"The song and dance can drive, they _say_,
The spleen _away_, and humour's grave;
Why hast thou not devised, O _France_
Some tune and _dance_ from Death to save?"
Here again, we see, he purges his poetic diction, and turns "I ween" into
"they say." It is remarkable that in translating these lines by Elis
Wynn he is not content to get the end-rhymes only, but accepts to the
full the difficulty of following the Welsh in the interned rhymes
throughout--as shown by the words italicised.
In his interesting account of "George Borrow and his Circle," Mr. Shorter
quotes a letter from Professor Cowell to a Norwich correspondent, Mr.
James Hooper, which betrays some disappointment over Borrow's Welsh
interest at the close of his life. Cowell had been inspired by "Wild
Wales" to learn Welsh, and even nursed a wish to do so under Borrow
himself. He found his way to Oulton Hall one autumn day, and its
master--now an old man close on eighty--opened the door in person. The
ardent visitor talked to him of Ab Gwilym, but his interest was languid;
and even the news that the Honourable Cymmrodorion were about to publish
the poems of Iolo Goch did not rouse him. Cowell himself, it may be
added, afterwards wrote an excellent appreciation of Ab Gwilym in the
Transactions of the same society. In his letter, Cowell speaks of
Borrow's carelessness as a translator, and declares the very
title--"Visions of the Sleeping Bard"--to be wrong; it should be, not the
"Sleeping Bard," but the "Bard Sleep." However, in this case, Borrow's
instinct was truer than his critic's. For "Cwsg" is used as a
noun-adjective by Elis Wynn; and the latest translator of the book--Mr.
Gwyneddon Davies {17}--adopts the same title precisely.
Borrow's record as a Welsh translator would not be complete without a
page or so of his version of the prose text of the same work. Elis Wynn,
I may explain, was, after the tale-writers of the Mabinogion, the best
author of Welsh narrative prose that the language possesses. He was at
once idiomatic and exact in style. He knew how to get the golden
epithet; his diction was bold and biblical, his vocabulary could be at
times startling and Rabelaisean. Borrow's efficiency in rendering him
may be tested by a couple of passages. The first takes us to the City of
Destruction and its streets:--
"'What are those streets called,' said I. 'Each is called,' he
replied, 'by the name of the princess who governs it: the first is
the street of Pride, the middle one the street of Pleasure, and the
nearest, the street of Lucre.' 'Pray, tell me,' said I, 'who are
dwelling in these streets? What is the language which they speak?
What are the tenets which they hold? To what nation do they belong?'
'Many,' said he, 'of every language, faith and nation under the sun
are living in each of those vast streets below; and there are many in
each of the three streets alternately, and everyone as near as
possible to the gate; and they frequently remove, unable to tarry
long in the one, from the great love they bear to the princess of
some other street; and the old fox looks slyly on, permitting
everyone to love his choice, or all three if he pleases, for then he
is most sure of him.'
"'Come nearer to them,' said the angel, and hurried with me
downwards, shrouded in his impenetrable veil, through much noxious
vapour which was rising from the city; presently, we descended in the
street of Pride, upon a spacious mansion open at the top, whose
windows had been dashed out by dogs and crows, and whose owners had
departed to England or France, to seek there for what they could have
obtained much easier at home; thus, instead of the good, old,
charitable, domestic family of yore, there were none at present but
owls, crows, or chequered magpies, whose hooting, cawing, and
chattering were excellent comments on the practices of the present
owners. There were in that street myriads of such abandoned palaces,
which might have been, had it not been for Pride, the resorts of the
best, as of yore, places of refuge for the weak, schools of peace and
of every kind of goodness; and blessings to thousands of small houses
around."
This comes from the first of the Three Dreams, that of the World; and a
further quotation from the same dream-book touches what is Borrow's
high-water mark as a translator:--
"Thereupon we turned our faces from the great city of Perdition, and
went up to the other little city. In going along, I could see at the
upper end of the streets many turning half-way from the temptations
of the gates of Perdition and seeking for the gate of Life; but
whether it was that they failed to find it, or grew tired upon the
way, I could not see that any went through, except one sorrowful
faced man, who ran forward resolutely, while thousands on each side
of him were calling him fool, some scoffing him, others threatening
him, and his friends laying hold upon him, and entreating him not to
take a step by which he would lose the whole world at once. 'I only
lose,' said he, 'a very small portion of it, and if I should lose the
whole, pray what loss is it? For what is there in the world so
desirable, unless a man should desire deceit, and violence, and
misery, and wretchedness, giddiness and distraction? Contentment and
tranquillity,' said he, 'constitute the happiness of man; but in your
city there are no such things to be found. Because who is there here
content with his station? Higher, higher! is what everyone
endeavours to be in the street of Pride. Give, give us a little
more, says everyone in the street of Lucre. Sweet, sweet, pray give
me some more of it, is the cry of everyone in the street of Pleasure.
"'And as for tranquillity, where is it? and who obtains it? If you
be a great man, flattery and envy are killing you. If you be poor,
everyone is trampling upon and despising you. After having become an
inventor, if you exalt your head and seek for praise, you will be
called a boaster and a coxcomb. If you lead a godly life and resort
to the Church and the altar, you will be called a hypocrite. If you
do not, then you are an infidel or a heretic. If you be merry, you
will be called a buffoon. If you are silent, you will be called a
morose wretch. If you follow honesty, you are nothing but a simple
fool. If you go neat, you are proud; if not, a swine. If you are
smooth speaking, then you are false, or a trifler without meaning.
If you are rough, you are an arrogant, disagreeable devil. Behold
the world that you magnify!' said he; 'pray take my share of it.'"
In the foregoing extract Borrow makes a few obvious errors. For
instance, he turns the Welsh word "dyfeiswr" into "inventor," whereas the
sense here implies a schemer, or intriguer (the last is the rendering
adopted by Mr. Gwyneddon Davies), and the translation suffers a
corresponding lapse in the same clause. But on the whole Borrow's
rendering is good of its kind, and it gains by its freedom at times, as
in the page where he turns "dwylla o'th arian a'th hoedl hefyd," into
"chouses you of your money and your life."
The fact is, Borrow was vital in prose, while the shackles of verse often
weighed on him. It was only in mid-career that he learnt to move at all
easily in them--how much more easily we should not have known had not Mr.
Wise, with his bibliographical intrepidity, set about printing for his
own library some of the unpublished matter. In the light of those green
quartos, Borrow is seen to be a translator of more force than grace, who
generally contrived to give a flavour of his own to whatever he touched.
Because of the subtleties of the prosody, he was rather less effective in
dealing with Welsh and Celtic than with Norse and Gothic verse. But he
managed to create an English that was undoubtedly rare in his day, and is
now unique because the Borrovian accent is in it, and the masculine voice
of Borrow--like the cry of Vidrik in the ballad--is unmistakable. He
knew the art of giving a name to things; and, again like Vidrik, who
called his sword "mimmering," and his shield "skrepping," this Cornish
East Anglian, who dabbled in gipsy lore and learnt Welsh, made his
weapons part of himself, whether they consisted of his pen, his
portentous umbrella, or his father's silver-handled blade:--
"Thou'st decked old chiefs of Cornwall's land
To face the fiend with thee they dared;
Thou prov'dst a Tirfing in their hand,
Which victory gave whene'er 'twas bared.
"Though Cornwall's moors 'twas ne'er my lot
To view, in Eastern Anglia born,
Yet I her sons' rude strength have got,
And feel of death their fearless scorn."
Little need be added about the various sources of the following text.
The first three poems are from a quarto MS. owned by Mr. Gurney of
Norwich, who has kindly lent it to the publishers. Its title runs:
_poems_.
By IOLO GOCH;
With a Metrical English Translation.
Some former owner has pencilled below, "By Mr. Borrer of Norwich"
(_sic_). From Mr. Wise's green quartos, already referred to, or from
MSS. in his library, come the two Goronwy Owen poems, "The Pedigree of
the Muse," and "The Harp." Also Lewis Morris the Elder's lines, "The
Cuckoo's Song in Meirion," or Merion, according to Borrow. The Epigrams
by Carolan and "Song of Deirdra" are Irish items from the same source;
while "Pwll Cheres, the Vortex of Menai," and "The Mountain Snow," are
two Welsh ones, which have not, I believe, been printed in any other
form. The familiar pages of "Wild Wales," and the less-known volume,
"Targum," account for the bulk of the remaining poems and fragments;
while Borrow's "Quarterly Review" article on Welsh Poetry (January, 1861)
provides us with four more translations. The versions are printed with
all their faults on their head; and if he put a whiting into a
fresh-water fish-pond (in the Ode on Sycharth, original text), or mistook
a saint for a secular detail, the collector of his works will be glad to
have the plain evidence under his hand, and will not wonder a bit the
less at the boyish achievement of this East-country Celt. It remains to
be said that, being Borrow, he was duly astonished at himself, and under
the Sycharth poem wrote in Welsh a footnote which runs in effect: "The
English translation is the work of George Borrow, an English lad of the
City of Norwich, who has never been in Wales, and has never in all his
life heard a word of Welsh from man or woman."