Translation is the ullage of literature. It’s never too respectable, although many fine writers have done it. Baudelaire probably improved Poe. I regret that Tristan Tzara never finished his version of Marlowe’s Faustus.

It is, alas, impossible: you just can’t move meaning from one tongue to another; lexical fields are loose fits, syntax won’t transpose. All you can do is paraphrase, really, and try to color between the lines.

I was struggling recently to translate that troubled Renaissance magus, Tommaso Campanella (more on this later, probably). His rough, surprising verse doesn’t slide easily into our flat English phonemes.

But I found solace in a passage from Diderot, in his smutty whatsit The Indiscreet Jewels. My translation follows:

— With a bit of meditation I shall succeed, My Lord, replied Bloculocus, but I shall reserve these delicate phenomena for the time when I can offer to the public my translation of Philoxenes, for which I beseech Your Majesty’s permission.

— Quite willingly, said Mangogul; but who is this Philoxenes?

— Prince, answered Bloculocus, he was a Greek author who had a great understanding of the subject of dreams.

— Do you know Greek, then?

— I, My Lord? Not a bit.

— Did you not tell me that you were translating Philoxenes, and that he wrote in Greek?

— Yes, My Lord, but one need not understand a language to translate it, since one only translates for people who do not know it at all.

— That is marvelous, said the sultan; translate Greek without knowing it, then, Bloculocus; I give you my word that I shall not tell a soul, and that I shall not esteem you the less for it.

(Posted by Doug Skinner. My translations of Xavier Forneret can be found in Strange Attractor Journal Three; info on my translation of Giovanni Battista Nazari’s Three Dreams can be found here and there.)