Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/63

 they had to consciously help create a more sophisticated language in which to be known. “So great was the current prejudice against English,” wrote Conley, “that the translators at first regarded the employment for literary purposes of ‘our corrupt & base, or as all men affirm it: most barbarous Language’ as little more than experimental.”*

Here is Sir Thomas Hoby, from the dedication to his translation of Castiglione’s Courtier (1561):

I wish with all my heart, profound learned men in the Greek and Latin should make the like proof, and every man store the tongue according to his knowledge and delight. . . that we alone of the world may not be still counted barbarous in our tongue. . . And so shall we perchance become as famous in England, as the learned men of other nations have been and presently are.

What a nice view of translation: storing one’s tongue, the way you’d store a pantry to prepare for a great feast. And a great feast it has been. Other than a short period at the end of the Middle Ages, it is only since the advent of Romanticism that fidelity to original and to author has been such a central concern in literary translation. Or, as Kelly puts it, translators began to treat “literary texts as if they were objective.”* In fact, until the end of the seventeenth century, fidelity usually meant not being true to the original’s content, which it generally does today, but rather being true to the original’s poetic form (the novel was still very young in those days).

The concept of fidelity goes all the way back to the classic Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus for those who don’t like to be overly familiar with classical writers) in his handbook on literary style, Ars Poetica, which was a favorite among neoclassicists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Needless to say, a satirist like Horace did not use “fidelity” in a strictly positive sense, but rather ironically: “Do not worry about rendering word for word, faithful translator, but render sense for sense.” However, sense fidelity was not very important to Roman translation, and so this origin of the term is important primarily because of the way it was 63