Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/272

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THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

not be carried over in full measure into another tongue; you must pause and hesitate and reconsider in a constant and ever recurring effort to reduce such sacrifice to a minimum. And for this reason, when you see another translator pushing blithely onward undaunted by such difficulties, the natural conclusion is that he is afflicted with a certain mental color-blindness, serenely unaware that he is missing the more delicate shading of verbal tones.

And the same nicety of sense of the meaning of words, the rhythm and cadence of sentences is demanded of the translator regarding the language into which he is translating. A far greater wealth of resource is needed by him than by the original craftsman. A writer who is doing creative work is free to choose his own vocabulary; he may affect the abruptness and simplicity of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables or he may emulate what

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