translator’s interpretive abilities to determine the extent to which a work is focused on form vs. content. Sometimes it’s very clear: a sonnet or villanelle is never accidental; it always shows a conscious formal choice. But even here the translator might be more attracted to the content and be willing to sacrifice some or all of the form (rhyming, the rhyme scheme, meter, the particular meter, the number of lines, the equal length of the lines) to preserve the content. Or as I said above, the translator may consider himself to be (or actually be) incapable of reproducing all or some of the form. Competence is not a prerequisite for wanting to get to know someone or something intimately. We approach a loved one as competently as we can. And often we don’t realize how we can best satisfy. There are modern translators who lean toward the formal end of the fidelity continuum. In the twentieth century, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig translated the Bible into German with the express intent of creating a sensory impression of the original language, to let the reader experience the sound and feel of Hebrew and Greek. Recently an American professor, Everett Fox, did the same thing with the Five Books of Moses, but into English. He wrote in his introduction, “I have sought here primarily to echo the style of the original, believing that the Bible is best approached, at least at the beginning, on its own terms. So I have presented the text in English dress but with a Hebraic voice.”* Modern theorists, as opposed to translators and reviewers, also tend toward the formal end of the continuum. They feel that the reader must be forced to approach the original, not in terms of meaning, but in terms of its forms of thought. The early nineteenthcentury German philosopher Friedrich Schliermacher took this position, and the twentieth-century Spanish essayist José Ortega y Gasset agreed with him: “It is only when we force the reader from his linguistic habits and oblige him to move within those of the author that there is actually translation.”* Of course, literature should also force the reader from his linguistic habits, but there is no more of this in original writing than there is in translation. The most notable contemporary prose translators taking this approach
are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
73
