Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/273

Rh Carlyle has called the "fine buckram style" of Dr. Johnson; he may use few words or he may roll them out in a rushing, surging flood. But the translator is in all these respects bound by his foreign model; he, more than any other writer, must be possessed of an infinite resource of word and phrase,—because sometimes only a hair's breadth lies between humour and pathos, between the tragic and the grotesque; and that hair's breadth the translator is bound to preserve.

Thirdly, before trying to put into English even some very simple and very brief piece of writing from a foreign pen, it is your duty as a good craftsman to know your author,—not merely to know the one specimen of his work that you are translating but a sufficient number of his volumes to give you the right to claim an intimate knowledge of his style, his structure, his philosophy of life. You may be