Note on the Translation

Finally, if you would like to step into the labyrinth of Google Translate's rendering of Giordani's Italian translation of Stael's French treatise into English, click on the hyperlink for "Sulla maniera e la utilità della traduzioni," which will open your computer's browser to an Italian Wikisource webpage transcription of the article. Enter the web address for this page into Google Translate or Bing Translator, and you will experience an interesting hybrid of human and machine translation from French into Italian into English.

The translation is based on the article “De l'Esprit des Traductions” as it appears in Oeuvres Completes de Madame la Baronne De Staël-Holstein: Tome II. I would like to thank Bastiaan Vanacker for his valuable assistance in my translation. Any errors and "foreignizations" are, of course, my own.

Note on the Text

Staël situates Italian literary arts within contemporary European literatures and the history of translation itself in order to provide a structure for Italian artistic revitalization. She draws attention to the untapped resources afforded by the flexibility of Italian for importing linguistic goods. From the outset of the piece, Staël figures translation as a capital investment capable of enriching the nation. Her opening paragraph moves with remarkable velocity from the abstract, ethereal resonances of her title (the "spirit" of translation) and her opening volley ("the transport of the human spirit from one language to another") to the material signs of exchange in its closing sentence: "the circulation of ideas is, of all the genres of commerce, the one from which the advantages are most certain." Spirit rapidly moves into "circulation" as it becomes concretized in a profitable economy.

Staël refuses either to privilege original writing over translation, or to equate them. Instead she identifies translation as essentially different from original writing, making translation a carrier of "unique" forms of expression into the target language. Serving to inoculate the nation against literary stultification, Staël's concept of translation—that it delivers the "more original"—underscores its paradoxical nature: "Translations of foreign poets can, more effectively than any other medium, protect the literature of a [host] country from those banal turns of phrase, which are the surest signs of its decline." Her language here evokes a positive immunology of literature: the national literary body "protects" itself through the introduction of foreign elements, preventing its "decline." The purpose of translating, Staël argues, is neither "to borrow" nor "to imitate." Translation serves "to emancipate oneself from certain conventional forms that maintain themselves in literature like officious phrases in society, and that exile from themselves all natural truth." To refuse to import foreign expressions is to ignore the emancipatory aspect of translation, leading inexorably to Staël's concluding image of Italians enclosed within their own linguistic parameters should they fail to embark on a program of revitalization through translation: "their country will fall into a sort of apathy from which the sun itself will scarcely be able to awaken it."

“On the Spirit of Translation(s)” figures translation as a genre, a term that carries both taxonomic and gender implications. Staël draws attention to the complex way genre can blur the lines of literary categories. She sees translation as a complex genre, one trumping all others: any genre can, after all, be superceded through its translation into another language. The French word genre has a malleability that English fails to encompass. Genre engenders a myriad of English translations: "form," "type," "kind," "mode," "genus," "species" (as in "the human genre"), and "gender" (as in the grammatical genres of masculine, feminine, and neutral). Genre declares a formal boundary, a classification, a taxonomy—a cordoning off of a larger geography into smaller enclosures. The seven instances of genre in “On the Spirit of Translations” range across this connotative vista.

By leaving genre untranslated (while offering in square parentheses a possible English word suitable for the context) in my rendering of the treatise, I wish to stress the significance of genre in the progress of Staël's argument. As the treatise progresses, Staël gradually blurs the lines of generic demarcation. When readers reach the last iteration of genre in the treatise, they will note that the word refers at once to drama and to translation. In discussing the translations of Shakespeare by her long-time companion A.W. Schlegel, Staël notes that these plays have become "altogether nationale in Germany," and that "English works—almost like inheritances—are played on the German stage." Through the Italian translation of French drama, Staël argues, "it will be possible in Italy to obtain a result of the same genre." Staël thereby proposes a genetic hybrid for Italy, based on a German model of English translation. Staël's formulation—"a result of the same genre"—stresses the reproductive capacities of genre, the genetics, of such an undertaking. The desire of the translator, so conceived, demands a genetic hybridization towards the improvement of the nation, towards a breaking free from the strict limitations imposed by "conventional forms." The role of the genre of translation on this literary stage is to intercede in the "executive power" of the genre of theatre: translation, as genre, interrupts the genetic homogeneity of Italian theatre by encoding the foreign into the linguistic parameters of Italian speech, parole.

Germaine de Staël, "On the Spirit of Translation(s)" (1816)

There is no greater service to render literature than the transport of the human spirit from one language to another. There are so few first-rate productions, and genius—in whatever genre [form] it may present itself—is a phenomenon so rare, that each modern nation limiting itself to its own treasures will always be poor. Furthermore, the circulation of ideas is, of all the genres [forms] of commerce, the one from which advantages are most certain.

The scholars and even the poets decided, at the time of the renaissance in letters, to write all texts in the same language, Latin, so that they had no need to be translated in order to be heard. This could be advantageous to the sciences, when the argument has no need of stylistic charms. But it nevertheless had the result, that several of the riches of Italians, in this genre [form], were unknown even to themselves, because the generalité of readers understood nothing but the idiom of the country. It was necessary, moreover, in writing in Latin about the sciences and philosophy, to create words that did not exist for the authors of antiquity. Therefore, the scholars were at the service of a language both dead and factitious; meanwhile, poets bound themselves to purely classical expressions; and Italy, where Latin resounded again on the banks of the Tiber, has been master of the writings of Fracastoro, Politian, and Sannazaro, who approximated themselves, they say, to the style of Virgil and Horace; but, though their reputation endures, their works are no longer read outside of the Scholarly Age; and it is a woeful literary glory, one for which imitation must be the base. These Latin poets of the Middle Ages were translated into Italian in their own homeland, since it is natural to prefer the language that recalls to you the emotions of your own life, which one can (not) but retrace by study!

The better manner, I am convinced, for dispensing with translations, would be to know all the languages in which the works of great poets have been composed: Greek, Latin, Italian, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German. But such an endeavor demands much time, much help, and never can one pretend that knowledge so difficult to acquire could ever be universal. But it is toward the universal that one must strive, when one wants to serve mankind. I would say more: even when one understands foreign languages well, one could taste again through a well-done translation in one's own language, a pleasure more familiar and more intimate. These naturalized beauties furnish the national style with new turns of phrase and more original expressions. Translations of foreign poets can, more effectively than any other medium, protect the literature of a country from those banal turns of phrase, which are the surest signs of its decline.

But, in order to derive from this labor a true advantage, it is not necessary, like the French do, to give one's own color to everything one translates. If one is bound to change everything one touches into gold, the result is no less than that one will not be able to nourish oneself. One would find no new sustenance for thought, and one will encounter again and again the same countenance with scarcely different adornment. This reproach, precisely that merited by the French, holds to, in the face of imposed hindrances of all kinds in their language to the art of writing in verse. The rarity of rhyme, the uniformity of verse, and the difficulty of inversions confine the poet within a certain circumscription that necessarily restricts itself to a kind of monotony in poetic language—if not exactly the same thoughts, than at least similar hemistichs—from which fugitive genius, even when it raises itself to a great height, cannot emancipate itself in all the transitions, in the arguments, and finally, in all of that which lays the groundwork for uniting the great [poetic] effects.

In effect, it is not plausible that the genius of a singular man not be surpassed in the three thousand years of work of all subsequent poets, yet there was something primitive in the traditions, in the customs, in the opinions, in the air of this epoch, the charm of which is indisputable. And it is in this beginning of the human genre [species], this youthfulness of the epoch that renews in our age by reading Homer, that we experience a sort of equivalent emotion through the remembrance of our own childhood. This emotion confounds itself with its dreams of the Golden Age, and causes us to give to the most ancient of poets preference above all his successors. If you subtract from his compositions the simplicity of those early days of the world, everything unique in it disappears.

In Germany, many scholars have maintained that the works of Homer were not composed by a single man, and that one should consider The Iliad, and even The Odyssey, as a composite of heroic songs to celebrate in Greece the conquest of Troy and the return of the vanquishers. It seems to me that it is easy to combat this opinion and that, above all else, the unity of The Iliad invalidates such a belief. Why would one be held to the recitation of Achilles' wrath? The subsequent events, the capture of Troy concluding them, must have been naturally done apart from the collection of rhapsodies that one supposes belong to diverse authors. The conception of unity of an event, the wrath of Achilles, cannot be but a plan formed by a single man. Without, however, wanting to discuss here a system, for and against which one must be armed with a frightening amount of scholarship, at least we must acknowledge that the principal grandeur of Homer belongs to his century, since it is believed that the poets of that time, or at least a very large number amongst them, had worked on The Iliad. It is more the proof that this poem is the image of a humane society, at such a degree of civilization, and it again bears the stamp more of the epoch than that of a single man.

Italian is, of all modern languages, the most ready to provide for us the sensation produced by Homeric Greek. It has not, it is true, the same rhythm as the original; the hexameter can scarcely introduce itself into our modern idiom; the long and short vowels are not enough demarcation so that one might equate Attic poets in this regard. But Italian parole [speech] has a harmony which can approximate the symmetry of dactyls and spondees, and the grammatical construction of Italian lends itself to a perfect imitation of Greek inversions: the versi sciolti, unconstrained by rhyme, does not constrict thought like prose does, preserving all the grace and measure of the verse.

It will be strongly desired, it strikes me, that the Italians occupy themselves with diverse attentions to the new poesies of the English and the Germans. They will thus make their compatriots acquainted with a new genre [form]—compatriots who cling onto, for the most part, derivative images of Antic mythology. They now begin to exhaust themselves, and the paganism of poesy exists almost no more in the rest of Europe. It is of consequence to the progress of thought that la bella Italia should look often beyond the Alps, not to borrow, but to learn—not to imitate, but to emancipate oneself from certain conventional forms that maintain themselves in literature like officious phrases in society, and that exile from themselves all natural truth.

Italian literature is now divided between the scholars who sift and resift the ashes of the past, attempting to rediscover there some flakes of gold, and the writers who rely on the harmony of their language for creating accord without ideas, for the juxtaposition of exclamations, declamations, and invocations wherein there is not one word that comes from the heart, nor one that arrives there. Will it then not be possible that an active emulation of those theatrical successes could restore by degrees the originality of spirit and the truth of style, without which there is no literature whatsoever [il n'y a point de littérature], nor are there any of the qualities that are necessary for having one?

The taste of sentimental drama has taken possession of the Italian scene and in lieu of this piquant gaiety that one saw reign in another time, in lieu of these great names of comedy who are classic throughout all Europe, one sees represented, from these dramas, the most insipid of murders—if one may so express oneself—from which one can only stage a miserable spectacle. Is it not a poor education for a very considerable number of persons, repeatedly subject to such pleasures? The taste of Italians, in the beaux-arts, is both simple and noble, but parole [speech] is also one of the beaux-arts and it would be necessary to conceive of it as having the same nature [caractère]; it [parole] most centrally constitutes humanity, yet we allow ourselves to be satisfied with paintings and monuments, rather than the sentiments to which it should be dedicated.

The Italians are great enthusiasts of their language. Great men have capitalized well on this investment, and the distinctions of spirit have been the sole jouissance, and often also the only consolations of the Italian nation. In order that each capable man of thinking perceives for himself a motif for his own development, it is necessary that all nations take an active principle of interest: some are military; others are political. The Italians must distinguish themselves by their literature and beaux-arts. If not, their country will fall into a sort of apathy from which the sun itself will scarcely be able to awaken it.