[Eric]

Liam, you have to be crystal clear about what you mean by "translating". Is this getting someone else to do a rough version, polishing it a bit, then taking all the credit for the translation, when in fact all you have done is improved it a bit, without knowing the source language? This is what people such as David Hare do with plays.

If Ted Hughes did not know the source languages, he may be a co-translator with someone who does. They will have worked together. In which case, this other person, the one who knows the language, should get equal credit. Basking in one's famous name and shoving the original translator out of the limelight is immoral and unjust.

You cannot translate from a language you do not know. Another ploy would be to translate from someone else's published translation into, say, French, a language that most educated Brits know.

However beautiful Hughes' version of the Juhász, unless someone compares it with the original, we don't know if Hughes took liberties with words or images, just to beautify the text, at the expense of what Juhász actually said.

In many other European countries, great authors also translate things as well. This was often the case in the Soviet bloc, where authors needed the money, or were banned for a while from writing their own things, so resorted to translation. Britain is different in that few British authors have ever translated anything from any language. By delving into the workings of other languages and literatures, with the direct access afforded you by reading the original, you understand things better, learn things from other countries and cultures than your own.

Look at the Estonian author Jaan Kross. He was brought up with German as first school language in the 1930s. He spent 8 years in the Gulag (i.e. Russian labour camps). No one in Russia speaks Estonian; he will have known labour camp Russian slang as well as, say, Solzhenitsyn. Apart from becoming maybe the most important post-war Estonian prose author, he translated poetry from German, Finnish, Russian, French, and a crime novel from Swedish. Authors whose works he translated and published include Brecht, Rolland, Hochhuth, Carroll, Diktonius, Shakespeare, Heine, Turtiainen. And he still managed to write some 15 novels of his own.

I would claim that what often contributes to making an author great (also Nabokov, for instance) is their capability of discovering directly or indirectly, i.e. with or without translation, what people in other countries are writing. Now, not in 1850. Most British authors are crippled on two counts: there are very few translations of contemporary European literature available; and they don't know any languages to read anything in the original. So they remain shut out of European literary developments until decades later, when someone bothers to translate a book. I am still waiting for the likes of Monica Ali, Jonathan Coe, Blake Morrison, Zadie Smith, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage, Martin Amis, and so on, to stun the world by announcing they have translated a novel or poetry collection directly from a foreign language.

This is all part and parcel of the art, craft, skill, world, whatever, of literary translation. It helps writers, too.

I've got more to say on whether you need to know a language perfectly. Nnyhav brings up a couple of pertinent points. But I'm going out now. Until next time.