Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/276

Rh classic habits of speech and thought, and our own; in the latter, the intention is to disguise these points of difference. The one translation says: here is an unaccustomed road, steep and craggy and full of ruts; jolt over it as best you can. The whole purpose of the other is to make the road so smooth that you almost forget that the road lies in a foreign country.

The words, almost forget, are used advisedly. We have seen that the aim of the ideal translation is to place us as nearly as possible in the place of readers for whom the original is intended. Now, take a French novel, the scene of which is laid in Paris. A Frenchman, reading this novel, would on the one hand feel no sense of strange environment; but, on the other, he would not for a moment lose sight of the fact that the action was taking place in Paris, and there is but one Paris in the whole wide world. Now, in translating,