[porknubbins]

I came across Burton on forum discussions of polyglots. In addition to the above he is supposed to have been fluent in some impossible number of languages like 50. Of course no one was around to check and many of these could have been dialects or much smaller languages than the major world languages.

Another great Victorian translator was Arthur Waley who translated the Tale of Genji and lots of Chinese poetry without ever having visted Asia. Its absolutely mind boggling to me, having barely learned a few languages how one would tranlate from handwritten kanji scrolls with no reference materials or even bilingual dictionaries.