The Villainy Translation.
Heine had a light hand with the branding-iron, and marked his subjects
not more neatly than indelibly. And really he alone were capable of
dealing adequate vengeance upon his translators. His verse has only
violent lovers or violent foes; indifference is impossible. Once read as
it deserves, it becomes one of the loveliest of our spiritual
acquisitions. We hate to see it tampered with; we are on thorns as the
translator approaches, and we resent his operations as an individual
hurt, a personal affront. What business has he to be trampling among our
borders and crushing our flowers with his stupid hobnails? Why cannot he
carry his zeal for topsy-turvy horticulture elsewhere? He comes and lays
a brutal hand on our pet growths, snips off their graces, shapes them
anew according to his own ridiculous ideal, paints and varnishes them
with a villainous compound of his contrivance, and then bids us admire
the effect and thank him for its production! Is any name too hard for
such a creature? and could any vengeance be too deadly? If he walked
into your garden and amused himself so with your cabbages, you could put
him in prison. But into your poets he can stump his way at will, and
upon them he can do his pleasure. And he does it. How many men have
brutalised the elegance, the grace, the winning urbanity of Horace! By
how many coarse and stupid fingers has Catullus been smudged and fumbled
and mauled! To turn _Faust_ into English (in the original metres) is a
fashionable occupation; there are more perversions of the _Commedia_ than
one cares to recall; there is scarce a great or even a good work of the
human mind but has been thus bedevilled and deformed. _Don Quixote_, _le
Pere Goriot_, _The Frogs_, _The Decameron_--the trail of the translator
is over them all. Messrs. Payne and Lang and Swinburne have turned poor
Villon into a citizen of Bedford Park, Fitzgerald and Florence Macarthy
have Englished Calderon, Messrs. Pope, Gladstone and others have done
their worst with Homer. If Rossetti had not succeeded with _la Vita
Nuova_, if Fitzgerald had not ennobled Omar, if Mr. Lang had not bettered
upon Banville and Gerard de Nerval, the word 'translator' would be odious
as the word 'occupy.' And 'occupy' on the authority of Mrs. Dorothy
Tearsheet is an odious word indeed.
The Proof of It.
The fact is, the translator too often forgets the difference between his
subject and himself; he is too often a common graveyard mason that would
play the sculptor. And it is not nearly enough for him to be a decent
craftsman. To give an adequate idea of an artist's work a man must be
himself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original. The
typical translator makes clever enough verses, but Heine's accomplishment
is remote from him as Heine's genius. He perverts his author as rhyme
and rhythm will. No charge of verbal inaccuracy need therefore be made,
for we do not expect a literal fidelity in our workman. Let him convey
the spirit of his original, and that, so far as meaning goes, is enough.
But we do expect of him a something that shall recall his author's form,
his author's personality, his author's charm of diction and of style; and
here it is that such an interpreter as Sir Theodore Martin (say) fails
with such assurance and ill-fortune. The movement of Heine's rhythms,
simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poet
laboured at his cadences as at his meanings. Artificial he is, but he
has the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial. His verses dance
and sway like the nixies he loved. Their every motion seems informed
with the perfect suavity and spontaneity of pure nature. They tinkle
down the air like sunset bells, they float like clouds, they wave like
flowers, they twitter like skylarks, they have in them something of the
swiftness and the certainty of exquisite physical sensations. In such a
transcript as Sir Theodore's all this is lost: Heine becomes a mere
prentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browning
himself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springless
cart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailed
breakdown. The poem disappears, and in its place you have an indifferent
copy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impression is
that they are not unlike Heine; you look into them, and Heine has
vanished. The man is gone, and only an awkward, angular, clumsily
articulated, entirely preposterous lay-figure remains to show that the
translator has been by.