onfided to them. He,
too, if he would be true to his office, must give the message as it has
been given to him, repeat the story in the words in which it was told
him. Every deviation from the letter of the original is a deviation from
the truth. Every epithet that is either added or taken away is a
falsification of the text. The addition or the omission may sometimes be
an improvement, but it is an improvement which you have no authority to
make. It is not to learn what you think Homer or Dante might have said
that the reader comes to your translation, but to see what they really
said. When Cesarotti undertook to show how Homer would have written in
the eighteenth century, he recast the Iliad and called it "The Death of
Hector," and in this he dealt more honestly with his readers than Pope;
for, although he failed to make a good poem, he did not attempt to pass
it for Homer.

The greatest difficulty of the translator arises from his personality.
He cannot forget himself, cannot guard, as he ought, against those
subtle insinuations of self-esteem which are constantly leading him to
improve upon his author. His own habits of thought would have suggested
a different turn to the verse, a different coloring to the image. He
finds it as hard to forget his own style, as to forget his identity. It
demands a vigorous imagination, combined with deep poetic sympathies, to
go out of yourself and enter for a time wholly into the heart and mind,
the thoughts and feelings, of another; and it is not to all that such an
imagination and such sympathies are given. There is scarcely a great
failure in poetical translation, which may not be traced to the want of
this power.

It may seem like the grave enunciation of a truism to say that another
indispensable qualification of the translator is perfect familiarity
with the language from which he translates, and a full command of his
own. It is not by mere reading that such a familiarity can be acquired.
You must have learnt to think in a language, and made it the spontaneous
expression of your wants and feelings, if you would find in it the true
interpretation of the wants and feelings of others. Its words and idioms
must awaken in you the same sensations which the words and idioms of
your own language awaken; giving pleasure as music, or a picture, or a
statue, or a fine building gives pleasure, not by an act of reflection
under the control of the will, but by an intuitive perception under