Hugo Friedrich: On the Art of Translation

The first text included in Theories of Translation, "On the Art of Translation," is a speech given on July 24, 1965 in Heidelberg by Hugo Friedrich, a professor of Romance Languages at the University of Freiburg from 1937 to 1970.  Friedrich is probably most famous for his in-depth study of poetry, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, in which he discusses the interpretation of modern poetry.

"On the Art of Translation," a seemingly short speech, was translated for inclusion in Theories of Translation by Schulte and Biguenet, and is unfortunately cut off toward the end, just before Friedrich embarks on an analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke's translation of a Sonnet IV by French poetess Louise Labé.  Eager to read Friedrich's analysis and to avoid ending the chapter with: "Can we afford to ignore these theories? . . ." I scoured the internet for "Zur Frage der Übersetzungskunst," hoping, at the very least, to find the speech in German so that I could someday slog through it.  I came up completely empty-handed.  As a consolation prize, I stumbled across this gem of a site offering translations of Labé's Sonnet XVIII in many languages, including Vietnamese!

The included portion of Friedrich's speech, like the Introduction, offers a brief chronological overview of translation theory, covering the Roman "conqueror" mentality, the enrichesse of the Renaissance, and culminating with Diderot/D'Alembert and Schleiermacher/Humboldt in the 18th and late-18th/early-19th centuries, respectively.  Beginning with the Roman appropriation of Greek texts – let's not call it translation – Friedrich makes note of Cicero's now-shameful extrapolation of Greek "ideas" and "forms" which he tuned to Latin "conventions of usage" and Saint Jerome's imitation of the same theories for his translation of the Greek Septuagint.  In his treatise De optimo genere interpretandi Saint Jerome writes, "The translator considers thought content a prisoner which he transplants into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror."  A later Roman translation concept bridges the gap between Roman and Renaissance translation practice.  In addition to conquering the source text, the source text serves as a type of muse, inspiring the creation of a better "original text."  In short, the works were in competition.  It's important to note as well that, in Roman translations, no real effort was made to adhere to the stylistic properties of the source text.  Part of creating a better text – if not "better" simply because it was now in Latin – was removing that which may have been awkward, different, or outside of the Latin "conventions of usage" and deposing the original author.

European Renaissance translators, instead of deriving inspiration solely from the "ideas" and "forms" of the source text, used the stylistic elements of the source text as a springboard for bringing new artistic and stylistic elements to their target language.  The approach strove to "enrich" the target language.  As an example Friedrich discusses Malherbe's translation of Seneca's Lucilius letters.  Rather than attempting to emulate Seneca's short, dry, incongruous sentences, Malherbe chose this opportunity to create a wholly new French style.  He added connective material, additional narrative, and explanations. From this "translation," classical French writing is said to have emerged.

Parallel to an emerging linguistic and historical tolerance that came about in the second half of the 18th century, new theories on translation practice developed which – bittersweetly – sought to recognize and do justice to the uniqueness of different languages.  This brought philosophers like Diderot and D'Alembert face-to-face with the "untranslatability" of texts and resulted in a general resignation to translation's impossibilities.  However, from this brief resignation came the recognition of certain linguistic affinities between language and its rhetoric, such as the "total art of language," elocutio, and the "heights and depths of language," genera.  Translators within this new style, admirers rather than conquerors of the foreign, moved toward the source text, occasionally further altering the translation simply "for the sake of its foreignness."  Humboldt and Schleiermacher, the German translator counterparts to Diderot and D'Alembert, were the first to truly embrace this new approach to translation. Of translators, Schleiermacher says that they ought "not to leave the reader in peace and to move the writer toward him, but to leave the writer in peace (i.e., untouched) and move the reader toward the writer."  He further distinguishes between "language as reality," Gegebenheit, and "language as act," Tat, which, to me, attempts to clarify the difference between language as an existent tool and language as a medium for artistic expression.  Within Tat, language becomes a vessel of motive and emerges in the author's style.  Within Gegebenheit, language serves a purely descriptive function and corresponds to a generic word-for-word rendering and passing on of information.  As a result, it is a translator's duty to pay attention not only to the Gegebenheit but more importantly to the Tat of the author's language.

On more contemporary practices (Friedrich died in 1978), Friedrich draws our attention to the common accidental elevation of the translation.  A common problem, he states, among writer-translators, is to ignore the true style and register of the source text, elevating the text in the target language.  This is a phenomenon against which Humboldt warned: "Ambiguities of the original that are part of the essential character of a work have to be maintained...  One can't afford to change something that is elevated, exaggerated and unusual in the original to something light and easily accessible in the translation."