The Dialogue on Translation between a Lord and a Clerk forms the preface of John Trevisa's 1387 translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden, made for his patron, Lord Berkeley. Written in Middle English, it consists of a series of arguments made by the clerk (representing Trevisa) on why books should not be translated from learned languages such as Latin, each one followed by a rebuttal from the Lord (representing Lord Berkeley). The clerk eventually agrees and the dialogue concludes with a prayer for guidance in the translation.
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“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
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“To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”
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