Volume III Part 80 (1/2)
”Crebillon! You cite a weighty authority But how is ht me to speak French in less than two years, and as a ratitude I translated his Radamiste into Italian Alexandrines I am the first Italian who has dared to use thisyour pardon, as that honour belongs to my friend Pierre Jacques Martelli”
”I a a na, inabout theof must be verses of fourteen syllables; without alternative masculine and feminine rhymes However, I confess that he thinks he has imitated the French Alexandrines, and his preface hter Did you read it?”
”Read it? I always read prefaces, and Martelli proves there that his verses have the same effect in Italian as our Alexandrine verses have in French”
”Exactly, that's what's so a The worthy man is quite mistaken, and I only ask you to listen to what I have to say on the subject
Your masculine verse has only twelve poetic syllables, and the feminine thirteen All Martelli's lines have fourteen syllables, except those that finish with a long vohich at the end of a line always counts as two syllables You will observe that the first hemistitch in Martelli always consists of seven syllables, while in French it only has six
Your friend Pierre Jacques was either stone deaf or very hard of hearing”
”Then you have followed our theory of versification rigorously”
”Just so, in spite of the difficulty, as nearly all our words end with a short syllable”
”What reception has been accorded to your innovation?”
”It has not been found pleasing, because nobody kno to recite my verses; but I hope to triumph when I deliver them myself before our literary clubs”
”Do you remember any of your version of the Radamiste?”
”I remember it all”
”You have a wonderful an to recite the same scene that I had recited to Crebillon ten years before, and I thought M de Voltaire listened with pleasure
”It doesn't strike one as at all harsh,” said he
This was the highest praise he would give e from Tancred which had not as yet been published, and which was afterwards considered, and rightly, as a ot on very well if we had kept to that, but ona line of Horace to praise one of his pieces, he said that Horace was a great iven precepts which would never be out of date Thereupon I answered that he hirandly
”Which is that?”
”You do not write, 'Contentus paucis lectoribus'”
”If Horace had had to combat the hydra-headed monster of superstition, he would have written as I have written--for all the world”
”It seeht spare yourself the trouble of co what you will never destroy”
”That which I cannot finish others will, and I shall always have the glory of being the first in the field”
”Very good; but supposing you succeed in destroying superstition, what are you going to put in its place?”