The question of translation has been around for centuries. Even as far back as Anglo-Saxon England, Latin texts were being translated into the vernacular and, as time passed, translation has become an increasingly problematic issue. A central concern that arises when translating a text is the question of authorship. For the Anglo-Saxons, this posed no problem: they had little concept of authorship, so a text could be copied, re-written, and changed as pleased the scribe. Nowadays a text is owned by the person who created it, which raises the question of whether a translation – a complete change of language, a re-interpretation of the text – should be considered an original work in its own right. A translator has the power to change the tone of a text by their choice of vocabulary, to change its style by altering the syntax, to imbue new feelings into the words and redefine the audience of a text. All of this points to the idea of a translation as an entirely new and different creation.

A good example of this is Seamus Heaney’s 1999 translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. It has been criticised by scholars for being too free in its vocabulary and style, and is often considered more an interpretation than a direct translation of the original. In comparison to Roy M. Liuzza’s 2000 translation, which follows the original closely, Heaney’s text stands out as a translation that does not pretend to be academic and is not marketed as such. Instead it is characterised by Heaney’s unique style and designed to appeal to new readers, unfamiliar with the original, and those who want to experience the poem as a poem, and not as an historical text. In this manner, Heaney widens the appeal of Beowulf.

Translations of works of literature are rarely regarded as attempts to improve upon the original: rather their function is to make a text accessible to more people. Classics such as Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid would be largely lost in contemporary society if not for their reproduction in translation, which started as far back as the Sixteenth Century. As their original languages die out, the texts can still survive today.

It is important that texts are translated from the modern European canon as well as the ancient, as many of the texts relate to British history. Indeed many cannot be ignored, such as Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes, which permeates so many English texts, old and new, that it is impossible to go through life without seeing it referenced somewhere, whether in praise, parody, or allusion. The fact that the text exists in translation means that one does not necessarily have speak Spanish to explore the text, enjoy the story, and discover the source of the famous Quixote stereotype.

The character can again be followed through Spanish history into the twentieth century, where author Jorges Luis Borges in his short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) writes a fictional review of a man, Pierre Menard, who wishes to go beyond a simple translation of Don Quixote by immersing himself in the world of the text so fully that he is able to re-create it word for word in the original language. This raises questions about the nature and accuracy of translation, but contrary to Pierre Menard’s view, I believe that Borges’s texts are worth translating for his stories alone, rather than the exact language he uses. The beauty of Borges’s writing in works such as Ficciones (1941) lies in the incredible ideas he portrays in his tales, including The Library of Babel, a never-ending library containing books of an infinite number of letter combinations, one of which must hold the meaning of life. If it weren’t for the translations of Borges’s stories we may even have missed out on the name for this very magazine, taken from his short story El Zahir (1949), which recounts the tale of a mysterious object, the Zahir, trapping people who look at it into a never-ending obsession, and detaching them from reality.

As well as for the narrative, many texts are translated for the beauty of the language itself. French authors lend themselves well to this category: poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé are widely translated into English, as are the French classical dramatists Pierre Corneille, Molière and Jean Racine. Writers such as Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett wrote in French as well as English, providing us with the opportunity to see how well their styles transcend the boundaries of language.

One of the main issues arising from the translation of poetry or drama is the balance between form and content. Should one compromise the meaning of a line to fit it into a certain structure or make it rhyme? Or is it better to forsake the poetic or dramatic form in favour of an accurate translation? French classical drama embodies this dilemma perfectly: both Corneille and Racine wrote entire plays in rhyming alexandrine couplets. To recapture the feel of the original in a production, the lines would have to be translated to fit into a similar rigid structure, and presented in a straightforward manner, with little variation in vocabulary (the Académie française in the Seventeenth Century harshly regulated French spelling, grammar and literature). However, this approach would have little appeal to modern readers, who would find English very stilted when forced into Alexandrines (our language follows an iambic pentameter rhythm), and would find the meaning of many lines compromised. Instead, translators tend to forsake the rhyme and tight structure, and translate the lines into prose. Of course there is no right way to translate these plays, but as yet there have only been moderately good translations of these playwrights – none are outstanding.

But how well one can actually capture the genius of the original text? For this, I can use none other than Oscar Wilde for my example. One of his most famous and accomplished plays, Salomé (1896), was originally written in French and then translated into English by Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas. The academic consensus is that Douglas’s translation never comes close to the beauty of the original and I am inclined to agree. In translation, one passage reads, “How good to see the moon. She is like a little piece of money, you would think she was a little silver flower.” The lines sound stilted in comparison with the original: “Que c’est bon de voir la lune! Elle ressemble a une petite piece de monnaie. On dirait une toute petite fleur d’argent”. Douglas cannot replicate Wilde’s turn of phrase and singular images; “une petite piece de monnaie” does not effectively translate as “a little piece of money”, but something more akin to “a beautifully delicate coin”.

But perhaps the translator is not solely to blame. Even from English, Wilde’s texts do not translate well into French. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) demonstrates this in the opening lines:

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

The 2001 translation into French by Vladimir Volkoff, however, just does not capture the same delicacy of language:

L’atelier était empli du capiteux parfum des roses, et, lorsque la légère brise d’été frémissait parmi les arbres du parc, la lourde odeur du lilas franchissait la porte ouverte, à moins que ce ne fût la senteur plus délicate de l’églantine aux fleurs rosées.

Something in the original English just doesn’t translate into the French, and it seems to be the life and magic behind the text. Dorian Gray can be translated accurately, the story can be told clearly and the content and characters remain unchanged, but the translation will always lack the spark of the original.

Compromises are inevitable when translating a text. Whether it is the beauty, the rhyme and rhythm, or the precision of the original, something will always be lost in translation. However, this is often effaced by the major gain of opening up a text to a new country, language and culture whose readers, falling in love with the translation, may be inspired to read the original in its own language.