6.20.2014

infallible test

In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 22

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a load of blathering-drivel!

JforJames said...

Coleridge may be baroque in his rhetoric but I like STC's test for the best poetry: untranslatable in the selfsame language.