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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: transplanting them into English, sacrifices the spirit to the
letter, and creates an obscurity in the translation where all is
lucidity in the original. Does not this show that the theory of
absolute literality, in the case of two languages so widely
different as English and Italian, is not the true one?
Secondly, Mr. Longfellow's theory of translation leads him in
most cases to choose words of Romanic origin in preference to
those of Saxon descent, and in many cases to choose an unfamiliar
instead of a familiar Romanic word, because the former happens to
be etymologically identical with the word in the original. Let me
cite as an example the opening of Canto III.:--
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
