7 - The Quick and the Dead

Summary

At the same moment Osip Mandestam described Acmeism as nostalgia for world culture, he declared, according to his widow, that ‘he would disown neither the living nor the dead.’ A final aspect of translation that I consider here is that performed by moving imaginatively across the boundary line Edmund Waller described in his farewell poem: ‘Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, / That stand upon the threshold of the new.’ My chapter title's wording comes from the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer version of the Apostles' Creed (‘from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead’), a text translated from the Latin ‘inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos’ – and the word ‘the quick’ (meaning ‘the living’) might itself now need to be translated, as can be seen from the OED entry for the first sense of the word. Translators have a nexus of responsibilities because they are entrusted with the conveying into other languages of qualities and values from other people's writings. They carry them into places where the quick and the dead are also judged, the places where books are bought, sold, read, and reviewed. Translations are themselves like reviews and critical writings: the more there are the less damage is done by the bad. It is not an impossible impulse in translating a poet that you wish to improve the impression given of an author you admire by retranslating a work misleadingly presented in an appropriative adaptation or a faulty translation.