Part 15 (1/2)

And thought it fit wits should be more confined To author's sense, and to their periods too, Must leave out nothing, every sense must do, And though they cannot render verse for verse, Yet every period's sense they must rehea.r.s.e.

Finally Metellus, speaking for the group, orders Laelius, one of their number, to translate the Fourth Book of the _Aeneid_, keeping himself in due subordination to Virgil.

We all bid then translate it the old way Not a-la-mode, but like George Sandys or May; Show Virgil's every period, not steal sense To make up a new-fas.h.i.+oned poem thence.

Other translators, though not defending the literal method, do not advocate imitation. Roscommon, in the _Essay on Translated Verse_, demands fidelity to the substance of the original when he says,

The genuine sense, intelligibly told, Shows a translator both discreet and bold.

Excursions are inexpiably bad, And 'tis much safer to leave out than add,

but, unlike Phaer, he forbids the omission of difficult pa.s.sages:

Abstruse and mystic thoughts you must express, With painful care and seeming easiness.

Dryden considers the whole situation in detail.[404] He admires Cowley's _Pindaric Odes_ and admits that both Pindar and his translator do not come under ordinary rules, but he fears the effect of Cowley's example ”when writers of unequal parts to him shall imitate so bold an undertaking,” and believes that only a poet so ”wild and ungovernable”

as Pindar justifies the method of Cowley. ”If Virgil, or Ovid, or any regular intelligible authors be thus used, 'tis no longer to be called their work, when neither the thoughts nor words are drawn from the original; but instead of them there is something new produced, which is almost the creation of another hand.... He who is inquisitive to know an author's thoughts will be disappointed in his expectation; and 'tis not always that a man will be contented to have a present made him, when he expects the payment of a debt. To state it fairly; imitation is the most advantageous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead.”

Though imitation was not generally accepted as a standard method of translation, certain elements in the theory of Denham and Cowley remained popular throughout the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century. A favorite comment in the complimentary verses attached to translations is the a.s.sertion that the translator has not only equaled but surpa.s.sed his original. An extreme example of this is Dryden's fatuous reference to the Earl of Mulgrave's translation of Ovid:

How will sweet Ovid's ghost be pleased to hear His fame augmented by an English peer, How he embellishes his Helen's loves, Outdoes his softness, and his sense improves.[405]

His earlier lines to Sir Robert Howard on the latter's translation of the _Achilleis_ of Statius are somewhat less bald:

To understand how much we owe to you, We must your numbers with your author's view; Then shall we see his work was lamely rough, Each figure stiff as if designed in buff; His colours laid so thick on every place, As only showed the paint, but hid the face; But as in perspective we beauties see Which in the gla.s.s, not in the picture be, So here our sight obligingly mistakes That wealth which his your bounty only makes.

Thus vulgar dishes are by cooks disguised, More for their dressing than their substance prized.[406]

It was especially in cases where the original lacked smoothness and perspicuity, the qualities which appealed most strongly to the century, that the claim to improvement was made. Often, however, it was a.s.sociated with notably accurate versions. Cartwright calls upon the readers of Holiday's _Persius_,

who when they shall view How truly with thine author thou dost pace, How hand in hand ye go, what equal grace Thou dost observe with him in every term, They cannot but, if just, justly affirm That did your times as do your lines agree, He might be thought to have translated thee, But that he's darker, not so strong; wherein Thy greater art more clearly may be seen, Which does thy Persius' cloudy storms display With lightning and with thunder; both which lay Couched perchance in him, but wanted force To break, or light from darkness to divorce, Till thine exhaled skill compressed it so, That forced the clouds to break, the light to show, The thunder to be heard. That now each child Can prattle what was meant; whilst thou art styled Of all, with t.i.tles of true dignity For lofty phrase and perspicuity.[407]

J. A. addresses Lucretius in lines prefixed to Creech's translation,

But Lord, how much you're changed, how much improv'd!

Your native roughness all is left behind, But still the same good man tho' more refin'd,[408]

and Otway says to the translator:

For when the rich original we peruse, And by it try the metal you produce, Though there indeed the purest ore we find, Yet still by you it something is refined; Thus when the great Lucretius gives a loose And lashes to her speed his fiery Muse, Still with him you maintain an equal pace, And bear full stretch upon him all the race; But when in rugged way we find him rein His verse, and not so smooth a stroke maintain, There the advantage he receives is found, By you taught temper, and to choose his ground.[409]

So authoritative a critic as Roscommon, however, seems to oppose attempts at improvement when he writes,

Your author always will the best advise, Fall when he falls, and when he rises, rise,

a precept which Tytler, writing at the end of the next century, considers the one doubtful rule in _The Essay on Translated Verse_. ”Far from adopting the former part of this maxim,” he declares, ”I consider it to be the duty of a poetical translator, never to suffer his original to fall. He must maintain with him a perpetual contest of genius; he must attend him in his highest flights, and soar, if he can, beyond him: and when he perceives, at any time a diminution of his powers, when he sees a drooping wing, he must raise him on his own pinions.”[410]

The influence of Denham and Cowley is also seen in what is perhaps the most significant element in the seventeenth-century theory of translation. These men advocated freedom in translation, not because such freedom would give the translator a greater opportunity to display his own powers, but because it would enable him to reproduce more truly the spirit of the original. A good translator must, first of all, know his author intimately. Where Denham's expressions are fuller than Virgil's, they are, he says, ”but the impressions which the often reading of him hath left upon my thoughts.” Possessing this intimate acquaintance, the English writer must try to think and write as if he were identified with his author. Dryden, who, in spite of his general principles, sometimes practised something uncommonly like imitation, says in the preface to _Sylvae_: ”I must acknowledge that I have many times exceeded my commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors as no Dutch commentator will forgive me.... Where I have enlarged them, I desire the false critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but either that they are secretly in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him; or at least, if both these considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he would probably have written.”[411]

By a sort of irony the more faithful translator came in time to recognize this as one of the precepts of his art, and sometimes to use it as an argument against too much liberty. The Earl of Roscommon says in the preface to his translation of Horace's _Art of Poetry_, ”I have kept as close as I could both to the meaning and the words of the author, and done nothing but what I believe he would forgive if he were alive; and I have often asked myself this question.” Dryden follows his protest against imitation by saying: ”Nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers. When we come thus far, 'tis time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his, to give his thought either the same turn, if our tongue will bear it, or if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance.”[412] Such faithfulness, according to Dryden, involves the appreciation and the reproduction of the qualities in an author which distinguish him from others, or, to use his own words, ”the maintaining the character of an author which distinguishes him from all others, and makes him appear that individual poet whom you would interpret.”[413] Dryden thinks that English translators have not sufficiently recognized the necessity for this. ”For example, not only the thoughts, but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid are very different: yet I see, even in our best poets who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents, and, by endeavoring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them so much alike that, if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies which was Virgil and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late n.o.ble painter that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happened because he always studied himself more than those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another.”

But critics recognized that study and pains alone could not furnish the translator for his work. ”To be a thorough translator,” says Dryden, ”he must be a thorough poet,”[414] or to put it, as does Roscommon, somewhat more mildly, he must by nature possess the more essential characteristics of his author. Admitting this, Creech writes with a slight air of apology, ”I cannot choose but smile to think that I, who have ... too little ill nature (for that is commonly thought a necessary ingredient) to be a satirist, should venture upon Horace.”[415] Dryden finds by experience that he can more easily translate a poet akin to himself. His translations of Ovid please him.

”Whether it be the partiality of an old man to his youngest child I know not; but they appear to me the best of all my endeavors in this kind.

Perhaps this poet is more easy to be translated than some others whom I have lately attempted; perhaps, too, he was more according to my genius.”[416] He looks forward with pleasure to putting the whole of the _Iliad_ into English. ”And this I dare a.s.sure the world beforehand, that I have found, by trial, Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil, though I say not the translation will be less laborious; for the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet.”[417] The insistence on the necessity for kins.h.i.+p between the author and the translator is the princ.i.p.al idea in Roscommon's _Essay on Translated Verse_. According to Roscommon,

Each poet with a different talent writes, One praises, one instructs, another bites.