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“It is not without good reason, it seems to me, that the Church forbids the promiscuous, reckless, and indiscreet use of the holy and divine songs which the Holy Spirit dictated to David. We must not mix God into our actions except with reverence and with devout and respectful attention. His word is too divine to have no other use than to exercise our lungs and please our ears; it should be uttered from the conscience and not from the tongue. It is not right that a shop apprentice, amid his vain and frivolous thoughts, should entertain himself and play with it. Nor assuredly is it right to see the holy book of the sacred mysteries of our belief bandied about a hall or a kitchen. Formerly they were mysteries; at present they are sports and pastimes. It is not in passing and in whirlwind fashion that we should handle so serious and venerable a study. It must be a premeditated and sober action, to which we should always add this preface of our service, sursum corda, and always bring even the body disposed in a demeanor that attests a particular attention and reverence. It is not everyone’s study; it is the study of the persons who are dedicated to it, whom God calls to it. The wicked, the ignorant, grow worse by it. It is not a story to tell, it is a story to revere, fear, and adore. Comical folk, those who think they have made it fit for the people to handle because they have put it into the language of the people! Is it just a matter of the words, that they do not understand all they find in writing? Shall I say more? By bringing it this little bit closer to the people, they remove it farther. Pure ignorance that relied entirely on others was much more salutary, and more learned, than this vain and verbal knowledge, the nurse of presumption and temerity. I also believe that this freedom for everyone to disperse a word so sacred and important into so many kinds of idioms has in it much more danger than utility. The Jews, the Mohammedans, and almost all others have espoused, and revere, the language in which their mysteries were originally conceived; and any alteration or change in them is forbidden, not without reason. Are we quite sure that in the Basque country or Brittany there are enough competent judges to warrant this translation made into their language? The universal Church has no judgment more arduous and solemn to make. In preaching and speaking, the interpretation is vague, free, mutable, and piecemeal; so it is not the same thing. One of our Greek historians justly accuses his age because the secrets of the Christian religion were scattered about the market place in the hands of the merest artisans, so that anyone might argue and talk about them according to his lights; and he thinks that it was shameful of us, who, by the grace of God, enjoy the pure mysteries of piety, to let them be profaned in the mouths of ignorant and common people, seeing that the Gentiles forbade Socrates, Plato, and the wisest men to speak of and inquire into the things committed to the priests of Delphi. He says also that the factions of princes in theological disputes are armed not with zeal but with anger; that zeal takes after divine reason and justice when it guides itself with order and moderation, but changes into envious hatred and produces tares instead of wheat and nettles instead of grapes when it is guided by human passion.” (Montaigne, tr. Donald Frame)
“L’avaricieux le prie pour la conservation vaine et superflue de ses thresors; l’ambitieux, pour ses victoires et conduite de sa passion; le voleur l’employe à son ayde pour franchir le hazart et les difficultez qui s’opposent à l’execution de ses meschantes entreprinses, ou le remercie de l’aisance qu’il a trouvé à desgosiller un passant. Au pied de la maison qu’ils vont escheller ou petarder, ils font leurs prieres, l’intention et l’esperance pleine de cruauté, de luxure, d’avarice.” (Montaigne, Des Prières)
“The covetous man sueth and praieth unto him for the vaine increase and superfluous preservation of his wrong-gotten treasure. The ambitious he importuneth God for the conduct of his fortune, and that he may have the victorie of all his desseignes. The theefe, the pirate, the murtherer, yea and the traitor, all call upon him, all implore his aid, and all solicite him, to give them courage in their attempts, constancie in their resolutions to remove all lets and difficulties, that in any sort may withstand their wicked executions and impious actions, or give him thanks if they have had good successe; the one if he have met with a good bootie, the other if he returne home rich, the third if no man has seene him kill his enemie, and the last though he have caused an execrable mischiefe. The souldier, if he but goe to besiege a cottage, to scale a castle, to rob a church, to pettard a gate, to force a religious house, or any villanous act, before he attempt it praieth to God for his assistance, though his intents and hopes be full-fraught with crueltie, murther, covetise, luxurie, sacrilege, and all iniquitie.” (John Florio Translation)
“The miser prays to him for the vain and superfluous conservation of his treasures; the ambitious man, for his victories and the guidance of this passion; the thief uses his help to pass through the risks and difficulties that oppose the execution of his wicked enterprises, or thanks him for having found it easy to cut a passer-by’s throat. Standing beside the house they are going to scale or blow up, they say their prayers, with their intentions and hopes full of cruelty, lust, and avarice.” (Donald Frame Translation)
“Florio’s greatest gift was the ability to make his book come to life for the Elizabethan imagination. Approximately the same forces surged through France and England in the Renaissance, but if Montaigne was to be fused into an integral part of the English mind and not left as a foreign classic, not only his spirit but the form of his expression had to be naturalized. And throughout his translation, sometimes consciously, more often instinctively, Florio creates a Montaigne who is an actual Elizabethan figure.
“His speech assumes the high-flung pitch of his new surroundings. Florio was no poet, but he shared some of the qualities which make it so often appear that the Englishman of the late-sixteenth century wrote with greater ease in poetry than in prose. He speaks of the ‘heavens wide-bounding vault,’ ‘swift-gliding Time,’ the sun’s ‘all-seeing eye,’ and ‘manyheaded confusion,’ with absolutely no hint from Montaigne. ‘Sa pyramide’ is ‘his high-towring Pyramis, or Heaven-menacing Tower,’ ‘de l’ombre et du doubte,’ ‘from out the shadow of oblivion or dungeon of doubt.’ Similar phrases characterize the great flow of Elizabethan verse; and Florio’s, to be sure, have no originality, but are repetitions of the accepted convention. In accordance, too, with the demands of this convention he introduces classic allusions. ‘Le soleil’ becomes ‘Phoebus’ bearing his ‘mourning weedes.’ ‘No human judgment is so vigilant or Argos-eied’ is his rendering of ‘Il n’est jugement humain si tendu.’ Usually these poeticisms add little, but once at least we feel the alchemy of imagination, when ‘la verdeur des ans’ becomes ‘the Aprili of my yeares.’
“The translator is constantly trying to discover a way to substitute the concrete for the abstract, to give color to an idea by an image. When Montaigne states an aphorism, ‘Mais aucun bien sans peine,’ Florio pours new life into it: ‘But no good without paines; no Roses without prickles.’ In addition to the general statement is an illustration; there is not only an appeal to the mind, but an appeal to the eye. ‘Men of their coate’ for ‘hommes de leur sorte’ achieves power of suggestion through being definite. In countless other cases the introduction of a graphic detail brings a new vividness and intimacy to the plain statement of the idea. Examples are everywhere: ‘to play the wilie Foxe’ for ‘de faire le fin,’ ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ for ‘en un moment,’ and the especially felicitious ‘to goe about to catch the winde in a net’ for ‘de negocier au vent.’ On the occasions where Montaigne himself had used an image, Florio develops it more fully with uncalled-for but charming detail. To the French proverb ‘Ce sont les pieds du paon, qui abbatent son orgueil,’ Florio adds, ‘It is the foulenesse of the Peacockes feete, which doth abate his pride, and stoope his gloating-eyed tayle.’ And when he translates ‘cercher le vent de la faveur des Roys’ into ‘to seeke after court holy-water and wavering-favours of Princes,’ he uses a phrase that may have caught Shakespeare’s eye, and have been appropriated for the Fool’s speech in Lear: ‘O Nunkle, court holy-water in a dry house, is better than this rain-water, out o’ doore.'” (F. O. Matthiessen, 1965, Translation, An Elizabethan Drama)
“Four hundred years have passed since Montaigne was born. It is hard to realise that this adorer of the Ancients is already becoming so ancient himself. He remains so modern — the first modern man, more advanced in many ways than this distracted world we live in, which only too closely resembles his in its fanaticism and brutality, and has so much still to learn from him. Today he seems nearer to us in mind than Shakespeare, who was younger and is as immortal; than Rousseau, who imitated his ideas and his self-revelations two centuries later; than our own grandparents. Generations have peered over Montaigne’s shoulder into the little mirror where he studied himself, to find their own features looking back at them; generations to come, for whom the most flashing novelties of 1933 have grown dull and rusty, will bend over that mirror still. That a gaily self-indulgent old gentleman in Périgord once loved scratching his ears is and will be remembered where lives, by the thousand, of desperate industry and devoted idealism leave not a ripple on the inky waters of oblivion. Such is justice. He would have been the first to smile at the irony of it. And yet it is not unreasonable. Montaigne has done more to civilise Europe by quietly recording what he was, than they by all they do. That quiet voice has filled our whole world with echoes. They meet us, disguised, in Hamlet and Measure for Measure and The Tempest. Webster wove its sentences into his bitter verse. Ben Jonson remarked in verse as bitter how good Montaigne was to steal from. Bacon followed in his tracks (Montaigne had been familiar with Anthony Bacon at Bordeaux); then Burton, and Addison, and Sterne. His influence has crossed the Atlantic as easily as the Channel, to mould Emerson and Thoreau. And in his own country, unlike Ronsard, he has never lost his place: admired as ‘l’incomparable auteur de l’art de conferer’ and detested as a pagan by Pascal; a still living friend for Madame de Lafayette and Madame du Deffand; a master for La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld, for Montesquieu and Rousseau; the sceptic ancestor of Sainte-Beuve and Renan and Anatole France.” (F. L. Lucas, 1934, The Master Essayist)
“He [Alexander Gerschenkron] spent a pleasant summer with my grandmother examining one hundred translations of Hamlet’s quatrain to Ophelia, ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire,’ in languages from Catalan to Icelandic to Serbo-Croatian to Bulgarian — all as preparation for an essay in which they argued that translation invariably distorts meaning.” (Nicholas Dawidoff, The Fly Swatter)
Erica Gerschenkron and Alexander Gerschenkron (1966), The Illogical Hamlet: A Note on Translatability. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 301–336. From the Essay: “A scholar must assume that the phenomena which he studies are amenable to rational explanations. A translator must assume that the foreign text is translatable. Those assumptions — or mental predispositions — are necessary. Without them there can be neither scholarly research nor translation. But the optimism, alas, is not always justified. Mounin’s impressive translatability thesis notwithstanding. Hamlet’s quatrain in his letter to Ophelia is a curious and instructive instance. The purpose of this Note is to review one hundred attempts — in sixteen languages — to translate those four lines. We shall try to show why in most, though not all, languages the translators had to struggle with a fundamental and actually insurmountable difficulty.”
“My grandfather, Alexander Gerschenkron, was always making dramatic declarations, and one day when he was in his fifties he appeared in font of his family to announce that he was giving up the morning newspaper. He had been looking into the matter, he said and had discovered that the number of books even a non-newspaper-reading man could get through in a lifetime was so small — five thousand, according to my grandfather’s calculations — that permitting himself such a daily distraction was simply out of the question. My grandfather had been an avid reader of newspapers since the age of six, and he freely admitted that they had their pleasures and their virtues, but now, with some force, he promised that he would no longer submit to them. And he didn’t; he never read the newspaper again.” (Nicholas Dawidoff, The Fly Swatter)
“When King Pyrrhus was undertaking his expedition into Italy, Cyneas, his wise counselor, wanting to make him feel the vanity of his ambition, asked him: ‘Well, Sire, to what purpose are you setting up this great enterprise?’ ‘To make myself master of Italy’, he immediately replied. ‘And then’, continued Cyneas, ‘when that is done?’ ‘I shall pass over into Gaul and Spain’, said the other. ‘And after that?’ ‘I shall go and subdue Africa; and finally, when I have brought the world under my subjection, I shall rest and live content and at my ease’. ‘In Gods name, Sire’, Cyneas then retorted, ‘tell me what keeps you from being in that condition right now, if that is what you want. Why don’t you settle down at this very moment in the state you say you aspire to, and spare yourself all the intervening toil and risks?'” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)
“But the worst mischief of all is this, that nothing we decree shall stand firm and that we will not know that a city with the worse laws, if immoveable, is better than one with good laws when they be not binding, and that a plain wit accompanied with modesty is more profitable to the state than dexterity with arrogance, and that the more ignorant sort of men do, for the most part, better regulate a commonwealth than they that are wiser. For these love to appear wiser than the laws and in all public debatings to carry the victory as the worthiest things wherein to show their wisdom, from whence most commonly proceeds the ruin of the states they live in. Whereas the other sort, mistrusting their own wits, are content to be esteemed not so wise as the laws and not able to carp at what is well spoken by another, and so, making themselves equal judges rather than contenders for mastery, govern a state for the most part well. We therefore should do the like and not be carried away with combats of eloquence and wit to give such counsel to your multitude as in our own judgments we think not good.” (Thucydides, tr. Thomas Hobbes, 1628)
“Bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority; that unlearned loyalty is more serviceable than quick-witted insubordination; and that ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows. The latter are always wanting to appear wiser than the laws, and to overrule every proposition brought forward, thinking that they cannot show their wit in more important matters, and by such behaviour too often ruin their country; while those who mistrust their own cleverness are content to be less learned than the laws, and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being fair judges rather than rival athletes, generally conduct affairs successfully. These we ought to imitate, instead of being led on by cleverness and intellectual rivalry to advise your people against our real opinions.” (Thucydides, tr. Richard Crawley, 1874)
“We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they remain fixed, than with good laws that are constantly being altered, that lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than the kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals. These are the sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws, who want to get their own way in every general discussion, because they feel that they cannot show off their intelligence in matters of greater importance, and who, as a result, very often bring ruin on their country. But the other kind — the people who are not so confident in their own intelligence — are prepared to admit that the laws are wiser than they are and that they lack the ability to pull to pieces a speech made by a good speaker; they are unbiased judges, and not people taking part in some kind of a competition; so things usually go well when they are in control. We statesmen, too, should try to be like them, instead of being carried away by mere cleverness and a desire to show off our intelligence and so giving you, the people, advice which we do not really believe in ourselves.” (Thucydides, tr. Rex Warner, 1954)
“In addition to the biases in perception already described, observers in less-developed countries can be affected by a special difficulty in detecting changes in their own societies, regardless of any comparison with what happens or has happened elsewhere, A reason for this difficulty can be found in the image which these observers have of their own societies, in the lenses they use to look at them, or, for short, in their ideologies. It is probably a principal characteristic of less-developed, dependent countries that they import their ideologies, both those that are apologetic and those that are subversive of the status quo. There always exists a considerable distance between variegated and ever-changing reality, on the one hand, and the rigid mold of ideology, on the other. The distance and the misfit, however, are likely to be much more extensive when the ideology is imported than when it is homegrown. In the latter case, an important social change which is not accounted for by the prevailing ideology will soon be noted and the ideology will be criticized and either adapted to the new situation or exchanged for a new one. A good example is the Revisionist criticism of orthodox Marxism which appeared even during the lifetime of Engels as a result of certain developments in German society which were hard to fit into Marxist doctrine. When the ideology is imported, on the other hand, the extent to which it fits the reality of the importing country is usually quite poor from the start. Given this initial disparity, additional changes in the country’s social, economic, or political structure that contradict the ideology do not really worsen the fit substantially and are therefore ignored or else easily rationalized. The free-trade doctrine imported from England into Latin America in the nineteenth century and so poorly adapted to the needs of that continent was fully routed there only as a result of the two World Wars and the Depression. The long life of the oft-refuted explanation of Latin American societies in terms of the dichotomy between oligarchy and mass may be another case in point. On the North American Left, the notion, imported by Marxist thought, that the white working class is the “natural ally” of the oppressed Negro masses also held sway for an extraordinarily long period, considering the over whelming and cumulative evidence to the contrary. Thus, an ideology can draw strength from the very fact that it does so poorly at taking the basic features of socio-economic structure into account. Among ideologies, in other words, it is the least fit that have the greatest chance of survival! And as long as the misfit ideology survives, perception of change — and of reality in general — is held back. To illustrate the point further, I must tell one last story: A man approaches another exclaiming: ‘Hello, Paul. It’s good to see you after so many years, but you have changed so much! You used to be fat, now you are quite thin; you used to be tall, now you are rather short. What happened, Paul?’ ‘Paul’ rather timidly replies: ‘But my name is not Paul’. Whereupon the other retorts, quite pleased with his interpretation of reality: ‘You see how much you have changed! Even your name has changed!'” (Albert Hirschman, 1968, Underdevelopment, Obstacles to the Perception of Change, and Leadership. Daedalus, 97, 925–937.)
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