Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/7

 you so admire, say, a French (or Japanese or Nguni) play the equal of King Lear? Odd indeed.

The invisible performance of translation is hard to describe. So translators have come up with all sorts of metaphors and similes for it. The translator is “like a sculptor who tries to recreate the work of a painter,” Anne Dacier wrote in the introduction to her 1699 French translation of the Iliad.* In translating poetry, wrote Petrus Danielus Huetius, a seventeenth-century French bishop and educator, “the most important rule is to preserve the meter and the syntax, so that the poet can be shown to his new audience like a tree whose leaves have been removed by the rigors of winter, while the branches, the roots, and the trunk can still be seen.”* Translators have for centuries used the metaphor of pouring wine from one bottle into another. Rosemarie Waldrop, an American translator from French, has taken this image one step further: “Translation is more like wrenching a soul from its body and luring it into a different one.”*

More recently and scientifically, the American translator from Spanish Margaret Sayers Peden constructed a complex metaphor out of an ice cube: “I like to think of the original work as an ice cube. During the process of translation the cube is melted. While in its liquid state, every molecule changes place; none remains in its original relationship to the others. Then begins the process of forming the work in a second language. Molecules escape, new molecules are poured in to fill the spaces, but the lines of molding and mending are virtually invisible. The work exists in the second language as a new ice cube-different, but to all appearances the same.”* And then there is the metaphor metaphor of Gregory Rabassa, an American translator from Spanish and Portuguese: “all languages are metaphor, and translation, instead of a vertical metaphor, is a horizontal metaphor.”

Here is how the translators of the King James Version of the Bible described translation:

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