THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING
competent, and indeed generous, critic finds in it "a curious example of perhaps inevitable inadequacy.… 'Duty! Duty! Duty!' Hilda once exclaims in a scornful outburst, 'What a short, sharp, stinging word!' The epithets do not seem specially apt. But in the original she cries out, 'Plight! Plight! Plight!' And the very word stings and snaps." I submit that in this criticism there is one superfluous word—to wit, the "perhaps" which qualifies "inevitable." … It might be possible, no doubt, to adapt Hilda's phrase to the English word and say, "It sounds like the swish of a whip lash," or something to that effect. But this is a sort of freedom which, rightly or wrongly, I hold inadmissible.
An analogous case, in my own experience, occurred in an attempt to translate the opening chapter of Don Gesualdo, from the Italian of Giovanni Verga. It went quite smoothly,—Verga's style is the essence of simplicity,—until I reached the place where the Trao Palace is on fire, and
[266]
