If you wish to preserve the spirit of a dead author, you must not skin
him, stuff him, and set him up in a case. You must eat him, digest him
and let him live in you, with such life as you have, for better or worse.
The difference between the Andrew Lang manner of translating the
_Odyssey_ and mine is that between making a mummy and a baby. He tries
to preserve a corpse (for the _Odyssey_ is a corpse to all who need
Lang’s translation), whereas I try to originate a new life and one that
is instinct (as far as I can effect this) with the spirit though not the
form of the original.
They say no woman could possibly have written the _Odyssey_. To me, on
the other hand, it seems even less possible that a man could have done
so. As for its being by a practised and elderly writer, nothing but
youth and inexperience could produce anything so naïve and so lovely.
That is where the work will suffer by my translation. I am male,
practised and elderly, and the trail of sex, age and experience is
certain to be over my translation. If the poem is ever to be well
translated, it must be by some high-spirited English girl who has been
brought up at Athens and who, therefore, has not been jaded by academic
study of the language.
A translation is at best a dislocation, a translation from verse to prose
is a double dislocation and corresponding further dislocations are
necessary if an effect of deformity is to be avoided.
The people who, when they read “Athene” translated by “Minerva,” cannot
bear in mind that every Athene varies more or less with, and takes colour
from, the country and temperament of the writer who is being translated,
will not be greatly helped by translating “Athene” and not “Minerva.”
Besides many readers would pronounce the word as a dissyllable or an
anapæst.