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Writers of no consequence in many cases, and of no originality whatsoever, failing to recognize the grandeur of Israel's past, the Meassefim despised their Jewish surroundings too heartily to seek inspiration in them. For the most part they were shallow imitators, second-rate translators of Schiller and Racine.
It is true that several even of the new Attic poets probably needed no accession to their coarseness; pieces like the -Asinaria- of Plautus cannot owe their unsurpassed dulness and vulgarity solely to the translator. Nevertheless coarse incidents so prevail in the Roman comedy, that the translators must either have interpolated them or at least have made a very one-sided selection.
The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing letters, had made the thought and history of the entire past contemporaneous; while a crowd of translators put every man who could read in inspiring contact with the select souls of all the centuries.
"Every one must know that when the translation of the scriptures was first made, the original not only existed, but it must have been known to others, beside the translators, who were able to detect the fraud, if there had been any, as to substantial matter of fact. And, in a work of so great importance, this certainly would have been the case.
The works of the latter were widely circulated throughout Europe; for one of the advantages of the custom of writing in Latin, which was universal during the Middle Ages, was that books of an important character were immediately current amongst all scholars without having, as now, to wait upon the caprice and ability of translators.
The very circumstance that Niebuhr's own arrangement and style are obscure, and that his translators have need of translators to make them intelligible to the multitude, rendered it more desirable that a clear and neat statement of the points in controversy should be laid before the public. But it is useless to talk of what cannot be mended.
We had a little band of editors and translators permanently in our service at each important literary centre. We had, for example, more than a score of men at work translating Bengali fiction and verse into English, a lot of that new literature is wonderfully illuminating to an intelligent Englishman and we had a couple of men hunting about for new work in Arabic.
Pourquoi, Worth, is your favorite word in French. Need I add that it means 'why'? And N'est-ce-pas well, Watts would say N'est-ce-pas meant 'ain't it'? and more flexible translators find it to mean anything they are seeking to persuade you is true. Pourquoi is the inquirer and N'est-ce-pas the universalist. I trust Watts will give this his endorsement."
The translators may have justified themselves at the bar of Roman police by pleading that the attacks were directed only against the Greek, and not against the Latin, gods; but the evasion was tolerably transparent.
The tastes of translators and their patrons were very catholic; science, theology, history and poetry proving equally attractive. Another characteristic of French letters in Belgium is the importance given to history. The first historical work written in French is a translation by Nicolas de Senlis of the Chronicle of Turpin, made for Yolande, sister of Baldwin V of Hainault.
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