has received some favorable comment, was out of print the last time I looked.George Steiner, "To Traduce or Transfigure," Encounter, XXVII (1966), 50.It is, I think, the failure to consider the importance of translation which explains the relatively mild treatment that Arndt's version has received from critics. Surely it is a haughty and unex-arnined let-them-learn-German attitude which is responsible for the emphasis of W. Witte's otherwise quite acceptable comments in his review (Times Literary Supplement, November 26, 1976, p. 1481); notice how lightly he passes from the unpleasant task of judging the translation to the pleasant one of applauding the original: "This new translation is a spirited performance, most successful perhaps in the humorous passages ... here the use of present-day colloquialisms and slang maintains the 'fresher diction' which was one of the translator's avowed aims. Whether elsewhere he has succeeded in reaching a higher poetic level than his rivals is rather more doubtful. One cannot but agree with what the editor says in his preface: 'Ultimately there is, of course, no ideal substitute for access to Goethe's German.' He might have left out the ward 'ideal.' There is no substitute."The reasons for the failure of Faust-translations are, of course, not wholly confined to the nature of the work and the translators' strategies and poetic talents. Thus in Proteus, His Lies, His Truth: Discussions of Literary Translation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 169, Robert Martin Adams asks "Why is it that German is relatively easy to translate into, and very difficult to translate out of? Why are German versions of Shakespeare consistently so much better than English versions of Goethe?" To the best of my knowledge, this question (which shows, I note in passing, that at least one distinguished scholar and translator shares my own dim view of English Faust-translations) has not as yet been adequately answered.
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