"Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation"
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Translation, Denham warns, is not clerical work; its a high-wire act that can snap under the weight of mere competence. "Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation" sounds like a snub, but its really an argument about power: the translator isnt a neutral courier. Put a middling mind in charge of a great mind and youll get something worse than error youll get diminishment, the slow sanding-down of style, thought, and music into safe paraphrase.
Denham, a 17th-century English politician and poet, is writing in a moment when English literary culture is trying to prove it can stand beside Latin and the continental giants. Translation is how you import prestige, but its also where you can embarrass yourself publicly. The line carries the anxiety of a nation building a canon: if you botch Homer or Virgil, you dont just misread a text; you advertise your own smallness.
The subtext is deliciously elitist, and intentionally so. Denham elevates the translator from craftsman to rival artist. He implies that translation is less about word-for-word fidelity than about recreating the original authors force in a new idiom. That requires imagination, taste, and nerve the same things we usually reserve for "original" writing. Its also a self-justifying claim: if only geniuses should translate, then imperfect translations can be dismissed as unworthy rather than threatening.
Read now, it doubles as a critique of our content-churn era: when language is treated as interchangeable, Denham insists that style is substance and only an equal can carry it across.
Denham, a 17th-century English politician and poet, is writing in a moment when English literary culture is trying to prove it can stand beside Latin and the continental giants. Translation is how you import prestige, but its also where you can embarrass yourself publicly. The line carries the anxiety of a nation building a canon: if you botch Homer or Virgil, you dont just misread a text; you advertise your own smallness.
The subtext is deliciously elitist, and intentionally so. Denham elevates the translator from craftsman to rival artist. He implies that translation is less about word-for-word fidelity than about recreating the original authors force in a new idiom. That requires imagination, taste, and nerve the same things we usually reserve for "original" writing. Its also a self-justifying claim: if only geniuses should translate, then imperfect translations can be dismissed as unworthy rather than threatening.
Read now, it doubles as a critique of our content-churn era: when language is treated as interchangeable, Denham insists that style is substance and only an equal can carry it across.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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