d it is sometimes urged, in a given case, that it is
not literal or that it is too free. A distinguished writer has recently
laid down that a translation should reproduce every word and phrase and
sentence of the original as accurately as a delicate tracing reproduces
the lines of a drawing. This is advice which may hold in the
school-room, but, I venture to maintain, nowhere else. In so far as
every language has a peculiar genius, a literal translation must
necessarily be a bad one; and any faithful translation will of its
nature be free. In other words, a translator will err if he slavishly
adheres to mere expression; he must have complete liberty to give his
author's meaning and style in the manner which he holds to be truest to
the original; and so, in translating from a foreign tongue, it will be
well for him to have some knowledge of his own. But he must guard
against the abuse of his position: his liberty may become license, and
his translation instead of being faithful may be phantastic. The
translator's first and last duty is, then, to efface himself. His first
duty is to stand entirely at the point of view of his author's thought;
his last, to find the clearest and nearest expression in his own
language both for that thought and for whatever is characteristic in the
way of conveying it; neither adding anything of his own nor taking away
anything from his author. The best translation is thus a re-embodiment
of the author's spirit, a real metempsychosis. Nothing can be done
without ideals, and this is the ideal at which the present translation
aims. That it fails of its aim and has many defects, no one knows better
than the translator himself; and he can only cherish the hope that where
he falls short he is sometimes close to the confines of what cannot be
translated.

December 2, 1892.

[1] _Goethe's Sprueche in Prosa_: zum ersten Mal erlaeutert und auf ihre
Quellen zurueckgefuehrt von G. v. Loeper, Berlin, 1870. This forms the
text of the translation.

[2] _Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre_, Bk. I. ch. 10.

[3] _Gespraeche mit Eckermann_, III. 4 January, 1824.

LIFE AND CHARACTER

I

1

There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must
only try to think it again.

2

How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking, but by doing. Try
to do your duty, and you will know at once what you are worth.

3

But what is your duty? The claims of the day.

4

The worl