Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/261

Rh, as the quotation from James Russell Lowell in the preceding chapter pointed out, is one of the best possible means of acquiring style; and if practised merely as an exercise and without any misplaced ambition for publication, it is a training which cannot be too strongly recommended to the apprentice in the craft of writing. The only trouble with Lowell's utterance is that he limits the value of translation to a single element of style, namely, precision. As a matter of fact, it is one of the most valuable aids which we possess to acquiring an appreciation, not merely of a precision of words, but of new rhythms and new possibilities of linguistic effects. A trained translator of sterling authors soon learns that if he hopes to preserve, with a fair amount of fidelity, the distinctive quality of the original author, he must convey over into his own language something of the linguistic harmony and the Rh