Translation, the art of rendering what is written in one language into its corresponding sense in the words of another. Obviously it should first be faithful—a reproduction of the sense and ideas rather than a paraphrase; contrasted with this prime quality all such ends as preserving the colour, the music, the idiomatic vigour, the distinctive manner of the original are counsels of perfection. To translate perfectly is to interpret to the last detail; and to interpret it is necessary to understand. The feeling is more important than the exact word, and the admonition of Dryden may be commended to the adult translator, if not the schoolboy—not 'to lacquey by the side of his author, but to mount up behind him.' It is difficult enough to express one's own meaning to one's wish; doubly difficult is it so to realise another's as to express it as he would have done had ours been his mother-tongue. A literal translation is better than a loose one, but obviously in the case of idioms and metaphors of special meaning the literal rendering cannot be the right one, for in such mechanical transposition the spirit and perfume will be found to have evaporated in the transfusion. 'Translation from one language into other,' said Don Quixote, 'is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and brightness of the right side. Yet,' he continues, 'a man may employ himself in ways worse and less profitable to himself,' and we need not cut ourselves off from some of the richest springs of human thought and experience because the drinking vessels available are seldom of exquisite workmanship. A prose translation of a poem like the Iliad or the Aeneid can be of course only an approximation to the ideal translation—a shadow of the reality, like the music of the sea, heard but in a shell, the colour being lost, the light and shade altered as in a photograph. Yet such translations as those of the Odyssey by Butcher and Lang, the Iliad by Leaf, Lang, and Myers, Theocritus by Lang, Sophocles by Jebb, Pindar by Myers, Virgil by Conington or Mackail, the Inferno by Dr Carlyle or C. E. Norton, the Purgatorio and Paradiso by A. J. Butler, are masterpieces of triumph over the difficulties of their kind. Of all books the Bible, or more strictly the New Testament, loses least in translation, the language being itself a product of a degenerate stage of Greek, the ideas to be conveyed relatively direct and simple, the matter being much more heeded than the manner. Fortunately for our literature the English translation was made at a time when the language had reached its period of fullest simplicity and vigour.
To lay down canons of translation will not help much in the matter, for the best translators are those who possess an individuality as well as their originals, such as Edward FitzGerald, whose versions from Calderon and Omar Khayyam, wide of their text as they frequently are, yet succeed to perfection in reviving in a sympathetic English reader the effects produced by the original. Hookham Frere's free versions of Aristophanes are perhaps the best things of their kind that have ever been done. 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. Or again, the translator should retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be. Such are some of the more or less perfunctory attempts to lay down definitions of translation, and we need only say in short that this, instead of being the easiest, is one of the most difficult of tasks, only to be essayed by men who are at once masters of both languages and of the subject-matter of the book to be translated. What men thus adequately equipped can make of an ancient author we see when we turn to Jowett's Plato, Munro's Lucretius, Conington's Persins, Long's Marcus Aurelius and Epicretus, Reid's Academica and De Finibus of Cicero, Church and Brodribb's Tacitus, also the History by Albert W. Quill, Rann Kennedy's Demosthenes, Jebb's Characters of Theophrastus, Shuckburgh's Polybins, Lewis' Juvenal, Macaulay's Herodotus, Welldon's Aristotle (Rhetoric and Politics), and the Ethics by F. H. Peters, Verrall's Æschylus (Agamemnon and Septem contra Thebas), Dakyns' Xeno-phon; or, of English translations from modern languages, the Thousand and One Nights of Edward Lane, of John Payne, and of Sir R. Burton; the Don Quixote of John Ormsby, and of H. E. Watts; Pascal's Pensées by Kegan Paul; Van Laun's Molière; Carlyle's Wilhelm Meister; and from the old Icelandic, the 'Saga Library' of Morris and Magnusson. Urquhart's Rabelais, Florio's Montaigne (as well as that by Cotton), North's Anyot's Plutarch, Shelton's Don Quixote, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, Philémon Holland's Livy, Hobbes's Thucydides; as also such metrical translations as Gavin Douglas' Aeneid, Harrington's Ariosto, Fairfax's Tasso, belong to a special group in English literature, valued more for their excellent English than for their accuracy. Among modern poetical translations especially notable are Coleridge's Wallenstein, Gifford's Juvenal, Cary's Dante, Calverley's Theocritus, Philip Worsley's Odyssey and that by William Morris, Plumptre's Æschylus, E. D. A. Morshead's trilogy of Æschylus (the Agamemnon better than Milman or Robert Browning), Lewis Campbell's Sophocles, W. H. Pollock's Nuits of Alfred de Musset, Lang's Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, Rossetti's group of translations from Italian poets entitled 'Dante and his Circle.' The difficulty of translating is well expressed in the punning Italian proverbial saying, that the translator is a betrayer (Traduttore traditore). Elphinstone's Martial has the merit of being among the worst, and Dryden's versions of part of Juvenal among the best, of their kind. Horace, the despair of translators, has yet been well treated by Conington and Sir T. Martin; Homer forms a library of itself, famous poetical versions being those by Chapman, Pope, Cowper, and Lord Derby; Chapman preserves the strength of the original, but his fanciful quaintness is a grievous impediment. Pope's Iliad is a noble poem, but, as Bentley said with fatal truth, 'you must not call it Homer.' It lacks its naturalness, its flowing simplicity, the Homeric ideas having gained a completely un-Homeric colour in the crucible of a characteristically 18th-century intellect.
There are some excellent remarks on translation by Jowett, in the preface to the third edition (1892) of his Plato.