The Translator Conceit

[littlemanpoet]

This does provide the author with a Get Out of Jail Free card...

NO.

Please let's not do Tolkien the disservice of bypassing a real issue with an easy excuse. The main purpose of the Translator Conceit cannot be a license to trespass against good style. One of the reasons for evaluation is to determine (to the best of our ability) if the Conceit does more than merely excuse stylistics.

Originally Posted by davem

Of course, its not the only case, & the translator goes even farther in other 'translations' - do we really believe the Shire was culturally & technologically so similar to Edwardian England? Did they really have clocks & umbrellas, or something sort of like that? Maybe they had nothing like those things at all, but the translator, having decided to represent the Shire by Edwardian England, just went ahead & put those things in their holes.

I'm glad you mentioned this, because in my latest scan of chapter one, it struck me how much it is a story told by a 20th century author rather than having any feel of a translation based on very old documents ... unless we want to suppose that the translator was also an incredibly gifted story teller, so as to take the history and provide creative dialogue that could not reasonably have been part of the original text.