ABSTRACT
All translations are more or less bad translations; for the ideal translation is one in which the symbols of the translationlanguage exactly reproduce for the translation-audience all and only those responses which the original symbols would elicit from the original intended audience, and this ideal is an impossible one outside the realm of formal languages. The translator in fact must walk a tight-rope between the fluent and the accurate, the elegant and the literal, the readable and the written; and this is a tightrope from which he must inevitably fall periodically into the saving net of compromise. All he can do in mitigation is to explain the principles he has striven to follow in seeking to meet the ultimately irreconcilable demands of fidelity to his author and concern for his public. Thus the endeavours of the humble translator, no less· than those of the exalted poet, are never completed, only abandoned.
