Next, I have sought to retain each individual meaning that goes to form
the matter of a poem.
Third, I have aimed at preserving the peculiar mode, the aroma of the
poet’s style, so far as I could do it without offence to the translating
English.
Fourth, both rhythm and rime being essential elements of every poem in
which they are used, I have sought to respect them rigorously.
Fifth, spirit, matter, and form truly represented, the more literal the
translation the more satisfactory will be the result.
After all, translation is but a continuous effort after the impossible.
There is in it a general difficulty whose root has a thousand
ramifications, the whole affair being but an accommodation of
difficulties, and a perfect translation from one language into another is
a thing that cannot be effected. One is tempted even to say that in the
whole range of speech there is no such thing as a synonym.
Much difficulty arises from the comparative paucity in English of double,
or feminine rimes. But I can remember only one case in which, yielding to
impossibility, I have sacrificed the feminine rime: where one thing or
another must go, the less valuable must be the victom.
But sometimes a whole passage has had to suffer that a specially poetic
line might retain its character.
With regard to the _Hymns to the Night_ and the _Spiritual Songs_ of
Friedrich von Hardenberg, commonly called Novalis, it is desirable to
mention that they were written when the shadow of the death of his
betrothed had begun to thin before the approaching dawn of his own new
life. He died in 1801, at the age of twentynine. His parents belonged to
the sect called Moravians, but he had become a Roman Catholic.
Perhaps some of Luther’s Songs might as well have been omitted, but they
are all translated that the Songbook might be a whole. Some, I cannot tell
how many or which, are from the Latin. His work is rugged, and where an
occasional fault in rime occurs I have reproduced it.
In the few poems from the Italian, I have found the representation of the
feminine rimes, so frequent in that language, an impossibility.