3 - Thou Art Translated

Summary

‘Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated’, exclaims Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the well-known scene, Bottom the Weaver, his head metamorphosed to that of an ass, encounters his fellow players. Here the word ‘translated’ might equally need translating into ‘transformed’. Charles Nicholl translates a 1586 use of the word from the fashion trade reporting a payment for ‘translating [altering] & mending of an attyre for the hed’. Translators can do no other than alter, but unlike this headgear transformation and that of Bottom's head, the translation of a poem or other verbal artifact will be an inexact copy whose relation to its original more resembles that of a variation to its theme. Shakespeare's use of the word is expressive of the shocking discrepancies that can be felt when encountering such translating. For poetry to be translated, in the sense implied by this chapter's title, is for it to be altered into a form that is comically unsuitable, improper even, and enjoyed by those such as Titania under delusive influences. Yet in Shakespeare's play the dangers of humiliation are for the most part averted, the transformations are only in play, and Bottom's features are restored. Among the ambiguities and ironies of the famous phrase that I take for a title to this chapter are the thought that poetry can be translated, but what readers will get is an ass's head.