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step by step, as they have done. For oftentimes they have gone so close, that they have trod on the heels of Juvenal and Persius, and hurt them by their too near approach. A noble author would not be pursued too close by a translator. We lose his spirit when we think to take his body. The grosser part remains with us, but the soul is flown away, in some noble expression, or some delicate turn of words, or thought. Thus Holiday, who made this way his choice, seized the meaning of Juvenal; but the poetry has always escaped him. They who will not grant me, that pleasure is one of the ends of poetry, but that it is only a means of compassing the only end, which is instruction, must yet allow, that without the means of pleasure, the instruction is but a bare and dry philosophy; a crude preparation of morals, which we may have from Aristotle and Epictetus, with more profit than from any poet; neither Holiday nor Stapylton have imitated Juvenal, in the poetical parts of him, his diction and his elocution. Nor had they been poets, as neither of them were; yet in the way they took, it was impossible for them to have succeeded in the poetic part. The English verse which we call heroic, consists of more than ten syllables, the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as for example, this verse in Virgil :

Pulverulenta putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.

Here is the difference of no less than seven syllables in a line, betwixt the English and the Latin. Now the medium of these is about fourteen syllables: because the dactyle is a more frequent foot in hexameters than the spondee. But Holiday, without considering that he writ with the disadvantage of four syllables less in every verse, endeavours to make one of his lines to comprehend the sense of one of Juvenal's. According to the falsity of the proposition was the success. He was forced to crowd his verse with ill-sounding monosyllables, of which our barbarous language affords him a wild plenty and by that means he arrived at his pedantic end, which was to make a literal translation his verses have nothing of verse in them, but only the worst part of it, the rhyme; and that, into the bargain, is far from good. But, which is more intolerable, by cramming his ill chosen and worse sounding monosyllables so close together, the very sense which he endeavours to explain is become more obscure than that of the author. So that Holiday himself cannot be understood, without as large a commentary as that which he makes on his two authors. For my own part, I can make a shift to find the meaning of Juvenal without his notes, but his translation is more difficult than his author. And I find beauties in the Latin to recompense my pains; but in Holiday and Stapylton my ears, in the first place, are mortally offended and then their sense is so perplexed, that I return to the original as the more pleasing task, as well as the more easy.

"This must be said for our translation, that if we give not the whole sense of Juvenal, yet we give the most considerable part of it. We give it, in general, so clearly, that few notes are sufficient to make us intelligible. We make our author at least appear in a poetic dress. We have actually made him more sounding, and more elegant, than he was before in English: and have endeavoured to make him speak that kind of English which he would have spoken had he lived in England, and had he written to this age. If sometimes any of us (and it is but seldom) make him express the customs and manners of our native country, rather than of Rome, it is, either when there was some kind of analogy betwixt their customs and ours, or when, to make him more easy to vulgar understandings, we give him those manners which are familiar to us. But I defend not this innovation, it is enough if I can excuse it. For, to speak sincerely, the manners of nations and ages are not to be confounded; we should either make them English, or leave them Roman. If this can neither be defended nor excused, let it be pardoned at least, because it is acknowledged: and so much the more easily, as being a fault which is never committed without some pleasure to the reader."1

This is a long extract, but it contains in a few sentences volumes of sound sense, such as you shall seek for in vain through whole æsthetical libraries of our many-folio'd friends, the Germans. It lays bare also, with a happy honesty, the weak side of the English strong man, when he careers along in his path of translation, not like a peeping German engraver on copper-plate, but like a regal Neptune lashing the billowy brine in triumph,-this weakness, namely, that in the heat of his enthusiasm, our English translator is in constant danger to act himself beyond his part, perhaps out of it altogether; in the strong possession of his idea to be a spirited imitator, he becomes a genuine original; instead of merely changing the dress, he has metamorphosed the character, and transmuted the soul of the old Greek. Let that direct manly English sentence stand out strongly as a solemn warning to all English translators from the mouth of their greatest Coryphæus: "For, to speak sincerely, the manners of nations and ages are not to be confounded; we should either make them English, or leave them Roman." Not merely not to confound, but to retain, and to bring conspicuously forward, (so far of course as the language

1 For the other side of the case, we cannot do better than refer our readers

back to Mr. Horne's remarks, No. 111. of the Classical Museum.

will allow), every trait that is in the slightest degree characteristic of his original,—this, we cordially agree with Mr. Sewell, (p. 76.) must ever be the grand object of a translator; for why do we seek eagerly to know a foreigner, either in life or in books, but for the sake of that which is foreign in him, or characteristic of him as a foreigner? Now, those who have examined English translations with care know, that precisely in this point lies their hereditary liability to offend. Instead of bringing that which is characteristic of their author into the foreground with a forward love, which, even if excessive, were pardonable, they studiously strive to hide it, either letting it drop altogether, or daubing it with a white wash, or working it over with all sorts of modern gum-flowers, and artificial festooning; just as if a painter, commissioned to give a sketch of the wild scenery in the granite district of Loch-na-gar and Balmoral, should, for fear of being thought harsh and over-bold, delineate every eminence, with smooth and gentle lines borrowed from the pastoral slopes of the green Ochills and the Cheviots! Or, perhaps, a worse procedure may be adopted, as in the case of those manufacturers of landscape, whom Ruscan so severely criticises, whose mountains are neither Ochills nor Grampians, but only mountains in general. Many instances of this generalizing style of translation may be noted in Francis' translation of Horace. As for the other, or what we may aptly call, the elegant style, which systematically softens down, and rubs off the characteristic peculiarities of the original, examples of it are to be found everywhere in the English translations of the classics; for the ancients, and especially the Greeks, had a direct and striking way of appealing broadly to the senses with a few bold words, which is mostly an offence, to the more refined sensibility, and over-delicate fastidiousness of the moderns. Of this fault, however, as it is pertinent to our present purpose, I shall mention a few instances from a translation of the Agamemnon, published within these twenty years. In the sublime opening chorus to this play, "the most wonderful effort," as Mr. Conington justly remarks, "of Greek poetry," Eschylus, after painting the appearance of two eagles devouring a hare laden with young, as an evil omen to the Greek fleet assembled at Aulis, describes Artemis, the patroness of the wild beasts of * The Agamemnon of Æschylus from the Greek, by John S. Harford, Esq. London 1831.

the forest, as indignant at this offence of the twin birds of Jove (representing Menelaus and Agamemnon), and therefore brooding evil against the house of Atridæ :

οἴκῳ

Γὰρ ἐπίφθονος Ἄρτεμις ἁγνὰ
Πτανοῖσι κυσὶ πατρὸς

Αυτότοκον πρὸ λόχου μογερὰν πτάκα θυομένοισι.

In which passage the eagles are called "the winged hounds of the father;" a phraseology at once most characteristic of the thing meant (a compound of celerity and ferocity) of the Greek style of imagery, and above all, of the genius of Æschylus; and a phraseology, therefore, which ought, at any sacrifice to have been retained by a translator who knew his duty, and who appreciated his author. Now, mark how Harford translates:

Diana's wrath this house must feel,

EAGLES, she hates your bloody meal."

And in a note he says:-"the term winged dogs or griffins for eagles, is one of those extravagancies of expression in which the wild fancy of Eschylus often indulged, and for which he is pleasantly rallied by Aristophanes in the Frogs"!!! In the same way, where Cassandra, in the vivid picture language of prophecy, describes the king of men as "a bull with black horns," Harford, as if to smooth down what to a modern fancy may appear the grossness of this favourite ancient image, first adds the epithet "noble" to the animal, and then misses out the "black horns" altogether. No less is he offended with the chorus, when, in the immediately preceding passage, they describe their blood, in somewhat strong, but in a moment of preternatural excitement, not unnatural language, as becoming yellow with fear.

Ἐπὶ δὲ καρδίαν ἔδραμε κροκοβαφὴς
Στάγων.

This yellow drop he makes ruddy.—But we forbear to multiply examples of this timid and delicate style of translation, which one may now be allowed to hope, with the single exception of Harford's work, Symmons,3 by his masculine and

The Agamemnon of Æschylus, translated by John Symmons, Esq. A.M., late student of Christ Church (son of

the translator of the Eneid.) London, 1824.

vigorous example, has banished for ever from the field of Eschylean translation. It will not be useless, however, to have brought this matter distinctly forward, as we shall see immediately that a recent translator of undoubted genius, has run, with an unreined plunge, after a fashion really ludicrous, into exactly the opposite extreme.

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Recurring to the critical remarks of Dryden, from which we started, we find in the very first words, another fertile source "The common way,' of abuse in our English translations. says he, "which we have taken is not a literal translation, but a sort of paraphrase, or something which is yet more loose, betwixt a paraphrase and an imitation." What this "sort of paraphrase" was, may best be understood by setting before the reader the following four lines and a half from the first satire of Juvenal, with their translation by Dryden :—

"Cum pars Niliacæ plebis, cum verna Canopi
Crispinus, Tyrias humero revocante lacernas,
Ventilet æstivum digitis sudantibus aurum,
Nec sufferre queat majoris pondera gemmæ,
Difficile est satiram non scribere."

Thus translated:

"When I behold the spawn of conquered Nile,
Crispinus, both in birth and manners vile,
Pacing in pomp with cloak of Tyrian dye,
Changed oft a day for needless luxury;
And finding oft occasion to be fanned,
Ambitious to produce his lady hand;

Charged with light summer rings his fingers sweat,
Unable to support a gem of weight;

Such fulsome objects meeting every where,

"Tis hard to write, but harder to forbear."

Here it were the most easy of all things for a scrupulous critic of very minute dimensions, to point out half a dozen or perhaps a whole dozen words, or even a whole line, that has no exact counterpart in the original; greater still to such a small observer were the offence, that plain "Maevia," mentioned a few lines above Crispinus, in our poet's version, be

comes,

"Mannish-Maevia, that two-handed whore ;"

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