IN a letter written on August 21, 1703, to Robert Harley, afterward Earl
of Oxford and Prime Minister, by Dr. George Hickes, the famous scholar
and non-juror, there is a reference to "old Dr. Biram Eaton who has read
Horace over, as they tell me, many hundred times, oftener, I fear, than
he has read the Gospels." Dr. Biram Eaton has escaped an article in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_, and, so far as I know, he has never
been reckoned by Horatians among their patron saints. In view of the
slur cast upon him by Dr. Hickes I should like to propose his
canonization, but I should much prefer to lay a wager that he found time
between his readings to try to turn some of the odes of his favorite
writer into English verses, probably into couplets resembling those of
Dryden. And I should also be willing to wager that before and after
making each of his versions, he gave expression, in some form or other,
to the proverbial statement that to attempt to translate Horace is to
attempt the impossible.
Perhaps we owe to this proverbial impossibility the fact that the
translator of Horace is always with us. A living antinomy, he writes a
modest preface; then exclaiming in the words of his master, _"Nil
mortalibus ardui est,"_ he tries to scale very heaven in his folly, to
rush blindly _per vetitum nefas_. But because he has loved much,
therefore is much forgiven him. To love Horace and not attempt to
translate him would be to flout that principle of altruism in which
some modern thinkers have discovered, more poetically perhaps than
philosophically, the motive force of civilization. "We love Horace, and
hence we must try to set him forth in a way to make others love him," is
what all translators, it would seem, say to themselves, consciously or
unconsciously, when they decide to publish their respective renditions.
And who shall blame them? Where is the critic competent to judge their
work, who has not himself listened to the Siren's song, if but for a
moment in his youth, who has not a version of some ode of Horace hid
away among his papers, the memory of which will doubtless forever
prevent him from flinging a stone at any fellow-offender?
It is not only impossible to translate Horace adequately, but it is
impossible to explain satisfactorily the causes of his unbounded
popularity--a popularity illustrated by the fact that when that
well-known group of American book-lovers, the Bibliophile Society, were
seeking to determine what great man of letters they would first honor by
issuing one or more of his works in sumptuous form, they chose--not an
author of their own day or nation or language--but a writer dead nearly
two thousand years, of alien race and tongue, spokesman of a
civilization remote and strange, the Horace of the immortal Odes. Yet
admirers of Lucretius and of Catullus tell us very plainly and
insistently that this Horace of the Odes is not a great poet. We listen
respectfully to the charge and somehow we do not seem greatly to resent
it; we merely read the Odes, if possible, more diligently and
affectionately--not, it is true, in the splendid Bibliophile volumes,
but in some well-worn pocket edition that has accompanied us on our
journeys, or, like one I own, has helped us to while away the hours on a
deer stand, through which the deer, as shy as the fawn with which the
poet compared Chloë, simply would not run. If we own such a pocket
volume, we leave our critical faculties in abeyance when Dante, in the
_Inferno_, introduces Horace to us along with Homer and Ovid and Lucan;
for do not our hearts tell us that in the truest sense of the phrase, he
is worthy to walk with the greatest of this mediævally assorted company?
We feel sure that Virgil must have loved him as a man; we have proof
that Milton admired him as a poet. We deny to him "the grand manner,"
but we attribute to him every charm. When we seek to analyze this charm,
we are left with the suspicion that, after we have pointed out many of
its elements, such as humor, vivacity, kindliness, sententiousness, and
the like, there are as many others, equally potent but more subtle, that
escape us altogether. So we turn the hackneyed saying into "the charm is
the man," and contentedly exchange analysis for enjoyment. And yet we
are persuaded that no author is more worthy of the painstaking, detailed
study characteristic of modern scholarship than is this same Epicurean
poet, who so utterly defies analysis and would be the first, were he not
but "dust and a shade," to smile at our ponderous erudition. We feel
that the scholar who shall devote the best years of his life to studying
the influence of Horace upon subsequent writers in the chief literatures
and to collecting the tributes that have been paid to his genius by the
great and worthy of all lands and ages, will deserve sincere
benedictions. We conclude, in short, that that exquisite epithet, "the
well-beloved," so inappropriately bestowed upon the worthless and
flippant French King, belongs to Horace, and to Horace alone, _jure
divino_.
But this praise of Horace and this defense of his translators fails to
justify or explain the writing of this paper. An honest confession being
good for the soul, I will confess that the remarks that follow were
first employed to introduce some versions of selected Odes I was once
rash enough to publish. It is not a good sportsman that shuts his eyes
and bangs away with both barrels at a flock of birds, and I now doubt
whether I was wise in trying to bring down readers, if not with my
verse-barrel, at least with my prose-barrel. Being older, I use at
present only one barrel at a time and, perhaps for the same reason, I am
wont to try the prose-barrel. And fortunately I can apply to the
comments I intend to make on Horatian translators the quotation I used
in order to mollify irate readers of my own verse renderings. It came
from a once popular, now forgotten poet, the Rev. John Pomfret, and it
ran as follows:--"It will be to little purpose, the Author presumes, to
offer any reasons why the following POEMS appear in public; for it is
ten to one whether he gives the true, and if he does, it is much greater
odds whether the gentle reader is so courteous as to believe him."
So much has been written on the methods of Horace's translators, and so
much remains to be written, that it is hard to determine where to begin;
but perhaps the preface of the late Professor Conington to his
well-known translation of the Odes will furnish a proper point of
departure. Few persons, whether translators or readers, are likely to
object to Conington's first premise that the translator ought to aim at
"some kind of metrical conformity to his original." To reproduce an
original Sapphic or Alcaic stanza in blank verse, or in the couplets of
Pope, is at once to repel the reader who knows Horace well, and to give
the reader who is unacquainted with Latin lyric poetry a totally
erroneous conception of the metrical and rhythmical methods of the poet.
To render a compressed Latin verse by a diffuse English one is to do
injustice, as Conington observes, to the sententiousness for which
Horace is justly celebrated, although the English scholar, had he
written after the appearance of Mr. Gladstone's attempt to render the
Odes, might with propriety have added that the translator should not,
in his avoidance of diffuseness, be seduced by the facility of the
octosyllabic couplet. To translate Horace's odes into anything but
quatrains, except on occasions, is also to offend the meticulous
Horatian and to mislead any reader who seeks to know the poet through an
English rendering. It would seem, however, that when Professor Conington
insisted that an English measure once adopted for the Alcaic must be
used for every ode in which Horace employed the stanza just named, he
went far toward hampering the translator, who, despite his proneness to
offend, has his rights. That such uniformity ought to be aimed at, and
that it will, as a rule, be aimed at, is doubtless true; but there is an
element of the problem with which Conington does not seem sufficiently
to have reckoned.
This is rhyme, which he assumed to be necessary to a successful
rendition of an ode of Horace. A particular stanza not employing rhyme
may probably be used without resulting loss in translating every ode
written in a special form. Yet this may not be the case with a stanza
employing rhymes, if the translator aim, as he should, at a fairly,
though not an awkwardly literal rendering of the language of his
original. There will necessarily be coincidences of sound in a literal
prose version of a Latin stanza that will suggest a definite and
advantageous arrangement of rhymes for a poetical version. To adopt a
certain English stanza in which to render a certain Latin stanza
wherever it occurs, is to do away with this natural advantage, which
presents itself oftener than might at first be supposed.
Concrete examples will serve to make my meaning clear. The third ode of
the first book, the admirable "Sic te diva potens Cypri," is written in
what is called the Second Asclepiad meter; so is the delightful ninth
ode of the third book, the "Donec gratus eram." We will assume that for
the first of these odes the translator has chosen a quatrain with
alternating rhymes (a, b, a, b). Following Professor Conington's rule of
uniformity, he must employ the same stanza for the second of the two
odes, which, by the way, Conington himself did not do, for reasons which
he gave at length. Now the fifth stanza of the "Donec gratus eram" runs
as follows:--
"Quid si prisca redit Venus
Diductosque jugo cogit aëneo,
Si flava excutitur Chloë
Rejectaeque patet janua Lydiae?"