The consequences of infelicity can be serious, though not as serious as they once were. The avenues of parks when leaves downrain. Sit late, read, write long letters, and again Who’s now alone, for long will so remain: He’ll not build now, who has no house awaiting. Leishman’s translation of Rilke’s “Autumn Day”: “Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty,” his translation of the Odyssey begins, “the man who wandered afar,/After the Holy Burg, Troy-town, he had wasted with war.” When I e-mailed a friend to ask if he had any bathetic examples, he instantly replied with the last stanza of J.B. The Pre-Raphaelite artist, designer, and utopian socialist William Morris took a run at Homer in 1887 and hit the wall hard. One of the worst things about a bad translation is that it’s unforgettable. If translation is like sex, it often leaves us with a case of epididymal hypertension, or, in the vernacular, blue balls. Even the very best produces a lingering frustration, an irritable awareness that we didn’t get what we came for. “Most people don’t like it.” The same might be said of translation, which many readers secretly consider a necessary evil. “There is a big secret about sex,” wrote Leo Bersani in 1987.
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