INTRODUCTIONthese registers, from literal to license, from close to imitation, are the subject
of books and essays. As for method, closeness need not be a literary travesty,
and great creative freedom may arise from the deepest understanding of the
source text. In this the scholar may seem to have an advantage. But the next
step is to re-create from the source, and there the writer enters. If the scholar
and writer artist are one person, it is ideal. However, even the most erudite
non-artist scholar, apart from creating a gloss, can only do harm to the aes-
thetic of the original. Likewise, if the writer artist disdains knowledge of the
source text, the result may be lovely but will not go beyond imitation. A fre-
quent solution is to put scholars and writers together, which is exactly what
occurred when the forty-seven men assembled to prepare the King James Ver-
sion. Some contributed Hebrew, others Greek, others the sonorous word, and
the result was that grand collaboration. Sometimes one person is both artist
and scholar, as Robert Fitzgerald for Homer and Virgil, and Richard Wilbur
for Moliere's verse plays. More commonly an informant and a writer collabo-
rate intelligently as one voice.
Pragmatically, there must be a meeting between the original creator and
the writer who re-creates. When Robert Fitzgerald went to Saint Elizabeth's
Hospital, where Ezra Pound was imprisoned, and asked the older poet how to
render Homer into English, Pound said simply, "Let Homer speak." It takes
great courage to let the original author speak through oneself, the translator.
There is always the temptation to listen obliquely or selfishly, and to convert
the ancestor's voice completely into one's own. Some follow this temptation
and produce masterpieces. Chaucer nobly practiced this art when he turned a
Boccaccio tale into Troilus and Criseyde and Pound transformed the Chinese
poet Li Bai into Cathay. More recently, David Ferry's translation of Gilgamesh,
based on the work of earlier scholars, is a thoroughly felicitous achievement.
The other Fitzgerald, Edward of The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, in 1859 pub-
lished his free adaptation from the twelfth-century Persian mystical poet. Se-
lecting certain verses of the sequence, he arranged them in a new order. His
work is praised as a classic of English literature, standing on its own, escaping
the scarlet-T label of "mere" translation. It achieved the dignity of an original.
So too the King James Version has for centuries been popularly received as
"original scripture" containing the exact chapter and verse of "gospel truth."
Bringing words understood only by clergy into the light of common under-
standing has historically required not only art but great courage as well. The
history of these efforts is appalling.