Among the many pronouncements that have shaped our understanding of literary translation, perhaps none is more often echoed than John Dryden’s preface to his version of the Aeneid. “I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English,” asserted Dryden, “as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age.” No doubt Dryden’s achievement is to have made many of his contemporaries believe that he had impersonated the Latin poet. But this is merely a poetic sleight of hand. Dryden’s Virgil abandons the unrhymed verse of the Latin poem for English couplets while cribbing lines from a previous translator, the poet Sir John Denham. A skeptic might well wonder why Virgil should come back as Dryden instead of an epic poet who lived in the same period and wrote his epic without rhyme: John Milton. Should we not expect an English Virgil to be more attracted to the grand style of Paradise Lost? […]

The most questionable effect of Dryden’s assertion, to my mind, is that it winds up collapsing the translator’s labor into the foreign author’s, giving us no way to understand (let alone judge) how the translator has performed the crucial role of cultural go-between. To read a translation as a translation, as a work in its own right, we need a more practical sense of what a translator does. I would describe it as an attempt to compensate for an irreparable loss by controlling an exorbitant gain.

The foreign language is the first thing to go, the very sound and order of the words, and along with them all the resonance and allusiveness that they carry for the native reader. Simultaneously, merely by choosing words from another language, the translator adds an entirely new set of resonances and allusions designed to imitate the foreign text while making it comprehensible to a culturally different reader. These additional meanings may occasionally result from an actual insertion for clarity. But they in fact inhere in every choice that the translator makes, even when the translation sticks closely to the foreign words and conforms to current dictionary definitions. The translator must somehow control the unavoidable release of meanings that work only in the translating language. Apart from threatening to derail the project of imitation, these meanings always risk transforming what is foreign into something too familiar or simply irrelevant. The loss in translation remains invisible to any reader who doesn’t undertake a careful comparison to the foreign text—i.e., most of us. The gain is everywhere apparent, although only if the reader looks.

(Excerpt. VENUTI, Lawrence. How to Read a Translation. Available at <http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article. php?lab=HowTo>).