Early Theories of Translation Part 15

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.

Horace could ne'er aspire to epic bays, Nor lofty Maro stoop to lyric lays.

This, then, is his advice to the would-be translator:

Examine how your humour is inclined, And which the ruling pa.s.sion of your mind; Then, seek a poet who your way does bend, And choose an author as you choose a friend.

United by this sympathetic bond, You grow familiar, intimate, and fond; Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree, No longer his interpreter but he.

Though the plea of reproducing the spirit of the original was sometimes made a pretext for undue lat.i.tude, it is evident that there was here an important contribution to the theory of translation. In another respect, also, the consideration of metrical effects, the seventeenth century shows some advance,--an advance, however, which must be laid chiefly to the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no tendency towards innovation and experiment in the matter of verse forms.

Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied with the couplet and kindred measures, did not consider, as the Elizabethans had done, the possibility of introducing cla.s.sical metres. Creech says of Horace, "'Tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the poet,"[418] and leaves the matter there. Holiday says of his translation of the same poet: "But many, no doubt, will say Horace is by me forsaken, his lyric softness and emphatical Muse maimed; that there is a general defection from his genuine harmony. Those I must tell, I have in this translation rather sought his spirit than numbers; yet the music of verse not neglected neither, since the English ear better heareth the distich, and findeth that sweetness and air which the Latin affecteth and (questionless) attaineth in sapphics or iambic measures."[419]

Dryden frequently complains of the difficulty of translation into English metre, especially when the poet to be translated is Virgil. The use of rhyme causes trouble. It "is certainly a constraint even to the best poets, and those who make it with most ease.... What it adds to sweetness, it takes away from sense; and he who loses the least by it may be called a gainer. It often makes us swerve from an author's meaning; as, if a mark be set up for an archer at a great distance, let him aim as exactly as he can, the least wind will take his arrow, and divert it from the white."[420] The line of the heroic couplet is not long enough to reproduce the hexameter, and Virgil is especially succinct. "To make him copious is to alter his character; and to translate him line for line is impossible, because the Latin is naturally a more succinct language than either the Italian, Spanish, French, or even than the English, which, by reason of its monosyllables, is far the most compendious of them. Virgil is much the closest of any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet than the English heroic."[421] Yet though Dryden admits that Caro, the Italian translator, who used blank verse, made his task easier thereby, he does not think of abandoning the couplet for any of the verse forms which earlier translators had tried. He finds Chapman's _Homer_ characterized by "harsh numbers ... and a monstrous length of verse," and thinks his own period "a much better age than was the last ... for versification and the art of numbers."[422] Roscommon, whose version of Horace's _Art of Poetry_ is in blank verse, says that Jonson's translation lacks clearness as a result not only of his literalness but of "the constraint of rhyme,"[423] but makes no further attack on the couplet as the regular vehicle for translation.

Dryden, however, is peculiarly interested in the general effect of his verse as compared with that of his originals. "I have attempted," he says in the _Examen Poetic.u.m_, "to restore Ovid to his native sweetness, easiness, and smoothness, and to give my poetry a kind of cadence and, as we call it, a run of verse, as like the original as the English can come to the Latin."[424] In his study of Virgil previous to translating the _Aeneid_ he observed "above all, the elegance of his expressions and the harmony of his numbers."[425] Elsewhere he says of his author, "His verse is everywhere sounding the very thing in your ears whose sense it bears, yet the numbers are perpetually varied to increase the delight of the reader; so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together."[426] These metrical effects he has tried to reproduce in English. "The turns of his verse, his breakings, his numbers, and his gravity, I have as far imitated as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of my performance would allow," he says in the preface to _Sylvae_.[427] In his translation of the whole _Aeneid_ he was guided by the same considerations. "Virgil ... is everywhere elegant, sweet, and flowing in his hexameters. His words are not only chosen, but the places in which he ranks them for the sound. He who removes them from the station wherein their master set them spoils the harmony. What he says of the Sibyl's prophecies may be as properly applied to every word of his: they must be read in order as they lie; the least breath discomposes them and somewhat of their divinity is lost. I cannot boast that I have been thus exact in my verses; but I have endeavored to follow the example of my master, and am the first Englishman, perhaps, who made it his design to copy him in his numbers, his choice of words, and his placing them for the sweetness of the sound. On this last consideration I have shunned the _caesura_ as much as possibly I could: for, wherever that is used, it gives a roughness to the verse; of which we have little need in a language which is overstocked with consonants."[428] Views like these contribute much to an adequate conception of what faithfulness in translation demands.

From the lucid, intelligent comment of Dryden it is disappointing to turn to the body of doctrine produced by his successors. In spite of the widespread interest in translation during the eighteenth century, little progress was made in formulating the theory of the art, and many of the voluminous prefaces of translators deserve the criticism which Johnson applied to Garth, "his notions are half-formed." So far as concerns the general method of translation, the principles laid down by critics are often mere repet.i.tions of the conclusions already reached in the preceding century. Most theorists were ready to adopt Dryden's view that the translator should strike a middle course between the very free and the very close method. Put into words by a recognized authority, so reasonable an opinion could hardly fail of acceptance. It appealed to the eighteenth-century mind as adequate, and more than one translator, professing to give rules for translation, merely repeated in his own words what Dryden had already said. Garth declares in the preface condemned by Johnson: "Translation is commonly either verbal, a paraphrase, or an imitation.... The manner that seems most suitable for this present undertaking is neither to follow the author too close out of a critical timorousness, nor abandon him too wantonly through a poetic boldness. The original should always be kept in mind, without too apparent a deviation from the sense. Where it is otherwise, it is not a version but an imitation."[429] Grainger says in the introduction to his _Tibullus_: "Verbal translations are always inelegant, because always dest.i.tute of beauty of idiom and language; for by their fidelity to an author's words, they become treacherous to his reputation; on the other hand, a too wanton departure from the letter often varies the sense and alters the manner. The translator chose the middle way, and meant neither to tread on the heels of Tibullus nor yet to lose sight of him."[430] The preface to Fawkes' _Theocritus_ harks back to Dryden: "A too faithful translation, Mr. Dryden says, must be a pedantic one....

And as I have not endeavored to give a verbal translation, so neither have I indulged myself in a rash paraphrase, which always loses the spirit of an ancient by degenerating into the modern manners of expression."[431]

Yet behind these well-sounding phrases there lay, one suspects, little vigorous thought. Both the clarity and the honesty which belong to Dryden's utterances are absent from much of the comment of the eighteenth century. The apparent judicial impartiality of Garth, Fawkes, Grainger, and their contemporaries disappears on closer examination. In reality the balance of opinion in the time of Pope and Johnson inclines very perceptibly in favor of freedom. Imitation, it is true, soon ceases to enter into the discussion of translation proper, but literalism is attacked again and again, till one is ready to ask, with Dryden, "Who defends it?" Mickle's preface to _The Lusiad_ states with unusual frankness what was probably the underlying idea in most of the theory of the time. Writing "not to gratify the dull few, whose greatest pleasure is to see what the author exactly says," but "to give a poem that might live in the English language," Mickle puts up a vigorous defense of his methods. "Literal translation of poetry," he insists, "is a solecism.

You may construe your author, indeed, but if with some translators you boast that you have left your author to speak for himself, that you have neither added nor diminished, you have in reality grossly abused him, and deceived yourself. Your literal translations can have no claim to the original felicities of expression, the energy, elegance, and fire of the original poetry. It may bear, indeed, a resemblance, but such an one as a corpse in the sepulchre bears to the former man, when he moved in the bloom and vigor of life.

Nec verb.u.m verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres--

was the taste of the Augustan age. None but a poet can translate a poet.

The freedom which this precept gives will, therefore, in a poet's hands, not only infuse the energy, elegance, and fire of the author's poetry into his own version, but will give it also the spirit of an original."[432] A similarly clear statement of the real facts of the situation appears in Johnson's remarks on translators. His test for a translation is its readability, and to attain this quality he thinks it permissible for the translator to improve on his author. "To a thousand cavils," he writes in the course of his comments on Pope's _Homer_, "one answer is necessary; the purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside."[433] The same view comes forward in his estimate of Cowley's work. "The Anacreon of Cowley, like the Homer of Pope, has admitted the decoration of some modern graces, by which he is undoubtedly more amiable to common readers, and perhaps, if they would honestly declare their own perceptions, to far the greater part of those whom courtesy and ignorance are content to style the learned."[434]

In certain matters, however, the translator claimed especial freedom. "A work of this nature," says Trapp of his translation of the _Aeneid_, "is to be regarded in two different views, both as a poem and as a translated poem." This gives the translator some lat.i.tude. "The thought and contrivance are his author's, but his language and the turn of his versification are his own."[435] Pope holds the same opinion. A translator must "give his author entire and unmaimed" but for the rest the diction and versification are his own province.[436] Such a dictum was sure to meet with approval, for dignity of language and smoothness of verse were the very qualities on which the period prided itself. It was in these respects that translators hoped to improve on the work of the preceding age. Fawkes, the translator of Theocritus, believes that many lines in Dryden's _Miscellany_ "will sound very harshly in the polished ears of the present age," and that Creech's translation of his author can be popular only with those who "having no ear for poetical numbers, are better pleased with the rough music of the last age than the refined harmony of this." Johnson, who strongly approved of Dryden's performance, accepts it as natural that there should be other attempts at the translation of Virgil, "since the English ear has been accustomed to the mellifluence of Pope's numbers, and the diction of poetry has become more splendid."[437] There was something of poetic justice in this att.i.tude towards the seventeenth century, itself so unappreciative of the achievements of earlier translators, but exemplified in practice, it showed the peculiar limitations of the age of Pope.

As in the seventeenth century, the heroic couplet was the predominant form in translations. Blank verse, when employed, was generally a.s.sociated with a protest against the prevailing methods of translators.

Trapp and Brady, both of whom early in the century attempted blank verse renderings of the _Aeneid_, justify their use of this form on the ground that it permits greater faithfulness to the original. Brady intends to avoid the rock upon which other translators have split, "and that seems to me to be their translating this n.o.ble and elegant poet into rhyme; by which they were sometimes forced to abandon the sense, and at other times to cramp it very much, which inconveniences may probably be avoided in blank verse."[438] Trapp makes a more violent onslaught upon earlier translations, which he finds "commonly so very licentious that they can scarce be called so much as paraphrases," and presents the employment of blank verse as in some degree a remedy for this. "The fetters of rhyme often cramp the expression and spoil the verse, and so you can both translate more closely and also more fully express the spirit of your author without it than with it."[439] Neither version however was kindly received, and though there continued to be occasional efforts to break away from what Warton calls "the Gothic shackles of rhyme"[440] or from the oversmoothness of Augustan verse, the more popular translators set the stamp of their approval on the couplet in its cla.s.sical perfection. Grainger, who translated Tibullus, discusses the possibility of using the "alternate" stanza, but ends by saying that he has generally "preferred the heroic measure, which is not better suited to the lofty sound of the epic muse than to the complaining tone of the elegy."[441] Hoole chooses the couplet for his version of Ariosto, because it occupies the same place in English that the octave stanza occupies in Italian, and because it is capable of great variety.

"Of all the various styles used by the best poets," he says, "none seems so well adapted to the mixed and familiar narrative as that of Dryden in his last production, known by the name of his _Fables_, which by their harmony, spirit, ease, and variety of versification, exhibit an admirable model for a translation of Ariosto."[442] It was, however, to the regularity of Pope's couplet that most translators aspired. Francis, the translator of Horace, who succeeded in pleasing his readers in spite of his failure to conform with popular standards, puts the situation well in a comment which recalls a similar utterance of Dryden. "The misfortune of our translators," he says, "is that they have only one style; and consequently all their authors, Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, are compelled to speak in the same numbers, and the same unvaried expression. The free-born spirit of poetry is confined in twenty constant syllables, and the sense regularly ends with every second line, as if the writer had not strength enough to support himself or courage enough to venture into a third."[443]

Revolts against the couplet, then, were few and generally unsuccessful.

Prose translations of the epic, such as have in our own day attained some popularity, were in the eighteenth century regarded with especial disfavor. It was known that they had some vogue in France, but that was not considered a recommendation. The English translation of Madame Dacier's prose Homer, issued by Ozell, Oldisworth, and Broome, was greeted with scorn. Trapp, in the preface to his Virgil, refers to the new French fas.h.i.+on with true insular contempt. Segrais' translation is "almost as good as the French language will allow, which is just as fit for an epic poem as an ambling nag is for a war horse.... Their language is excellent for prose, but quite otherwise for verse, especially heroic. And therefore tho' the translating of poems into prose is a strange modern invention, yet the French transprosers are so far in the right because their language will not bear verse." Mickle, mentioning in his _Dissertation on the Lusiad_ that "M. Duperron de Castera, in 1735, gave in French prose a loose unpoetical paraphrase of the Lusiad,"

feels it necessary to append in a note his opinion that "a literal prose translation of poetry is an attempt as absurd as to translate fire into water."

If there was little encouragement for the translator to experiment with new solutions of the problems of versification, there was equally little lat.i.tude allowed him in the other division of his peculiar province, diction. In accordance with existing standards, critics doubled their insistence on Decorum, a quality in which they found the productions of former times lacking. Johnson criticizes Dryden's _Juvenal_ on the ground that it wants the dignity of its original.[444] Fawkes finds Creech "more rustic than any of the rustics in the Sicilian bard," and adduces in proof many ill.u.s.trations, from his calling a "n.o.ble pastoral cup a fine two-handled pot" to his dubbing his characters "Tawney Bess, Tom, Will, d.i.c.k" in vulgar English style.[445] Fanshaw, says Mickle in the preface to his translation of Camoens, had not "the least idea of the dignity of the epic style." The originals themselves, however, presented obstacles to suitable rendering. Preston finds this so in the case of Apollonius Rhodius, and offers this explanation of the matter: "Ancient terms of art, even if they can be made intelligible, cannot be rendered, with any degree of grace, into a modern language, where the corresponding terms are debased into vulgarity by low and familiar use.

Many pa.s.sages of this kind are to be found in Homer. They are frequent also in Apollonius Rhodius; particularly so, from the exactness which he affects in describing everything."[446] Warton, unusually tolerant of Augustan taste in this respect, finds the same difficulty in the _Eclogues_ and _Georgics_ of Virgil. "A poem whose excellence peculiarly consists in the graces of diction," his preface runs, "is far more difficult to be translated, than a work where sentiment, or pa.s.sion, or imagination is chiefly displayed.... Besides, the meanness of the terms of husbandry is concealed and lost in a dead language, and they convey no low and despicable image to the mind; but the coa.r.s.e and common words I was necessitated to use in the following translation, viz. _plough and sow_, _wheat_, _dung_, _ashes_, _horse and cow_, etc., will, I fear, unconquerably disgust many a delicate reader, if he doth not make proper allowance for a modern compared with an ancient language."[447]

According to Hoole, the English language confines the translator within narrow limits. A translation of Berni's _Orlando Innamorato_ into English verse would be almost impossible, "the narrative descending to such familiar images and expressions as would by no means suit the genius of our language and poetry."[448] The task of translating Ariosto, though not so hopeless, is still arduous on this account.

"There is a certain easy negligence in his muse that often a.s.sumes a playful mode of expression incompatible with the nature of our present poetry.... An English translator will have frequent reason to regret the more rigid genius of the language, that rarely permits him in this respect, to attempt even an imitation of his author."

The comments quoted in the preceding pages make one realize that, while the translator was left astonis.h.i.+ngly free as regarded his treatment of the original, it was at his peril that he ran counter to contemporary literary standards. The discussion centering around Pope's _Homer_, at once the most popular and the most typical translation of the period, may be taken as presenting the situation in epitome. Like other prefaces of the time, Pope's introductory remarks are, whether intentionally or unintentionally, misleading. He begins, in orthodox fas.h.i.+on, by advocating the middle course approved by Dryden. "It is certain," he writes, "no literal translation can be just to an excellent original in a superior language: but it is a great mistake to imagine (as many have done) that a rash paraphrase can make amends for this general defect; which is no less in danger to lose the spirit of an ancient, by deviating into the modern manners of expression." Continuing, however, he urges an unusual degree of faithfulness. The translator must not think of improving upon his author. "I will venture to say," he declares, "there have not been more men misled in former times by a servile, dull adherence to the letter, than have been deluded in ours by a chimerical insolent hope of raising and improving their author....

'Tis a great secret in writing to know when to be plain, and when poetical and figurative; and it is what Homer will teach us, if we will but follow modestly in his footsteps. Where his diction is bold and lofty, let us raise ours as high as we can; but where his is plain and humble, we ought not to be deterred from imitating him by the fear of incurring the censure of a mere English critic." The translator ought to endeavor to "copy him in all the variations of his style, and the different modulations of his numbers; to preserve, in the more active or descriptive parts, a warmth and elevation; in the more sedate or narrative, a plainness and solemnity; in the speeches a fullness and perspicuity; in the sentences a shortness and gravity: not to neglect even the little figures and turns on the words, nor sometimes the very cast of the periods; neither to omit nor confound any rites and customs of antiquity."

Declarations like this would, if taken alone, make one rate Pope as a pioneer in the art of translation. Unfortunately the comment of his critics, even of those who admired him, tells a different story. "To say of this n.o.ble work that it is the best which ever appeared of the kind, would be speaking in much lower terms than it deserves," writes Melmoth, himself a successful translator, in _Fitzosborne's Letters_.

Melmoth's description of Pope's method is, however, very different from that offered by Pope himself. "Mr. Pope," he says, "seems, in most places, to have been inspired with the same sublime spirit that animates his original; as he often takes fire from a single hint in his author, and blazes out even with a stronger and brighter flame of poetry. Thus the character of Thersites, as it stands in the English _Iliad_, is heightened, I think, with more masterly strokes of satire than appear in the Greek; as many of those similes in Homer, which would appear, perhaps, to a modern eye too naked and unornamented, are painted by Pope in all the beautiful drapery of the most graceful metaphor"--a statement backed by citation of the famous moonlight pa.s.sage, which Melmoth finds finer than the corresponding pa.s.sage in the original. There is no doubt in the critic's mind as to the desirability of improving upon Homer.