Lost in Translation.

As I've been following the adventures of my sophomore-year (high school) daughter studying Shakespeare, I've been given again to think about the language, its meaning and accessibility.

In the study of Torah, we learn -- very quickly -- that any translation out of Hebrew is reading an entirely different text -- all but stripped of the meaning except for the grossest elements of plot and character.  Adding even vowels and cantillation mutes the original. 

Having read Proust and Cervantes in translation, I am convinced that I haven't read these masters at all.  In school, I read Chaucer in Middle English and, apart from feeling quite smug about that, I can now bore people at cocktail parties by reciting the first forty lines in a sonorous and  ponderous voice.  But I do feel that reading it in the 'original' gave me a much better understanding of the work.  (Ask me about The Faerie Queene and I'm likely to give you a different answer.) 

Then comes along this bit of news recently posted on a New York Times blog:  Paradise Lost has just been published into translation. 

From the article: 

Danielson is well aware that it might seem odd to translate a poem into the language in which it is already written. Dryden turned some of “Paradise Lost” into rhymed verse for a libretto while Milton was still alive; but that was an adaptation, not a translation. There are of course the Classic Comics and Cliff Notes precedents; but these are abridgments designed for the students who don’t have time to, or don’t want to, read the book. Danielson’s is a word-for-word translation, probably longer than the original since its prose unpacks a very dense poetry. The value of his edition, he says, is that it “invites more readers than ever before to enjoy the magnificent story — to experience the grandeur, heroism, pathos, beauty and grace of Milton’s inimitable work.

Danielson borrows the word “inimitable” from John Wesley, who in 1763 was already articulating the justification for a prose translation of the poem. Wesley reports that in the competition for the title of world’s greatest poem, “the preference has generally been given by impartial judges to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’” but, he laments, “this inimitable work amidst all its beauties is unintelligible to [an] abundance of readers.” Two hundred and fifty years later, Harold Bloom made the same observation. Ordinary readers, he said, now “require mediation to read ‘Paradise Lost’ with full appreciation.”

I am vain, but I'm not so stupid as to disagree with Harold Bloom, but you must forgive me a moment to mourn the passage of another great work into the mists.