Renaissance periods, translation was seen by many as something asymmetrical and therefore, according to minds reared on the symmetrically-oriented classics, impossible.* By the end of the sixteenth century, the buzzword for what was lost in translation had become “spirit”: the spirit, the soul, of a literary work could not pass through into the translated version.
Shelley was typical of the English Romantics when he wrote in his “Defense of Poetry,” “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principles of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.” Note the subtle change from the spirit of a literary work to the more Romantic spirit of a poet’s creations.
In the twentieth century, Thomas Mann applied this idea to literary prose: in translation “superior prose . . . is denatured, its rhythm is shattered, all the finer nuances fall by the wayside. Often, in fact, its innermost intentions, its spiritual posture and intellectual aims, are distorted beyond recognition, to the point of total misunderstanding, no matter how hard the translator tries for faithful reproduction.”* Mann also wrote that, during her work on an English translation of his Lotte in Weimar, Helen Lowe-Porter said to him with a sigh, “I am committing a murder.”
In the introduction to his collection of essays on Shakespeare in translation, Dennis Kennedy wrote, “Everyone knows that a good and faithful translation of Shakespeare’s text into another language is an impossibility. . . . At best only approximations can be assembled or an alternative poetry substituted.”* Then he went on to provide a list of what he thought was lost in translation, including subtleties, balances, reflections, insinuations, wordplay, suggestion, resonance, harmony, emphases.
Have you ever heard a musician say that it’s impossible, or destructive, to play music, or an actor say it’s impossible or destructive to play roles? Challenging, yes, difficult, demanding, certainly, but only for particular performers and particular roles or pieces of music does unplayability actually come into play. Why is translation plagued with the concept of impossibility, not just of the toughest works or of works that particular translators would find impossible, but generally, philosophically, annoyingly all-inclusively?
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