Part 7 (1/2)

# A judicious one-volume selection preferable.

Th.o.r.eau's _Walden_, 1854.

Thorne's _Environs of London_.

Tottell's _Miscellany_.

Virgil, _Bucolics_ and _Georgics_, by Keightley.

Voltaire's _Candide_, in French.

Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary_.

Walton's _Angler_.

Warton's _English Poetry_, 1871.

Walpole's _Letters_.

Wise's _New Forest_.

# Best edition for engravings.

White's _Selborne_, 1st edition.

Wodroephe's _Spare Hours of a Soldier_, 1623.

Yarrell's _British Birds_.

How pa.s.sing rich one would be with all these, and no more--rich beyond the greatest bibliomaniacs, and beyond the possessors of the rarest and costliest treasures in book-form! Turn over the pages of the most splendid catalogues, and how few one would find to add! Nor would all the before-recited productions appeal to all book-lovers. There are many who would excuse themselves from admitting Rabelais. Some might not particularly care for the works of foreign origin. Some might be courageous enough to avow an indifference to Milton and Spenser, and even a dislike to Bunyan. Still the rule holds good, we think, that all our chosen authors or books have more or less powerful credentials. There remain to be added Books of Reference, as we have pointed out, curiosities, and this or that person's specialisms.

From a strictly practical point of view, the language and sense of any great writer, ancient or modern, may be as well, nay, better, appreciated in a volume bought for a trifle than in a rare and luxurious edition, where the place and time of origin, the type, the paper, and the binding are advent.i.tious accessories--almost _impedimenta_--and the book itself a work of art like a picture or a coin. But with either of the latter it is different, for there the canvas or the metal is an integral portion of the object. For instance, take the better parts of Tennyson. Is it not sufficient to read them in a modest foolscap octavo? Do we require external aids?

The poet is his own best ill.u.s.trator, and if we purchase a pictorial edition, we are apt to find that the author and the artist are at variance in their interpretations.

Translations are always to be carefully avoided by all who can more or less confidently read the author in the original language. We have yet to meet with a version, whether of an ancient or of a modern cla.s.sic, which is thoroughly appreciative and satisfactory. The majority are utterly disappointing and deceptive. It is in the transfer of the idiom and costume that the difficulty and consequent failure lie. No one who merely knows at second hand Homer, Herodotus, Plautus, Terence, Horace, Virgil, Montaigne, Le Sage (a metonym for _Gil Blas_), Cervantes, La Fontaine, Dumas, Maupa.s.sant, Balzac, can have had an opportunity of forming an adequate and just estimate of those authors. You might nearly as soon expect a Frenchman to relish Butler or d.i.c.kens in their Parisian habiliments.

Such a fact--for a fact it undoubtedly is--opens to our consideration a very large and a very grave problem, since the very limited extent to which the English public is conversant with Greek and Latin, and with even the Latin family of modern languages, makes the admission that so many works of the highest importance and interest are only properly and truly readable in their own tongues tantamount to one that they are not properly and truly readable at all.

Of all forms of translation, the paraphrase is perhaps the worst, so far as an interpretation of the original sense goes, but not the most dangerous if we know it to be what it is, and do not look for more than a general idea of the meaning and plan of the author. To be practically serviceable, an English version of any cla.s.sical or foreign work should be literal, and with the literalness as idiomatic as may be; and if the text to be rendered is in verse, the English equivalent should preferably be in verse without rhyme or in prose.

The object to be attained in these cases is a transfer of the conceptions, notions, or theories of writers from languages which we do not understand to one which we do; and therefore the best translator is he who has absolutely no higher aim than this, and does not aspire to make his task a stalking-horse for his own literary ambition.

There is scarcely an end of the various schemes adopted to convey to us intelligibly and successfully the sentiments and conceits of ancient authors as well as of those of other countries, and, all things considered, a _literal_ version in prose appears to present the fewest disadvantages, for it disarms the translator of the temptation to poetical flights and metrical ingenuity, and brings us nearer to the man and the age to be immediately and primarily studied.

At best, a translation is an indifferent subst.i.tute for the book itself, as it was delivered to the world by some renowned hand, or even by some personage whose individuality is stamped, as in the case of the _Imitatio Christi_ or the _Essays_ of Montaigne, on every sentence indelibly and untransferably, and seems part of the very Latin or French type. An amusing instance occurred in which a gentleman, having heard of the fine style of A Kempis, bought as a present to a friend a copy of the latest English translation! And it is equally futile to look for the essence and spirit of the great Gascon writer in the pages of Florio or Cotton, both of whom, though in unequal measure, to the exigencies of diction or an imperfect conversance with the dialect in which Montaigne wrote sacrificed precious personal idiosyncrasies.

The majority of the popular and current versions of the cla.s.sics are unsatisfying and treacherous, because they have been executed either by under-paid scholars, like Bohn's Series, or by persons who have had a tendency to put themselves in the place of their author.

We may not be very willing to part with our old favourites, such as Chapman's _Homer_, Florio's _Montaigne_, North's _Plutarch_, Shelton's _Don Quixote_, Urquhart's _Rabelais_, and Smollett's _Gil Blas_; but it is to be feared that they must be prized as curiosities and rarities rather than as interpreters and guides. If a thoroughly reliable library of cla.s.sical translations, on as literal a plan as possible, could be formed, it would be a real boon to the public--it would be what Bohn's Series ought to have been. Of course, in the department of translation there are two leading divisions--the ancient and the modern cla.s.sics; and for much the same reason that a story or a _jeu d'esprit_ seldom bears transplanting from one soil to another, both these branches of literature are apt to suffer when they change their garb. Almost every man who writes is influenced by dominant environments, whether he be Greek or Roman, or Oriental, or modern European of whatever nationality; and his mere expressions or sense rendered into a foreign tongue are usually like a painting without a background or an atmosphere. We may range over the whole field from the most ancient times to the most modern, and the same thing manifests itself. Open before me is an ill.u.s.tration which will answer the purpose as well as any other, in the shape of Muirhead's version of the _Vaux de Vire_ of Jean le Houx. At page 105 we have the following stanza:--

”Lorsque me presse l'heure, Je retourne au logis; Ma femme est la qui pleure, Ainsi qu'il m'est aduis, Et me dict en cholere: 'Que fay ie seule au lict?

Est il seant de boire Ainsi jusqu'a minuict?'”

Mr. Muirhead translates thus--

”When late the hour appears, Returning to my home, My wife is there in tears, As I hear when I come.

She greets me testily: 'I lie a-bed alone: Do you thus shamelessly Carouse till midnight's gone?'”