in the bloodiest war of all time. No nation can afford to permit itself to be dishonored by ignoring insult after insult.

Engaging in war involves preparation for war. We must prepare in the most effective way. That brings us back to our original question, Shall we introduce military trainingin to our high schools? The answer is unalterably the same-No! We understand that if the war continues for some time, the schoolboys of today will be the soldiers of tomorrow, and that it behooves them to prepare for military service. We trust that they may not fail in their duty; furthermore, that they may not choose the wrong method in which to make this preparation. It can not be done by simply acquiring skill in the "old order of things." It can be done by developing body, mind, and soul to the limit of their capacity. The best place for such development is the school, that school in particular which gives physical education a prominent place on its program, for have we not found that physical training builds men better than does military training?

Furthermore, modern warfare involves something besides physical force. The present war is waged largely by technicians. Future wars, if such there be, will be fought almost entirely by men who know chemistry, physics, electricity, engineering, topography, metallurgy, and like subjects, the principles of which are taught in our schools. Any untrained person who takes part will have the pleasure of doing the drudgery, and he will not require much drilling for that. The value of the above-named subjects does not cease to exist when war ends, for they are related to the arts of peace.

We must not be so absorbed in the business of war that we forget to prepare for peace. After the war, when the men are mustered out, they will be called upon to render a different form of service from that in which they have just been engaged. If they have been properly trained they will take their places in the business and professional worlds as efficiently as they did upon the battlefield. They will have had not only preparation for war and death, but also preparation for peace, for life.

HARVEY, ILL.

EDITH L. HILDERBRANT

VI

HASTE AND WASTE IN TRANSLATING LATIN

There still lingers among us a more or less general idea that translation, if properly conducted, is a process almost wholly objective, a routine substitution of values, Latin or French x and y, for example, becoming English a and b. To be sure, no one would quite accept that picturesque legend of the Seventy, imprisoned in as many separate cells by Ptolemy Philadelphus, that they might produce independent translations of the books of the Old Testament, with the astonishing result that one identical version from beginning to end was handed in by all the scholars. And yet many continue to imagine that the perfect translation of the Phaedo, or St. John's Gospel, or the Fourth Eclogue, would all but eliminate subjective interpretation, and give the precise equivalent of the original, with almost mathematical accuracy. But this coldly mechanical, objective, unbiased translation is the purest fiction of the imagination. Practical experience long ago proved that virtually nothing can be translated except by a logical process of reasoning, an analysis of the probable meaning in case there is the least uncertainty. For ideas exprest in one language can not be run into the mold of another tongue without first going into the melting-pot of the translator's mind. Something may be lost in this highly subjective process, but the one radical remedy possible is purely personal-another translator. And the next to try his hand can make no revolutionary change of method. He too must do his best to grasp the whole thought of his author, before he attempts to set down a syllable. If this is so clearly the case of the seasoned scholar, what are we to say of the rapid-fire methods of the school-boy or student, who tries the impossible with naïve assurance, reducing the process by elimination of the first and all-essential step?

He may not say in his haste that all men are liars, but he does have a lurking notion that ancient writers, at least, wrote sentences which appear to be made up of just words, some familiar, some quite new, others half-recognized acquaintances. He begins to think at once of the meaning of these separate words, thus diverting his attention unhappily at the critical moment from the inflections, which alone can give the clue to phrases and larger groups, of vastly more importance than the individual words. The same distraction naturally prevents word-order and the rhetorical elements from making any impression at the proper time. At the first glimmering of an idea he feels that he must begin to "translate," thus forcing a preconceived and often hopelessly confused meaning out of the reluctant words. That this socalled translation is nonsense, or at best obscure and empty, would seem an obvious check on such slap-dash methods. But a saving sense of humor is often wholly lacking. Nowhere does the average pupil show less of that precious quality than when he has just perpetrated a routine “translation," which would be screamingly funny in its indifference to sense, if these comedies of errors were not the daily tragedy of the classroom.

Few students appear to dream that in translating, a contact of mind with mind is first to be established, that definite and clear-cut ideas, as exprest by the writer, must first enter the head of the translator before he can possibly find the English words with which to reproduce those thoughts in modern form. It is a kind of wireless communication, so mystifying to the beginner, that he hears only confused sounds, and thinks the whole process decidedly uncanny. He imagines the ancient mind must have worked, with much clanking of strange machinery, to produce sentences of dreary length and dismal obscurity; but that, such as they are, we must accept them as the weird products of an age remote and incomprehensible; that, for such reasons, an English version can hardly sound otherwise than dimly intelligible. course, every bright student knows better, but some such unconscious obsession is, even in his case, the inevitable result

Of

of translating daily by wasteful and inefficient methods, or no method at all.

The commonest waste of effort is in a kind of amateur detective work-chasing after the lone rascal of a word, oblivious of the pals who stand by his side, unseen for the moment. A hasty identification is attempted, and rashly based upon the first few letters of the word, as if there were no deceptive resemblances. The old hand begins at the other end, and counts endings of far more moment at the start than initial letters. He narrowly scrutinizes case-endings, verb-forms, and other inflections, even before he allows himself a thought about the meaning of the words. Trained in the hard school of experience, he knows that words, unlike thieves, have no finger-prints or rogues' gallery photographs, making their identification prompt and certain; that they often disguise themselves, and pass under some unsuspected alias. "Find the group first," is his maxim, as infallible as the lawyer's cui bono, or cherchez la femme. This done and only thendoes he think of the individual word, often elusive, like res or ratio, only to be seized after one has thought more or less consciously of the Protean changes they make in their meaning in deference to their surroundings. Imitative coloring we might call this, and give it a whole chapter in the vade-mecum of the translator, adequately to treat of such chamæleon words, defying real recognition, except in the given grouping.

But our beginner has been searching all this while from one end of the sentence to the other for certain leading words called subject, predicate, object, and so forth. Very likely he has been deliberately taught that these important pieces in the game must be first discovered, then arranged in the English order, then translated, leaving the other elements of the sentence to be brought in somehow, as best he can. Nothing could be more flatly opposed to the psychology of translation, as the slightest practical experience in handling two or three languages of today will readily prove. And nothing is more certain to obscure or distort the meaning of sentences, than a process so illogical, so naïvely dependent upon the printed page, so incapable of application to the

spoken word. One has only to read an unseen Latin sentence of average length aloud to a student trained by the above method, to demonstrate the utter failure of such a process of beating the bushes. And yet it is not unfair to say that a large fraction of teachers have been unable to break away altogether from a method which fails at once when applied to a sentence read aloud by another person, thus arousing the uncomfortable suspicion that it is entirely devoid of any logical basis. That there should be two parallel methods, one to be used when the ear is called into play, the other when we depend upon the eye, is too absurd for words. Who could possibly believe in the wisdom of attempting to play the same game by two radically different sets of rules? The logic of the situation would seem to be pitiless, and a method which can not serve both eye and ear manifestly deserves a place on the classical scrap-heap.

Translation from a foreign tongue requires a single, definite mode of attack, in all essentials the same for a "dead" language as for a "living" one. It must be precisely the same for sentences which reach us thru the ear, as for those which lie before the eye in cold type, except in so far as repetition in the latter case is always possible an advantage heavily discounted by the temptation to relax attention in the first reading, and thus to skirmish half-heartedly about, instead of risking all upon one frontal attack. If the need of strategy is so often forgotten, it must be that many carelessly assume translation to be only a transfer of words, a changing of foreign coins into the equivalent domestic coinage, at a low rate of exchange, too, when literalness alone is required. But no analogy could be more misleading than that of the moneychanger. There is no such sordid converse between any other speech and our own. The latter is like a small country, entirely surrounded by a neutral zone, such as the ancient Teutons thought the best proof of their prowess. Just beyond that "No Man's Land" lie all the other languages, living or dead. The neutral strip is peopled by ideas alone, to the entire exclusion of words. It is a zone of thoughts, completely stript of nationality, as of every other limitation of