The Trials of a Translator

A delightful little book on "the difficulties which beset the path of the conscientious translator." (113) It is Knox's witty and intellectual little apologia on his translation of the Vulgate. The book is a collection of 7 short essays that Ronald Knox wrote during the nine years he was translating the Bible in the 1940s. It is written with the humorous calm of a beleaguered translator surrounded by his critics, by the man who in the onslaught of attack doesn't mind using his last minutes to self-consciously pontificate on his method and explain some of his decisions, just for the record. If you like C.S. Lewis' writing, Knox sounds very similar.

Knox described the work like this: "As the traveller, lost in some impenetrable jungle, and convinced that he will never make his way out of it alive, sits down to blaze on a tree-trunk the record of his wanderings, for the benefit of some luckier explorer in times to come; so the translator, seeing the end before him of a task which can never be complete, is fain to draw breath, to look round him, and to meditate on the reflex principles which have guided him thus far." (24) Above all, Knox's great translation principle was "not to ask, How shall I make this foreigner talk English? but, What would an Englishman have said to express this?" (4-5)