Siyar al-mutaʾakhkhirin 42.29.2

42.29.2

All these people, whether in Europe or in India, never suspected that I wrote quite like a foreigner, (and indeed they soon would have told me so, had they thought it) and it is no less certain that it is only since I have wrote history, that is, since I have thrown away the mask, and given myself for what I was, that I have been taken for a foreigner, and have been thought so greatly defective in language. Let us examine then, whether this be not owing to this incident, that a translation, although ever so excellent, must unavoidably look like a translation, that is, like something foreign. But if this be the case with the Greek and Latin writers, whose ideas, notions, religion, ways of speaking, Gods, terms of war, terms of eloquence and arts and sciences, with a infinity of simple and compound words, have been naturalized in the languages of Europe, what must be the case of a translation from the Persian into the English or any other European language, where there is as much diversity in those articles, as there is similarity in the European ones ? Is it not natural enough to suppose, that some anomalies, and some out of the way expressions must unavoidably become the result of that insurmountable diversity ? Is it not natural to suppose, and would it not be generous to think, that were a translation in as fine a language as that of the best English historians, it would unavoidably deviate from the genuineness of the text ?