Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/278

This page has been validated.
THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

name is, The New Street of the Little Fields;" but it would be sheer grotesqueness in serious prose to speak of the Place of the Star, and the Avenue of the Elysian Fields.

Similarly, foreign titles of courtesy and conventional terms of address cannot be translated without producing a curious hybrid effect utterly out of tone with the context. Mme de Montespan has a foreign sound; Mrs. De Montespan is neither more nor less than burlesque. Even the least travelled modern reader knows that in Berlin people greet each other as Herr and Frau, in Florence as Signor and Signora, and not as Mr. and Mrs. Of course there are certain anomalous cases that are rather baffling; in Germany especially the complicated forms of address, Herr Ober-Lieutenant, Frau Professorin, and the like, lead the translator between a Scylla of inconsistency and a Charybdis of farce-comedy.

[264]