Date: Fri, 9 Jul 99 08:34:16 CST
From: Jim Marchand <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Translation - Commentary
Thanks to everybody who has e-mailed me to help in my quest for a quotation:
The best commentary is a translation, or words to that effect. I went back
to that heisser Typ Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, "Was ist
Uebersetzen?" _Reden und Vortraege von UW-M_ 3d ed. (Berlin: Weidmann,
1913), 1-29. I have never been a W-M fan, and I am less so now, though he
does have some good tour-de-force translations into 3d C. Greek. Anyway, he
does not say what I wanted _expressis verbis_, but the notion informs his
whole article, which nails home the point that only the philologist ought to
translate. Having once, many years ago, been a Professor of Germanic
Philology, I felt warm inside.
A great place to look for quotations on translation, BTW, is B. Q. Morgan's
Bibliography, appended to Reuben A. Brower, ed., _On Translation_ (Harvard
UP, 1959), 270-293. He will lead you to W. F. Leopold's review of the
English translation of Cassirer's _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_ in
_Language_ 31 (1955), p. 78: "... every act of translation is an act of
interpretation." Another interesting title for a rather rambling article
that makes the same point: Smith Palmer Bovie, "Translation as a Form of
Criticism," In _The Craft and Context of Translation_, ed. William
Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck (University of Texas Press, 1961), 51-76. I am
still lacking that pithy formulation, but I am going to go with these.
Traduttore ??
Jim Marchand.
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