THE 19TH CENTURY: ROMANTICISM AND

VICTORIANISM
ROMANTICISM: another important landmark in Translation Studies;
Paul van Tieghem defines the Romantic Movement: a crisis of the European
consciousness generated by its essence:
a reaction against Neo-classical ideals of Rationalism and formal
harmony;
stress shifts onto the functions of Imagination.
SHELLEYs Defense of Poesy (1829) centred on IMAGINATION!
- it produces the language for its own needs, i.e. to produce POETRY!
COLERIDGEs Biographia Literaria (1817) his own theory of imagination:
a) PRIMARY IMAGINATION the great ordering principle that makes
PERCEPTION possible;
b) SECONDARY IMGINATION the conscious use of the ordering principle;
- in a poem the 2 parts mutually support and explain each other!
COLERIDGE also distinguishes between:
a) FANCY = the associative power which constructs surface decorations!
b) IMAGINATION = the supreme and organic creative power, opposed to FANCY!

 COLERIDGEs theory has affinities with A. W. SCHLEGELs theory of the

opposition of mechanical and organic form (1809), translated into English in 1813;
- Engl. and Germ. theories raise the question of how to define TRANSLATION
creative or mechanical enterprise?

AUGUST WILHELM SCHLEGEL: all aspects of speech and writing =

TRANSLATION, as they decode and interpret messages;
- the form of the original must be retained!
FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL: TRANSLATION = category of thought!
CONCLUSION
- in the 19th century = two conflicting tendencies;
a) one exalts TRANSLATION as a category of thought;
- TRANSLATOR
a creative genius in touch with the
genius of the original work;
enriches literature and language;
b) one defines TRANSLATION as a mechanical function that makes
known a text or an author (decoding and interpreting of messages);

 FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER (1768-1834) in his lecture On the

Different Methods of Translating delivered to the Academy of Sciences
in Berlin in 1813, undertakes a systematic analysis of the Romantic
concept of translation;
he urges that the reader be brought to the author, that the reader learn
to accept alienation (the later idea of FOREIGNIZATION)
unlike his predecessors, SCHLEIERMACHER first distinguishes
between:
a) the DOLMETSCHER, who translates commercial texts and
b) the BERSETZER, who works on scholarly and artistic texts! =
this is SCHLEIERMACHERs main concern!
PARAHRASE
he also excludes the looser versions of translation
IMITATION
the two basic methods of translation are then:
a) move the reader to the author
b) move the author to the reader

 Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and
moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as
possible, and moves the author towards him.

For in the first case the translator tries, by means of his work, to replace
for the reader the understanding of the original language that the reader
does not have. He tries to communicate to the readers the same image, the
same impression he himself has gainedthrough his knowledge of the
original languageof the work as it stands, and in doing so he tries to
move the readers towards his point of view, which is essentially foreign to
them.
the first method is explained metaphorically:
- it will be perfect in its kind when one can say that if the author had
learnt German as well as the translator has learnt Latin he would not
have translated the work he originally wrote in Latin any differently than
the translator has done.
the foreignizing method challenges the reader and places a strain on the
language of the translation!

 the other case is when:

the translation wants to let its Roman author, for instance, speak the way he would
have spoken to Germans, but Latin; rather it drags him directly into the world of
the German readers and transforms him into their equal

this second method = DOMESTICATION = stipulates that one should

translate in such a way as if the author himself would have written in
the TL!
it was very popular with DRYDEN!
SCHLEIERMACHER sides with the first method, as the casting of the
author as a potential translator of his work
dramatizes
the relationship between AUTHOR TRANSLATOR READER!
there cannot be a third method, with a precisely delimited goal over and
above these two. The two separated parties must either meet at a certain
point in the middle, and that will always be the translator, or one must
completely join up with the other, and of these two possibilities only the
first belongs to the field of translation.
the other method is rather a sort of imitation in disguise.

 in order to move the reader to the author and achieve a good translation, the
translator must adopt an alienating method of translation (as opposed to
naturalizing);
- the translator must valorize the foreign and transfer it into the TL!

MAIN CONSEQUENCES OF THIS APPROACH:

(1) If the reader is to seek to communicate the same impression received
from the ST, this impression will also depend on the level of
education and understanding among the TT readership, and this is
likely to differ from the translators own understanding;
(2) A special language may be necessary, for example compensating in
one place with an imaginative word where elsewhere the translator
has to make do with a hackneyed (worn-out, unimaginative term)
expression that cannot convey the impression of the foreign.
SCHLEIERMACHER proposes:
(1) the creation of a sub-language for the use in translation only;
(2) the modulation of the language acc. to the syntactical and lexical
patterns of the original.
e.g. Greek-like German in Hlderlins translation of Sophocles and
Schleiermachers own translation of Plato!

 SCHLEIERMACHERs theory of a separate language for translations

was shared by important 19th c. translators:
- DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882) who proclaimed the
translators subservience to the forms and language of the original!
FRANCIS WILLIAM NEWMAN (1805-1897) the translator should
retain every peculiarity of the original wherever possible, 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.
To translate Homer suitably, we need diction sufficiently antiquated to
obtain pardon of the reader for its frequent homeliness.
The translators first duty is a historical one, to be faithful.
I am concerned with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible effect
of moderate antiquity while remaining easily intelligible.
CONCLUSION: the entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic,
that of a translator ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and
owe as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by
classical learning.

WILLIAM MORRIS produced deliberately and consciously

archaic, translations, full of peculiarities of language;
THOMAS CARLYLE used elaborate German structures in his
translations from German;
CONCLUSIONS:
- two aspects emerge:
a) an immense respect for the original;
b) the production of consciously archaic translations to be
read by a minority (the intellectual reader).

 reaction came from the outstanding Victorian poet and literary critic,
MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1868) who criticized the pedantry of
authenticity of some of the contemporary translators, i.e.
NEWMAN;
in Lecture One of the series On Translating Homer (1861);
Advises the readers to put their trust in scholars, as they alone can
judge whether the translation is or not in the spirit of the original!
No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the
original; but they alone can say, whether the translation produces more
or less the same effect upon them as the original. They are the only
competent tribunal in this matter.
PRACTICAL ADVICE TO A TRANSLATOR:
(1) I advise the translator to have nothing to do with the questions,
whether Homer ever existed; whether the poet of the Iliad be one or
many; whether the Iliad be one poem or an Achilleis and an Iliad
stuck together; whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement is
shadowed forth in the Homeric mythology; whether the Goddess
Latona in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary, and so on.

(2) I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with constructing a special
vocabulary for his use in translation; with excluding a certain class of
English words, and with confining himself to another class, in
obedience to any theory about the peculiar qualities of Homers style.

(3) Such a theory [of constructing a special language for use in

translation] seems to me both dangerous for a translator and false in
itself. Dangerous for a translator; because, wherever one finds such a
theory announced, (and one finds it pretty often), it is generally
followed by an explosion of pedantry; and pedantry is of all things in
the world the most un-Homeric. False in itself; because, in fact, we owe
to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and
clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the German,
and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome: so that to
limit an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon origin is to
deprive him of one of his special advantages for translating Homer.

(4)

When I say, the translator of Homer should above all be penetrated

by a sense of four qualities of his author; that he is eminently rapid;
that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his
thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in
his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of
his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is
eminently noble.

Hence, the translator must focus on the ST primarily

and must serve that text with complete commitment,
i.e. he must bring the reader to the SLT and he must
use a transparent translation method!

 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1881) he takes

the literalist position to extremes by restricting the translators
function even more, i.e. to the position of a technician!
blank verse translation of Dantes Divina Comedia;
in defence of his translation he stated:
The only merit my book has is that it is exactly what Dante says, and
not what the translator imagines he might have said if he had been an
Englishman. In other words, while making it rhythmic, I have
endeavoured to make it also as literal as a prose translation. In
translating Dante, something must be relinquished. Shall it be the
beautiful rhyme that blossoms all along the line like a honeysuckle on
the hedge? It must be, in order to retain something more precious than
rhyme, namely, fidelity, truth, the life of the hedge itself. The
business of a translator is to report what the author says, not to explain
what he means; that is the work of the commentator. What an author
says and how he says it, that is the problem of the translator.

 EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1863) translated The Rubiyt of

Omar Khayym;
he opposed to LONGFELLOWs view of the translators faithfulness;
although not noted for its fidelity, his version was a high point of the
19th century and was greatly influential;
many of the verses are paraphrased, and some of them cannot be
confidently traced to any one of Khayyams quatrains at all;
he referred to his work as transmogrification (i.e. transformation in
a surprising or magical manner);
My translation will interest you from its form, and also in many respects
in its detail: very unliteral as it is. Many quatrains are mashed together:
and something lost, I doubt, of Omar's simplicity, which is so much a
virtue in him. (letter to E. B. Cowell, 9/3/58)
I suppose very few People have ever taken such Pains in Translation as
I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Cost, a Thing must
live: with a transfusion of ones own worse Life if one cant retain the
Originals better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle. (letter to E.
B. Cowell, 4/27/59)
he perceived the ST as rough clay, from which the TL is moulded.
he sought to bring a version of the SL text into the TL culture as a
living entity.