Translation in the 1790's: a Means of Creating a Like Existence and/or Restoring the Original

Translation was one of the main issues of Romanticism, not only because the art of translation served to extend the horizon of literature but also because it involved several points of central polemics on the conjunction of language and imagination. The issue surrounding translation is deeply related to the principles of translation in the 1790's which allow a great amount of freedom in poetical translation especially. Unlike the rigour of classical aesthetic of the eighteenth century, when translation of Classics was the only matter of importance, the general tendency of the 1790's was toward innovation and novelty, and consequently, the demand for translations of contemporary European literature, especially of German literature became very keen. With a flood of translation of German literature into England, starting from Schiller's The Robbers (1792), Romantic ambiguity, gaudiness, and extravagance prevailed in English literature. Plagiarism as unacknowledged copying derives its sources in a freedom of cultural transmission which translation made easy and accessible, and ultimately it culminates in a simple questioning of validity of translation. The issue of plagiarism, therefore, cannot be severed from the contemporary polemics on the ideas of language as well as on the nature of imagination. Forgery, on the other hand, as is evident in the case of James Macpherson, contains the blending of genuine material with the translator's own creations, so that it often contradicted and usually undermined the integrity of the creative imagination. The revolutionary movement to renovate poetic diction and style, and to examine "preestablished codes of decision" that both Wordsworth and Coleridge had experimented with in Lyrical Ballads was not unrelated to this cultural environment of the 1790's which had encouraged the greatest liberty of translation in the process of cultural transmission. In order to discuss the definition of translation in the 1790's, we had better start with Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791) by Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. Tytler was one of the influential personages at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His Essay was first published in anonymity, but in 1797 the second edition appeared, and the third edition came out in 1813 with additions and alterations. In the meantime he published his own translation of Schiller's The Robbers in 1792.(G. G. J. & J. Robinsons: London, 1792). The Essay on the Principles of Translation is "an admirably typical dissertation on the classic art of poetic translation, and of literary style, as the eighteenth century understood it."("Introduction", p.viii) In Chapter I, Tytler begins his discussion by referring to two opposite extremes in translation. At one one extreme, "the duty of a translator " is "to attend only to the sense and spirit of his original, to make himself perfectly master of his author's ideas, and to communicate them in those expressions which he judges to be best suited to convey them." It should be noted that this idea of free translation had already been proposed by John Dryden in his "Dedication of the Aeneis"(1697), and Pope's translation of The Illiad could be counted as a good example. The other extreme is "that, in order to constitute a perfect translation, it is not only requisite that the ideas and sentiments, of the original author should be conveyed, but likewise his style and manner of writing, which, it is supposed, cannot be done without a strict attention to the arrangement of his sentences, and even to their order and construction."(Tytler, p.8) It would be appropriate to recall here that with such rigour, Malcom Laing censured the work of Macpherson in 1805. (The Poems of Ossian, & containing the Poetical Works of James Macpherson, Esquire, in …