"Translators who hold fast to their originals surrender the originality of their nation": Goethe on translation

There are three kinds of translation. The first acquaints us with the foreign realm in our own understanding; here a simple and prosaic translation is the best. For as prose does away with all the particularities of any poetic art . . . . it does greatest service at the beginning. . . . A second period follows, in which one seeks to transport [versetzen] oneself into the situation of the foreign realm, but only in order to possess oneself of foreign meaning, to reproduce that foreign meaning with one's own . . . We [then] experience a third epoch, which we may call highest and last, that namely in which one seeks to make the translation identical to the original, to have it count not instead of the original but in its place. . . . This last mode meets at its beginning with the greatest resistance; for translators who hold fast to their originals surrender to some extent the originality of their own nation. A third thing thus comes into being, towards which the taste of the public must now develop itself.

From Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans, Notes and Essays for Better Understanding the East-West Divan, translated by Larry Rosenwald. Excerpted from his keynote address at the recent National Yiddish Book Center conference on translation.