Untranslatable ?
When, more than twenty years ago, I wrote on a piece of paper the words "They do it because they want to. It suits them; it is their cup of tea," I could not foresee that the meretricious book in which this jewelled prose was to coruscate would be translated into almost every European language except Erse. The other day, glancing through a newly arrived French edition, I noticed that "it is their cup of tea " had been rendered by " c'est leur pain quotidien." This seemed tt, me a dogged rather than a felicitous attempt to capture the meaning of a slang phrase, and I thought it would be interesting to see what the other nationalities had made of it. Half an hour's research proved that the French were the only people who had even had a shot at it; the others had all left it out. This, since the phrase is redundant, was a sensible thing to do; but I felt a slight qualm of guilt at the thought of all those gifted translators racking their brains, thumbing their dictionaries, and finally, with a feeling of frustration and inadequacy, taking the coward's way out.
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