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 noble 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 assure 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 kinship between the author and the translator is the
principal 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 passion 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 latitude, 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 classical 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 Poeticum_, "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 repetitions 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
destitute 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 verbum 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 latitude. "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 attitude 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
associated 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 noble 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 classical 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 fashion 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."