"Troia the Achaioi hold," and later,
"Troia do the Achaioi hold," followed by:
"this same day
I think a noise--no mixture--reigns i' the city
Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel--"
And it does not end here. In fact it reaches the nadir of its bathos in
a later speech of Klutaimnestra in the line
"The perfect man his home perambulating!"
We may add several exclamation points to the one which Mr. Browning has
provided. But then all translation is a thankless, or is at least most
apt to be a thankless and desolate undertaking.
What Browning had not got into his sometimes excellent top-knot was the
patent, or what should be the patent fact that inversions of sentence
order in an uninflected language like English are not, simply and
utterly _are not_ any sort of equivalent for inversions and
perturbations of order in a language inflected as Greek and Latin are
inflected. That is the chief source of his error. In these inflected
languages order has other currents than simple sequence of subject,
predicate, object; and all sorts of departures from this Franco-English
natural position are in Greek and Latin neither confusing nor delaying;
they may be both simple and emphatic, they do not obstruct one's
apperception of the verbal relations.
Obscurities _not inherent in_ the matter, obscurities due not to the
thing but to the wording, are a botch, and are _not_ worth preserving
in a translation. The work lives not by them but despite them.
Rossetti is in this matter sounder than Browning, when he says that the
only thing worth bringing over is the beauty of the original; and
despite Rossetti's purple plush and molasses trimmings he meant by
"beauty" something fairly near what we mean by the "emotional intensity"
of his original.
Obscurities inherent in the thing occur when the author is piercing, or
trying to pierce into, uncharted regions; when he is trying to express
things not yet current, not yet worn into phrase; when he is ahead of
the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might be ahead of the
color-sense) of his contemporaries.
As for the word-sense and phrase-sense, we still hear workmen and
peasants and metropolitan bus-riders repeating the simplest sentences
three and four times, back and forth between interlocutors: trying to
get the sense "I sez to Bill, I'm goin' to 'Arrow" or some other such
subtlety from one occiput into another.
"You sez to Bill, etc."
"Yus, I sez ... etc."
"O!"
The first day's search at the Museum reveals "Aeschylus" printed by
Aldus in 1518; by Stephanus in 1557, no English translation before 1777,
a couple in the 1820's, more in the middle of the century, since 1880
past counting, and no promising names in the list. Sophocles falls to
Jebb and does not appear satisfactory.
From which welter one returns thankfully to the Thomas Stanley Greek and
Latin edition, with Saml. Butler's notes, Cambridge, "typis ac sumptibus
academicis." 1811--once a guinea or half a guinea per volume, half
leather, but now mercifully, since people no longer read Latin, picked
up at 2s. for the set (eight volumes in all), rather less than the price
of their postage. Quartos in excellent type.
Browning shows himself poet in such phrases as "dust, mud's thirsty
brother," which is easy, perhaps, but is English, even Browning's own
particular English, as "dust, of mud brother thirsty," would not be
English at all; and if I have been extremely harsh in dealing with the
first passage quoted it is still undisputable that I have read Browning
off and on for seventeen years with no small pleasure and admiration,
and am one of the few people who know anything about his Sordello, and
have never read his Agamemnon, have not even now when it falls into a
special study been able to get through his Agamemnon.
Take another test passage:
Οὖτός ἐσιν Αγαμέμνων, ἐμὸς
Πόσις, νεκρὸς δέ τῆσδε δεξιᾶς χερός
Ἔργον δικαίνας τέκτονος. Τάδ' ὦδ ἔχει. 1445
"Hicce est Agamemnon, maritus
Meus, hac dextra mortuus,
Facinus justae artificis. Haec ita se habent."
We turn to Browning and find:
"--this man is Agamemnon,
My husband, dead, the work of this right hand here,
Aye, of a just artificer: so things are."
To the infinite advantage of the Latin, and the complete explanation of
why Browning's Aeschylus, to say nothing of forty other translations of
Aeschylus, is unreadable.
Any bungling translation:
"This is Agamemnon,
My husband,
Dead by this hand,
And a good job. These, gentlemen, are the facts."
No, that is extreme, but the point is that any natural wording, anything
which keeps the mind off theatricals and on Klutaimnestra actual,
dealing with an actual situation, and not pestering the reader with
frills and festoons of language, is worth all the convoluted tushery
that the Victorians can heap together.
I can conceive no improvement on the Latin, it saves by _dextra_ for
_δεξιᾶς χερός_, it loses a few letters in "se habent," but it has the
same drive as the Greek.
The Latin can be a whole commentary on the Greek, or at least it can
give one the whole parsing and order, and let one proceed at a
comforable rate with but the most rudimentary knowledge of the original
language. And I do not think this a trifle; it would be an ill day if
men again let the classics go by the board; we should fall into
something worse than, or as bad as, the counter-reformation: a welter of
gum-shoes, and cocoa, and Y.M.C.A. and Webbs, and social theorizing
committees, and the general hell of a groggy doctrinaire obfuscation;
and the very disagreeablizing of the classics, every pedagogy which puts
the masterwork further from us, either by obstructing the schoolboy, or
breeding affectation in dilettante readers, works toward such a
detestable end. I do not know that strict logic will cover all of the
matter, or that I can formulate anything beyond a belief that we test a
translation by the feel, and particularly by the feel of being in
contact with the force of a great original, and it does not seem to me
that one can open this Latin text of the Agamemnon without getting such
sense of contact:
"Mox sciemus lampadum luciferarum 498
Signorumque per faces et ignis vices,
An vere sint, an somniorum instar,
Gratum veniens illud lumen eluserit animum nostrum.
Praeconem hunc a littore video obumbratum
Ramis olivae: testatur autem haec mihi frater
Luti socius aridus pulvis,
Quod neque mutus, neque accendens facem
Materiae montanae signa dabit per fumum ignis."
or
"Apollo, Apollo! 1095
Agyieu Apollo mi!
Ah! quo me tandem duxisti? ad qualem domum?
* * * * *
"Heu, heu, ecce, ecce, cohibe a vacca 1134
Taurum: vestibus involens
Nigricornem machina
Percutit; cadit vero in aquali vase.
Insidiosi lebetis casum ut intelligas velim.
* * * * *
Heu, heu, argutae lusciniae fatum _mihi tribuis_:
* * * * *
"Heu nuptiae, nuptiae Paridis exitiales 1165
Amicis! eheu Scamandri patria unda!"
All this howling of Kassandra comes at one from the page, and the
grimness also of the Iambics:
"Ohime! lethali intus percussus sum vulnere." 1352
"Tace: quis clamat vulnus lethaliter vulneratus?"
"Ohime! iterum secundo ictu sauciatus."
"Patrari facinus mihi videtur regis ex ejulatu. 1355
"At tuta communicemus consilia."
"Ego quidem vobis meam dico sententiam," etc.
Here or in the opening of the play, or where you like in this Latin, we
are at once in contact with the action, something real is going on, we
are keen and curious on the instant, but I cannot get any such impact
from any part of the Browning.
"In bellum nuptam,
Auctricem que contentionum, Helenam: 695
Quippe quae congruenter
Perditrix navium, perditrix virorum, perditrix urbium,
E delicatis
Thalami ornamentis navigavit
Zephyri terrigenae aura.
Et numerosi scutiferi,
Venatores secundum vestigia,
Remorum inapparentia
Appulerunt ad Simoentis ripas
Foliis abundantes
Ob jurgium cruentum."
"War-wed, author of strife,
Fitly Helen, destroyer of ships, of men,
Destroyer of cities,
From delicate-curtained room
Sped by land breezes.
"Swift the shields on your track,
Oars on the unseen traces,
And leafy Simois
Gone red with blood."[6]
Contested Helen, _Ἀμφινεικῆ_.
"War-wed, contested,
(Fitly) Helen, destroyer of ships; of men;
Destroyer of cities,
"From the delicate-curtained room
Sped by land breezes.
"Swift on the shields on your track,
Oars on the unseen traces.
"Red leaves in Simois!"
"Rank flower of love, for Troy."
"Quippe leonem educavit.... 726
Mansuetum, pueris amabilem....
... divinitus sacerdos Ates (i.e. Paris)
In aedibus enutritus est.
"Statim igitur venit 746
Ad urbem Ilii,
Ut ita dicam, animus
Tranquillae serenitatis, placidum
Divitiarum ornamentum
Blandum oculourum telum,
Animum pungens flos amoris
(_Helena_) accubitura. Perfecit autem
Nuptiarum acerbos exitus,
Mala vicina, malaque socia,
Irruens in Priamidas,
Ductu Jovis Hospitalis,
Erinnys luctuosa sponsis."
It seems to me that English translators have gone wide in two ways,
first in trying to keep every adjective, when obviously many adjectives
in the original have only melodic value, secondly they have been deaved
with syntax; have wasted time, involved their English, trying first to
evolve a definite logical structure for the Greek and secondly to
preserve it, _and all its grammatical relations,_ in English.
One might almost say that Aeschylus' Greek is agglutinative, that his
general drive, especially in choruses, is merely to remind the audience
of the events of the Trojan war; that syntax is subordinate, and duly
subordinated, left out, that he is not austere, but often even verbose
after a fashion (not Euripides' fashion).
A reading version might omit various things which would be of true
service only if the English were actually to be sung on a stage, or
chanted to the movements of the choric dance or procession.
Above suggestions should _not_ be followed with intemperance. But
certainly more sense and less syntax (good or bad) in translations of
Aeschylus might be a relief.
Chor. Anapest:
"O iniquam Helenam, una quae multas, 1464
Multas admodum animas
Perdidisti ad Trojam!
Nunc vero nobilem memorabilem _(Agam. animam),_
Deflorasti per caedem inexpiabilem.
Talis erat tunc in aedibus
Eris viri domitrix aerumna."
Clytemnestra:
"Nequaquam mortis sortem exopta 1470
Hisce gravatus;
Neque in Helenam iram convertas,
Tanquam viriperdam, ac si una multorum
Virorum animas Graecorum perdens,
Intolerabilem dolorem effecerit."
* * * * *
Clytemnestra:
"Mortem haud indignam arbitrar 1530
Huic contigisse:
Neque enim ille insidiosam cladem
Aedibus intulit; sed meum ex ipso
Germen sublatum, multum defletam
Iphigeniam cum indigne affecerit,
Digna passus est, nihil in inferno
Glorietur, gladio inflicta
Morte luens quae prior perpetravit."
"Death not unearned, nor yet a novelty in this house; Let him make talk
in hell concerning Iphigenia."
(If we allow the last as ironic equivalent of the literal "let him not
boast in hell.")
"He gets but a thrust once given (by him)
Back-pay, for Iphigenia."
One can further condense the English but at the cost of obscurity.
Morshead is bearable in Clytemnestra's description the beacons.
"From Ida's top Hephaestos, Lord of fire,
Sent forth his sign, and on, and ever on,
Beacon to beacon sped tjie courier-flame
From Ida to the crag, that Hermes loves
On Lemnos; thence into the steep sublime
Of Athos, throne of Zeus, the broad blaze flared.
Thence, raised aloft to shoot across the sea
The moving light, rejoicing in its strength
Sped from the pyre of pine, and urged its way,
In golden glory, like some strange new sun,
Onward and reached Macistus' watching heights."
[1] Milton, of course, whom my detractors say I condemn without due
circumspection.
[2] _I.e._ Clark is "correct," but the words shade differently. _Ἠκα_
means low, quiet, with a secondary meaning of "little by
little."-_Submisse_ means low, quiet, with a secondary meaning of
modesty, humbly.
[3] Later continued by l'Abbé de St. Chérroi.
[4] My impression is that I saw an Iliad by Andreas Divus on the Quais
in Paris, at the time I found his version of the Odyssey, but an
impression of this sort is, after eight years, untrustworthy, it may
have been only a Latin Iliad in similar binding.
[5] Reading _ἀργυφέοισιν_, variant _ἀργυρέοισιν_, offered in footnote.
In any case _argentea_ is closer than _candida_.
[6] "H.D.'s" translations from Euripides should be mentioned either here
or in connection with "The New Poetry"; she has obtained beautiful
strophes for First Chorus of Iphigenia in Aulis, 1-4 and 9, and for the
first of the second chorus. Elsewhere she retains certain needless
locutions, and her versification permits too many dead stops in its
current.