Category: Uncategorized

In order to determine precisely how and when Monamy made use of the graphic aids available to him, in my view it is necessary to start by concentrating first on the depiction of the lighthouse, and for the time being to ignore the composition of the background shipping.

To the left are two prints showing Winstanley’s first construction. The upper is the earlier, “Drawn at ye Rock by Jaaziell Johnston, Painter”, which was engraved and issued in 1698. Another print of the second tower was issued after its construction in 1699.

The lower print is based on the upper, and was engraved by Henry Roberts, 1761, after the completion of Smeaton’s lighthouse in 1759, and issued in connection with Smeaton’s account of its construction. Roberts also engraved a print of the second construction at the same time: see here.

There can be no doubt that Monamy’s painting portrays this first Winstanley construction. It would also seem reasonable to assume that he made use of the earlier engraving.

There were, however, other drawings of this lighthouse. Alison Barnes has generously directed my attention to an entry in the Calendar of Treasury Papers, Jan 7, 1702, Vol LXXVII, p 6, which shows that Thomas Baston “….. by the King’s order, through Major Gen Trelawny, … made a draught of the lighthouse on the Eddystone near Plymouth, which the King then had at Kensington, and that afterwards, by his express orders, a second draught of the same, much larger, and according to the new alterations, which were then made, in that lighthouse, together with the draughts of several of the King’s ships of war, which after much pains and six months labour, he performed to general satisfaction, and delivered to the King at Hampton Court …..”

Besides the print, therefore, Monamy could have made use of Johnston’s original drawing, or Thomas Baston’s drawing, and it is apparent that Winstanley himself made drawings, as well as a wooden model.

There are salient additions and differences between Monamy’s painting and the engraving after Johnston, discussed below.

The most obvious and striking differences are the long projecting arm with the red ensign; the vestige of what looks like a central door to the left of the ladder; and the head-on view of the rock on which the lighthouse stands. It is clear that Monamy also made use of a drawing by the Younger van de Velde, reproduced further down.

Why does it age and eventually depart, and where does it go? The search for survival begins, and curiosity engenders science, pure and applied. Intellectual necessity begets invention. He, more probably than she, lifts his head — are wolves the only other animals to notice the sky? Dogs will also bark at the full moon — and sees the sun, moon and stars. A vengeful deity is conceived. Man is reborn from woman, but powers exerted by more distant bodies direct life’s daily round. The sun and rain impregnate the earth, the moon regulates ovulation, there are patterns in the stars. Is there some veiled link between the vaults of heaven and the lap of nature?

BYNG’s BATTLES

Cape Passaro 2

To the left, a detail of a map of Sicily from Ottens’ Atlas, 1745.

Below, an attempt to reconcile the several ship encounters depicted in the oil painting with Monamy’s pen and wash sketch. There are many differences, and since his handwriting is an almost illegible shorthand scrawl any successful further elucidation seems doomed to be minimal. The descriptive texts by Byng, Charnock et al are also enlisted to try to solve the puzzles.

The engagements separated into boxes 1, 6 and 7 on the previous page, and below, appear to be the most straightforward, followed by box 2. Information becomes progressively less detailed for the remaining boxes, and the ink sketch is no great help, as it represents the actions comparatively realistically, which does not agree easily with the schematic rendering in the painting.

Box 7: The Principe de Asturias, Rear-Admiral Chacon, was an English-built ship formerly named the Cumberland captured by the French in 1707. Built for 80 guns, she carried 70 in Spanish hands. The Grafton first engaged her, then left her for the Breda and Captain to take.

“The Montagu and Rupert took the Volante“: Byng’s despatch.

Box 6: The note to the painting reverses the positions of the Rupert and the Montagu from their places in the sketch. It may be that the identifications in the notes are based on the colours of the squadron ensigns being flown.

“The Montagu and Rupert took the Volante“: sketch.

Box 2: The notes state that one of the two nearer ships of the White is probably the Superbe. In the sketch, below, the names of the Superbe and the Real San Felipe seem reasonably clear, allowing for a creative and arbitrary spelling, but the situation is depicted very differently. What must be an English ship, judging by its ensign, lower left, might possibly represent the Kent.

The Real Phillip and Superbe. Top right, the San Luis and San Fernando galing away from the Barfleur.

From Byng’s despatch: “About one o’clock, the Kent and Superbe engaged the Spanish Admiral (in the Real San Felipe), which with two ships more fired on them, and made a running fight until about three; when the Kent, bearing down upon her, and under her stern, gave her a broadside and went away to leeward of her. Then the Superbe put for it, and laid the Spanish Admiral on board, falling on her weather quarter; but the Spanish Admiral shifting her helm and avoiding her, the Superbe ranged up under her lee quarter; on which she struck to her.” Whether this account is accurately represented in the sketch is for someone with a knowledge of naval battle-tactics to say.

The sketch and the painting are juxtaposed above, showing reasonable correspondence between the engagements located in boxes 1, 2, 3, 6, and 8. Box 5 doesn’t seem to feature in the sketch at all. It is difficult to equate Box 4 with box A in the sketch, since they are not in the same position and involve different numbers of ships. Box 7 appears to be more or less in the same position as the engagement labelled B in the sketch, involving the Principe de Asturias, the Breda and the Captain, as outlined at the top of this page. It is labelled B because there is some doubt as to whether the scribbled names below can be made to read accordingly.

Perhaps the names really do read Captain, P Asturias and Breda, after all.

Boxes 3, 4 (A), 5, and 8 are discussed on the next page.

TRANSLATION AND STYLE

by Murat Nemet-Nejat

[edited]

Understanding translation is embedded in the concept of faithfulness. What is a faithful translation? The traditional answer is Platonic, best represented in our day by the critic George Steiner, especially in his introduction to the The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation (1966). According to this view, the original poem exists in an ideal, static state, and the translator attempts to transmigrate this ideal totality into the second language. Since two languages never “mesh perfectly,” a translation can never be completely successful; something is lost. Steiner quotes Du Bellay to that effect: “That it is untranslatable is one of the definitions of poetry. What remains after the attempt, intact and uncommunicated, is the original poem.”

In this traditional approach, completely successful translations are rare, discontinuous, mystical happenings, “a medium of communicative energy which somehow reconciles both languages in a tongue deeper, more comprehensive than either.”

The problem with the traditional, Steiner approach is that it is ahistorical, empirically incorrect. Major achievements and transformations in a language are often associated with translations. To cite only English cases, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Sidney’s translations from Petrarch, the King James version of the Bible, Ezra Pound’s The Seafarer from the Anglo-Saxon and Exile’s Letter from Li Po, each of which played a key role in reorienting the English language.

These translations are based on a different concept of faithfulness. They fragment the original totality, starting with a conception of “lack.” The translation senses a quality in the original language, reflected in the original poem, which the second language lacks. The translator is faithful to this conception and tries to recreate it in the second language. A translation in this sense starts with criticism and ends by pointing, not to the first, but to the second language. It explores the second language and, if successful, changes it by assimilating this lack. I define this kind of translation a transparent text.

The ideal of transparent translation is not to be perfect in terms of a Platonic concept of wholeness but to create shifts in the second language. In fact, subtle distortions due to fragmentation and misreadings caused by the central vision of lack are integral parts of it, often pointing to some of its most successful moments.

One quality often regarded as a virtue in the traditional approach is a red flag of failure in the transparent translation: making the language of the translation so natural as though it were a poem written in that language, not a translation at all.

This is the sure sign of a bad translation, not worth reading. A successful translation must sound somewhat alien, strange, not because it is awkward or unaware of the resources or nature of the second language, but because it expresses something new in it. The best ones remain strange even after poems deriving from them make them more familiar. They affect the course of a language without being entirely part of it. A translation completely assimilated into the conventions, norms, of the second language, solely acceptable in its terms, is a failure.

This strangeness endures because in a transparent translation, style often precedes meaning, which, in the form of theme or feeling, is transformed when attached to stylistic expansion. A transparent translation always has an independent stylistic identity. This is why Walter Benjamin says in his essay, The Task of the Translator, that meaning is attached to a translation “loosely.” In original poems, style appears contingent on meaning, more integrated with it.

In its suggestiveness describing the relationship between two languages during translation, Benjamin’s essay is a powerful text. At its centre, it asserts that it is the foreignness of a work that makes it translatable: “The higher the level of the work, the more does it remain translatable, even if its meaning is touched upon fleetingly.” This thought is one step from the concepts of lack and fragmentation, which define transparent translation. But Benjamin’s ideas are, linguistically, intricately linked to, dominated by Hegelian idealism, which contradicts and finally thwarts their developments. He sees a perfect translation to reside in an ideal, pre-Babel state; a “hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfilment of languages.” This concept is regressive in two ways. First, it retains the ghost of a perfect match, which his essay also negates. Steiner’s introduction is a restatement of the idealistic side of Benjamin’s text. Second, it leaves Benjamin completely silent on the relationship of the translation to the second language.

The present essay tries to demythologize Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator from Hegelian idealism to the American practicality, by fragmenting and exploiting contradictions inherent in it. The focus here is the relationship of a translation, not to the first, but to the second language —– different ways in which that language is altered and expanded.

The Seafarer is, along with the Exile’s Letter, perhaps the major transparent translation in the twentieth century in English. Pound’s focus in translating this poem is sound, the harsh sound he hears in Anglo-Saxon. The Seafarer is part of Pound’s “heave to overthrow the iambic.” The result is not a natural English poem recreating the syntax and the meter of the original; its purpose is rather to force a shift from vowels to consonants as the organizing principle of a poem in English. By making the substance of the language more palpable, through inversions and abundance of consonants, it opens the door to making language itself a subject matter, the equivalent of Picasso’s and Braque’s revolutions in sculpture, “Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries.” There is a direct link between The Seafarer, Louis Zukofsky, and the language poets.

In a successful transparent translation, much more than the surface gets transposed: “He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having/Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight…” “Winsomeness” is a medieval, not an Anglo-Saxon concept. In this subtle distortion, at this moment, The Seafarer is a translation from a Provençal poem.

The theme of exile itself is another dimension that The Seafarer transposes from Anglo-Saxon into English. Not only does it appear in the figure of Ulysses at the beginning of The Cantos, but, as Charles Bernstein pointed out, for Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Reznikoff, English was not the language they grew up in. In fact, as writers, they tended to treat it as a foreign language. Their works can be seen as translations, transparent texts, from their alien language, English, into their private idioms, a reason for their strong stylistic identity. Their relationships to English are those of linguistic exiles. The Seafarer creates a shift in English which is not in the original. It points out that a plastic involvement with language entails a distancing between the writer and the language —- and consequently between the writer and the audience. The Anglo-Saxon original was a poem accompanied by music, implicitly for an audience. The Seafarer is a poem to be read by an individual. Finally it is the most radical, significant bent Ezra Pound creates in the original.

I, Orhan Veli (Hanging Loose Press, 1988), consisting of my translations of poems by the Turkish poet Orhan Veli (1914-1950), is another example of a transparent translation. Its purpose is to alter intimacy, between reader and poem, by redefining colloquial speech. On the one hand, it possesses, I hope, the sounds, the smells, the music of a strange city, Istanbul; on the other hand, the voice feels very much as if it belonged to New York, like a New York voice.

This contradiction is at the heart of the shift I, Orhan Veli tries to create in contemporary colloquial speech. In American speech, colloquialism is often associated with natural speech. informality and streetwise humor. Though I, Orhan Veli reflects that, it also has a contemplative, melancholy, lyrical dimension. It is this dimension which is new and which sounds Turkish in the poems. It makes the colloquial speech as though the reader were walking side by side with the poet, overhearing his conversation.

This intimacy is reinforced by the way these translations alter the concept of poetic closure. Generally, Orhan Veli’s poems and these translations end where the subject matter ends, not where the poetic tradition expects them to end. The result is a seamless clarity, language pushing away from itself, losing body, as though these were not poems but overheard pieces of conversation. This helps replace the figure of the exile, the solitary prophet, by a friend.

I, Orhan Veli‘s colloquialism is not really daily speech. It is a very terse, precise abstraction from it, its stylistic, plastic identity as a translation. The purpose of I, Orhan Veli is to create a clear hard-edged sharpness, also relaxed and intimate. It is an offshoot of the clarification, at moments the spiritualization, of language that Pound started in Cathay, particularly with Li Po’s Exile’s Letter, and which poets on and off —- T.S. Eliot in the garden sequence of Burnt Norton, a good portion of Charles Reznikoff, John Yau’s A Suite of Imitations After Reading Translations of Poems by Li He and Li Shang-Yin —- try to continue.

Talisman, 1991 (Spring 6), pp. 98-100.

back to pound note

If anyone can supply further details of the provenance of this essay, please mail cichw-0@cichw.net.

Smeaton built his house to last, in stone. It was meticulously planned, all the way, and, remarkably, outlasted the rock it was founded on.

When replaced by the Douglass tower, it was dismantled and re-erected in Plymouth, where it may still be seen.

Och en mot tio ställdes
af retad Vasason.
Der flydde hvad ej fälldes,
det var hans lärospån.
Tre konungar tillhopa
ej skrefvo pilten bud.
Lugn stod han mot Europa,
en skägglös dundergud.

Gråhårad statskonst lade
de snaror ut med hast
den höga yngling sade
ett ord och snaran brast.
Högbarmad, smärt, gullhårig
en ny Aurora kom:
från kämpe tjugoårig
hon vände ohörd om.

Der slog så stort ett hjerta
uti hans Svenska barm,
i glädje som i smärta,
blott for det rätta varm.
I med och motgång lika,
sin lyckas överman,
han kunde icke vika
blott falla kunde han.

Se, nattens stjernor blossa
på grafven längese’n,
och hundraårig mossa
betäcker hjeltens ben.
Det herrliga på jorden
förgänglig är dess lott.
Hans minne uti Norden
Är snart en saga blott.

Dock — än till sagan lyssnar
det gamla sagoland
och dvergalåten tystnar
mot resen efterhand.
Än bor i Nordens lundar
den höga anden qvar
han är ej död, han blundar:
hans blund ett sekel var.

Böj Svea, knä vid griften,
din störste son göms der.
Läs nötta minneskriften,
din hjeltedikt hon är.
Med blottadt hufvud stiger
historien dit och lär,
och Svenska äran viger
sin segerfana der.

Esais Tegnér, 1818

Not ten to one appal
The angry Vasa’s son;
Those fled, who did not fall:
So was his course begun,
He drove three Kings asunder,
Who leagued against him stood;
And Europe saw with wonder
A beardless Thundergod.

Old grey-haired schemers muttered
Their plots with wily care
The brave young hero uttered
One word, and burst their snare.
High-bosomed, goldhaired, slender,
A new Aurora came:
From his throne’s young defender,
The temptress turned in shame.

So great a heart was heaving
In his true Swedish breast,
In gladness, or in grieving,
Justice he loved the best.
Though fortune smiled or lowered,
He dauntless kept the field:
He could but be o’erpowered,
He knew not how to yield.

The stars have long been glowing
On his sepulchral stones;
A century’s moss is growing
Above the hero’s bones.
Thus glory passes forth,
So soon its records fall:
Their echo in the North
Is but an old man’s tale.

Still is the old land hushed,
The tale still calls up wonder,
Low dwarfish sounds are crushed
By the old giant thunder.
Still in our Northern numbers
The lofty spirit burns;
It is not dead, it slumbers,
Its hour of pride returns.

Kneel, Sweden, where reposes
Thy greatest, noblest Son;
The crumbling stone discloses
The honour thou hast won.
There bards, to read his story,
Come reverently bare;
And Sweden’s flag of glory
Is dedicated there.

J.E.D.Bethune, 1848

So one at ten was pitted
By Vasa’s angered son,
And all unfelled had fled when
Their lesson’s day was done.
Three hostile kings united:
The boy stood like a rod,
And calmly faced Europa,
A beardless thunder-god.

As grizzled statesmen plotted
With hasty craft their trap,
The lofty stripling uttered
One word their snare to snap.
Full-bosomed, slender, golden
Aurora came one day:
The warrior of twenty
Turned her unheard away.

So great a heart was beating
Within his Swedish breast,
In gladness as in anguish
Alone for what is Just.
Alike at flood or ebbtide
Too resolute to quell,
The overlord of fortune,
He fought until he fell.

See! Stars of night an epoch
Upon his grave have shone,
And mosses now centennial
Bedeck the hero’s bone.
All glory that is mortal
Is fated so to fade.
His name in Northern story
Will soon be just a shade.

Yet — to the tale may hearken
This ancient saga-land,
And dwarfish talk fall silent
When giants rise to stand.
Still in the Northern forest
The noble spirit stirs,
Not dead, but sleeping merely:
His sleep, one hundred years.

Kneel, Svea, by the graveside,
Thy greatest son here dwells;
And scan the worn memorial
Thy epic story spells.
All history, bare-headed,
Will to this place repair,
And Swedish honour hallows
Her victory-banner there.

CHW, 1998

“On the 27th June 1682, was born King Charles the Twelfth, a Man the most extraordinary, perhaps that ever appear’d in the World.” With these words in 1732, from the first English translation of Voltaire’s vividly readable Histoire de Charles XII, the legend of the adamantine warrior received an indelible imprint. The French original was first published in 1731, and remains one of the most frequently re-issued and re-translated works in literary history. Rigorously nurtured in the Protestant religious ethic by devoted parents, Charles placed his deceased father’s crown on his own head, at the age of fifteen. Three years later, in 1700, Sweden’s then extensive Baltic and North German territories were opportunistically attacked by a coalition of three kings ruling four countries, Russia, Poland, Saxony and Denmark. Charles spent the remaining eighteen years of his life at war, leading the resistance to this onslaught in person. The first nine of these eighteen years were attended by unparalleled success, followed by nine years of virtually unremitting defeat. By 1721 a diminished Sweden was left to lick her wounds in peace. Charles had been killed in 1718, murdered, according to the latest investigations, by a ball fired from close range, encased in the brass or silver metal of one of his own coat-buttons.

Voltaire set the mould for an enduring legend, but the panegyrists were engaged from the moment of Charles’s shattering first victory over the Russians at Narva on the Baltic coast in the early months of the war, the news of which spread rapidly throughout Europe. In 1951 Olov Westerlund published his doctoral dissertation at the University of Lund, Karl XII i Svensk Litteratur, a 350 page study in the ways of poetic iconography from Dahlstierna (1661-1709) to Tegnér (1782-1846). This analysis of myth-making could rank with The Road to Xanadu by J.L.Lowes, and it demonstrates that almost every line of Tegnér’s poem on Charles XII has its origin in the effusions of the preceding hundred years.

Tegnér’s centenary verses were a milestone in the long process of debate on the character and historical significance of Charles and his Great Northern War, in which the human individual has now almost vanished under successive layers of hagiography and censure. Westerlund reveals that one of the king’s most virulent critics in the mid-18th century was a man at least as extraordinary as himself, Emanuel Swedenborg. Attitudes to Charles XII within Sweden, which hardened against him as his star began to fall, have always been subject to swings of hero-worship and denigration. It has proved almost impossible for Swedes to reach a consensus in weighing reverence for their boy David, against the fact that his obsessive pursuit of his hydra-headed Goliath merely led to the collapse of their 17th century European status. A well-judged biography by Bengt Liljegren, published in 2000, may finally have achieved the desirable balance of passion and objectivity.

In a trenchant article in Tidningen Boken, 1998, a Swedish historian and novelist, K. Arne Blom, expressed his concern with the devaluation of Sweden’s historical and literary heritage. In his view a major victim of this revisionism is Esaias Tegnér, who can fairly be described as his country’s first international best-selling author. Within 15 years of its appearance in 1825 his principal work, Fritiofs Saga, had been translated, partially or completely, twenty times, and the present reckoning is reputed to be once at least into every European language, as well as twenty-two times into English, and twenty times into German. The basic theme of this verse epic is the continuity of human values underlying the transition, during the Viking age of Scandinavia, from paganism to Christianity. Tegnér ended his life as a bishop, albeit of an unorthodox sort. Apart from his poetry, his work centred mainly on education and pan-Scandinavian cultural enfranchisement.

Until about the mid-1960s Tegnér’s summation of the memory of Charles XII would have been known to every Swedish schoolchild. Although anthologies of pre-modernist Swedish poetry occasionally appear in English, one of the latest being The North! To the North!, by Judith Moffett, published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001, the only known previous attempt to translate Tegnér’s extremely familiar lines has been by J.E.D.Bethune, in his Specimens of Swedish and German Poetry, 1848.

Few translators of formal, rhymed, metric, 18th and 19th century verse seem able to resist expressing their contempt for the efforts of their predecessors, and Bethune is no exception. Disingenuously admitting that “I have not myself attempted a version of Frithiof”, he rides into an attack on those that have, with “I am ready to allow that all the previous English translations of Frithiof are indeed very bad”, and singles out that of George Stephens, 1839, as the worst of the lot. It is true that Stephens, a pioneering runologist who spent most of his life in Denmark, appears to have no ear whatsoever for the rhythms of English verse. A much later translator, C.D.Locock, 1924, agrees that Stephens’s “versification can only be described as ludicrous”, but concedes that as regards the first essential prerequisite, “The reproduction ….. of the author’s meaning”, it is “almost too unimpeachable”. In Stephens we perhaps have a significant forerunner, in the advocacy of literal translation, to no less a practitioner than Vladimir Nabokov.

The fact is that a poet, whatever s/he writes and whether in a style of the strictest traditional formality or the most outré avant-garde, is expressing his/her love-affair with his/her mother-tongue. For any poet older than about fourteen there can be no fully acceptable surrogate in this relationship. How then is the well-meaning translator to tackle his/her self-imposed and thankless task? Another of Tegnér’s translators, Clement B.Shaw, in 1908, set out a number of rules, of which the following are only a sample: “A translation should produce the effect of the original. But this identity of emotional effect is by no means always to be secured by literal rendering ….. Moreover, the translator must translate — must faithfully reproduce the matter of the original, — no more, no less ..… One must not depart from his course for a rhyme too good to be lost; must not employ ‘mountains’ to rhyme with ‘fountains’, when the original does not allude to mountains.” Shaw’s native origins are plainly evident from this excerpt. He, too, can only disparage his predecessors: “no European English paraphrase of Frithiof’s Saga preserves the Tegnerian measures with enough felicity even to evince literary courtesy to the great poet. Yet each translator claims to have done this very thing”. However, he reserves “very high indorsement (sic)” for two American translations, “the works of Mr and Mrs Holcomb, and of Professor Sherman. No consideration of nationality prompts the opinion that these two translations have not been equaled (sic) in England.”

Devotees of Nabokov’s masterpiece, Pale Fire, may surprise themselves with a start of recognition at Shaw’s instancing the rhyme of “fountains” with “mountains”, and might wonder if the well-read polyglot was also familiar with the numerous English paraphrases of Fritiofs Saga. Yet another of its British translators, in 1872, was Captain H.Spalding, of the 104th Fusiliers — a gentleman too upright to belittle his rivals. By 1881, when he translated Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, he had been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel, and he is jocularly referred to in Nabokov’s own impeccably non-paraphrastic 825-page conundrum as “bluff Spalding”, or “matter-of-fact Lt.Col. Spalding”. Nabokov’s dissection and “literal” translation of Eugene Onegin in 1964 produces an effect on the English reader at least as ludicrous as Stephens’s Frithiof’s Saga. My suspicion is that the roguish genius was consciously constructing a monumental academic joke at the expense of lickspittle scholarship. Pale Fire is the obverse of this performance: a comic novel which is deeply serious, and the prankster’s shade may now somewhere be chuckling at the Kinbotes he has spawned.

In the foreword to his three volumes devoted to Eugene Onegin Nabokov asserts “To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the entire poem literally is mathematically impossible. But in losing its rhyme the poem loses its bloom ….. Should one then content oneself with an exact rendering of the subject matter and forget all about form? Or should one still excuse an imitation of the poem’s structure to which only twisted bits of sense stick here and there, by convincing oneself and one’s public that in mutilating its meaning for the sake of a pleasure-measure rhyme one has the opportunity of prettifying or skipping the dry and difficult passages?” ….. “A schoolboy’s boner mocks the ancient masterpiece less than does its commercial poeticization, and it is when the translator sets out to render the ‘spirit’, and not the mere sense of the text, that he begins to traduce his author.”

To coagulate a poem’s spirit, sense, metre, verbal tropes, rhymes and meaning, into a language other than its original, would be a supernatural achievement. Mortals are left to compromise. While agreeing that “in losing its rhyme the poem loses its bloom”, I can only dissent from Nabokov’s opinion that the translator who sets out to render the spirit of the text “begins to traduce his author”. What other objective should s/he have, which could not otherwise be accomplished by handing the would-be reader several dictionaries, a selection of grammars, the rest of the literature in the source language, and locking her/him up for a year or ten? Clement B.Shaw, in my view, is correct to say that “a translation should reproduce the effect of the original”. Spirit is certainly communicable, and its inter-cultural transfer has been the aim of translation since poetry first began — the only issue is the translator’s ability to prioritise from those factors that are irreconcilable. In the end it is a matter of taste and judgement and, pace Nabokov, the verdict of the consumer.

The modern reader might wonder that a military man, at the apogee of Queen Victoria’s Empire, addressed himself to translating verse masterpieces from Swedish and Russian, and be curious about what he was doing between 1872 and 1881. It is recorded that on 22nd January, 1879, a Brevet Major Henry Spalding, of the 104th Regiment, rode out of a tiny British supply depot in Southern Africa, leaving a Lieutenant J.R.M.Chard in command, with the memorable words “You will be in charge, although, of course, nothing will happen. I will be back by evening.” The defence of Rorke’s Drift during the following 24 hours is one of the most astonishing actions in the annals of military history, unmatched since the Battle of Narva. I must try to emulate the disciplined restraint of “bluff Spalding” by limiting myself to remarking that J.E.D.Bethune seems to have been mesmerized by his overwhelming compulsion to reproduce Tegnér’s rhyme-scheme.