_Trieste, 1890._
[The Foreword just given is an unfinished pencilling on the margin of
Sir Richard's Latin text of Catullus. I reproduce below, a portion of
his Foreword to a previous translation from the Latin on which we
collaborated and which was issued in the summer of 1890.--L. C. S.]
A 'cute French publisher lately remarked to me that, as a rule, versions in
verse are as enjoyable to the writer as they are unenjoyed by the reader,
who vehemently doubts their truth and trustworthiness. These pages hold in
view one object sole and simple, namely, to prove that a translation,
metrical and literal, may be true and may be trustworthy.
As I told the public (Camoens: Life and Lusiads ii. 185-198), it has ever
been my ambition to reverse the late Mr. Matthew Arnold's peremptory
dictum:--"In a verse translation no original work is any longer
recognisable." And here I may be allowed to borrow from my Supplemental
Arabian Nights (Vol. vi., Appendix pp. 411-412, a book known to few and
never to be reprinted) my vision of the ideal translation which should not
be relegated to the Limbus of Intentions.
"My estimate of a translator's office has never been of the low level
generally assigned to it even in the days when Englishmen were in the habit
of translating every work, interesting or important, published out of
England, and of thus giving a continental and cosmopolitan flavour to their
literature. We cannot at this period expect much from a 'man of letters'
who must produce a monthly volume for a pittance of £20: of him we need not
speak. But the translator at his best, works, when reproducing the matter
and the manner of his original, upon two distinct lines. His prime and
primary object is to please his reader, edifying him and gratifying his
taste; the second is to produce an honest and faithful copy, adding naught
to the sense or abating aught of its especial _cachet_. He has, however, or
should have, another aim wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art.
Every language can profitably lend something to and take somewhat from its
neighbours--an epithet, a metaphor, a naïf idiom, a turn of phrase. And the
translator of original mind who notes the innumerable shades of tone,
manner and complexion will not neglect the frequent opportunities of
enriching his mother-tongue with novel and alien ornaments which shall
justly be accounted barbarisms until formally naturalized and adopted. Nor
will any modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the malpractice
of his banal brotherhood, the striking and often startling phases of the
foreign author's phraseology and dull the text with well-worn and
commonplace English equivalents, thus doing the clean reverse of what he
should do. It was this _beau idéal_ of a translator's success which made
Eustache Deschamps write of his contemporary and brother bard,
_Grand Translateur, noble Geoffroy Chaucier._