Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/61

 translators today would question turning a rhymed, metered stanza into free verse. What they wanted were the verse forms and the vocabulary. Translating quantitative Greek meters into Latin, even then a primarily accentual language, was, according to Peter Glassgold, “a mark of wealth, education, and training to be able to. . . pull it off effectively, to actually get a rhetorical and dramatic effect in the way you wrench your language.” Then, literary translation was a matter of pride in creating difficult yet perfect forms; now it is primarily a matter of doing the author justice.

According to translation historian L. G. Kelly, translators during the Middle Ages were “not concerned with anything but intellectual information.”* D. P. Lockwood wrote that “medieval translations. . . were not regarded as belles lettres. They were a means to an end—a purely professional end.”* The eighteenth century also used translation to serve its ends: “What the Middle Ages shared with the Age of Reason,” Kelly wrote, “was the conviction that the universally human could only be understood in the familiar terms of their own society.”* That is, translators took the content and put it into their own culture’s verse forms, cut out what they didn’t like, and added in their own moral tenets.

As for the Renaissance, according to Antoine Berman, a French translation theorist, “The lettered public of the sixteenth century. . . rejoiced in reading a work in its different linguistic variants; it ignored the issue of fidelity.”* This is an especially difficult thing for us to imagine, but it becomes easier when one realizes that the lettered public of the time was tiny and multilingual. Here were people who actually delighted in reading a work in its Latin, Greek, or vernacular original as well as in its French, Italian, and English versions, often far from what we consider translations. Each work might be in a different form, satisfying different literary tastes, with different voices, tones, even different visions, much the same way different film directors would approach the same novel today. Translators could be much more clearly artists at a time when their role was the same as the author’s: to entertain, to express, to expand their art and their language. Translation in Renaissance Europe was not a palliative for the disease of monoglotism, as it is today; it was a part of literature, a part of the passing of literary traditions and creations from language to language, and a part of 61