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Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20334, 5 September 1931, Page 13

In his Taylorian Lecture on Translation, lately published by the Clarendon Press, Mr Ililaire Belloc has an amusing and penetrating passage on the difficulty of verbal translation. Translate a word into its obvious equivalent, and its own associations are left behind, a disastrous loss, or it is embarrassed by new ones.

Oertam words are common or even touch upon the ludicrous, in one language whose apparent literal equivalent has no such atmosphere about. it.- There ig the classic instance of the word "handkerchief" in Othello, which, translated by the French w .°' d , Mouchoir'' interrupted the tragedy with loud laughter. Or again, the simplest word may suggest abuse or anger or repulsion in one tongue and not in another. One m ®y say that ihe word "vache" means cow, hut the very sound of that long vowel vache' has led to Hb use as a term or odium peculiarly violent and comic onlv on account of ita violence. ' There is ah old and excellent French joke about a Parisian lady who saw a charming little calf and said, Quel malheur que ca devient vache I" / that by saying, "How sad that it should grow into a cow," because cow suggests something absurd but certainly not something fierce and angry; it is not an opprobrious term. Now so much does this word "vache" have this other connotation in French that it is the common popular insult to a policeman and is a motive for imprisonment. It is one of the favourite challenges thrown down by young and eager revolutionaries to ordered society. . . . You can no more translate, the word "cad" into French than you can translate the word 'gentleman*' into French.

"Wfcile many ■women writers, says the "Manchester Guardian," have adopted masculine not many men have returned the compliment, but Mr Oliver Madox Hueffer, who published several novels under the name of Jane Wardle, was not quite alone in his choice of a feminine pseudonym. Alphonse Daudet at one time wrote under the name of Marie Gaston, Theodore Hook signed his early work Mrs Ramsbotham, Susan Crick hid the masculinity or Horace Mayhew, Euth Partington was in private life Mr B. P. Shilliber, and Mrs Horace Manners was no less a person than Swinburne. Whittior, too, somotimes used a feminine pseudonym, while, most" notable of all, Fiona Maclcod effectually veiled until his death the identity of the poeteritic William Sharp.