Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/343

Rh able to enter into the spirit of the foreign text, the student easily seizes the relation between thought and its expression, and the analysis of the expression, needed to render it into French, becomes an intellectual exercise, which brings to his knowledge the genius of two languages and two peoples. If he translates a good author, he forms the habit of expressing in French only just ideas. He rises to the height of the author by appropriating his thoughts: his own conceptions become more clear by the effort he makes to express them clearly. He thus forms a good style, in trying to reproduce in his translation the qualities of the original.

Independently of its special use in giving power of expression, translation is an indisputable source of progress in mental culture. Correct expression and correct thinking are one and the same. Great eloquence implies high intelligence. The act of mind by which a student assures himself of the exact sense of the foreign text, and the search for expressions which shall better render the thought of the author, are operations of high intellectual import. They aid him to express his meaning, to analyze it, and to state it neatly in his judgments and reasonings.

In the efforts of a translator to render the original clearly, precisely, and conformably to the genius of his language, he corrects, expands, condenses his phrases, examines them under the relations of style and meaning. He reflects, observes, compares, judges, chooses understandingly, weighs the import of terms and reasonings, and appeals to analogy, to his recollections, and his own experience. It is this necessity of a complex action of the mind which is the principal merit of classical and literary study.

Some modern languages, as English and German, are rich in works which rival those of antiquity in force, clearness, and grace of expression, while imparting much more by the positive knowledge they contain. They might profitably replace the classics, but they would have to be taught by the French; and then, on the other hand, pupils would have small chance of being able ever to understand and read them like the English and Germans.

It is clear that, for this intellectual gymnastic, the language must be read directly. By so much as one falls short of this, he cannot derive advantage from the reading. In the first exercises of translation, whether we pass from the phrase to the word by the way of reason, or from the word to the phrase by the way of routine, we can neither take in the full import of the text, nor enter into the spirit of the author. We should seek the promptest means to free ourselves from oral translation, which is best done by means of the translation on the opposite page.

Translation, as ordinarily practised, not as an exercise in French composition, but to construe the authors, violates the law of Nature, which requires that we pass from the phrase to the words. In our