And even though our third colleague died more naturally, it wasn't because half of Europe didn't long to see him hanged, drawn, quartered, and impaled in pieces. In the most dramatic of these cases, the ostensible reason for the translator's execution was that he had inserted three extra words in his translation, words not clearly present in the original. It is the particle-ridden and elliptical nature of these outwardly simple words that presents the problem, and few translators could make any sense of the passage without adding words to the text. And hence death can do nothing to you, for you are not yet ready to die, and when you have died, death will also not be able to do anything, since you will no longer be anything at all . In both the French and the English, it is the last three italicized words that furnished the grounds for execution.
Experienced translators are likely to recognize the nature of the problem.
One requires truly deep knowledge of such texts to be absolutely certain of their meaning. So much is elliptical or left unsaid or couched in extremely simple terms that the worst offense Dolet can be charged with is perhaps excessive zeal. Unfortunately his accusers of 1546 were equally zealous, and it was their judgment which finally brought him him, at the age of 37, to the stake. A humanist to the core, Dolet spent his early youth in the Montparnasse of his day, the University of Padua, where pantheism and materialism both flourished, making it almost de rigueur to deny the immortality of the soul. Always a bit headstrong, at the age of only 25 Dolet killed a man, and a part of his life was spent in prison or on the run.