Charmides | Page 7

harmony of the English language is to be preserved.
And still a caution has to be added on the other side, that we must avoid
giving it a numerical or mechanical character.
(3) This, however, is not one of the greatest difficulties of the translator;
much greater is that which arises from the restriction of the use of the
genders. Men and women in English are masculine and feminine, and
there is a similar distinction of sex in the words denoting animals; but
all things else, whether outward objects or abstract ideas, are relegated
to the class of neuters. Hardly in some flight of poetry do we ever
endue any of them with the characteristics of a sentient being, and then
only by speaking of them in the feminine gender. The virtues may be
pictured in female forms, but they are not so described in language; a
ship is humorously supposed to be the sailor's bride; more doubtful are
the personifications of church and country as females. Now the genius
of the Greek language is the opposite of this. The same tendency to
personification which is seen in the Greek mythology is common also
in the language; and genders are attributed to things as well as persons
according to their various degrees of strength and weakness; or from
fanciful resemblances to the male or female form, or some analogy too
subtle to be discovered. When the gender of any object was once fixed,
a similar gender was naturally assigned to similar objects, or to words
of similar formation. This use of genders in the denotation of objects or
ideas not only affects the words to which genders are attributed, but the
words with which they are construed or connected, and passes into the
general character of the style. Hence arises a difficulty in translating
Greek into English which cannot altogether be overcome. Shall we
speak of the soul and its qualities, of virtue, power, wisdom, and the
like, as feminine or neuter? The usage of the English language does not
admit of the former, and yet the life and beauty of the style are
impaired by the latter. Often the translator will have recourse to the
repetition of the word, or to the ambiguous 'they,' 'their,' etc.; for fear of
spoiling the effect of the sentence by introducing 'it.' Collective nouns
in Greek and English create a similar but lesser awkwardness.

(4) To use of relation is far more extended in Greek than in English.
Partly the greater variety of genders and cases makes the connexion of
relative and antecedent less ambiguous: partly also the greater number
of demonstrative and relative pronouns, and the use of the article, make
the correlation of ideas simpler and more natural. The Greek appears to
have had an ear or intelligence for a long and complicated sentence
which is rarely to be found in modern nations; and in order to bring the
Greek down to the level of the modern, we must break up the long
sentence into two or more short ones. Neither is the same precision
required in Greek as in Latin or English, nor in earlier Greek as in later;
there was nothing shocking to the contemporary of Thucydides and
Plato in anacolutha and repetitions. In such cases the genius of the
English language requires that the translation should be more
intelligible than the Greek. The want of more distinctions between the
demonstrative pronouns is also greatly felt. Two genitives dependent
on one another, unless familiarised by idiom, have an awkward effect
in English. Frequently the noun has to take the place of the pronoun.
'This' and 'that' are found repeating themselves to weariness in the
rough draft of a translation. As in the previous case, while the feeling of
the modern language is more opposed to tautology, there is also a
greater difficulty in avoiding it.
(5) Though no precise rule can be laid down about the repetition of
words, there seems to be a kind of impertinence in presenting to the
reader the same thought in the same words, repeated twice over in the
same passage without any new aspect or modification of it. And the
evasion of tautology--that is, the substitution of one word of precisely
the same meaning for another--is resented by us equally with the
repetition of words. Yet on the other hand the least difference of
meaning or the least change of form from a substantive to an adjective,
or from a participle to a verb, will often remedy the unpleasant effect.
Rarely and only for the sake of emphasis or clearness can we allow an
important word to be used twice over in two successive sentences or
even in the same paragraph. The particles and pronouns, as they are of
most frequent occurrence, are also