'The firste finder of our fair langage'
is styled 'a Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, an Angel in
conduct and a great Translator,'--a seeming anti-climax which has
scandalized not a little sundry inditers of 'Lives' and 'Memoirs.' The
title is no bathos: it is given simply because Chaucer _translated_ (using
the term in its best and highest sense) into his pure, simple and strong
English tongue with all its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and
fancies of his foreign models, the very letter and spirit of Petrarch and
Boccaccio."
For the humble literary status of translation in modern England and for the
short-comings of the average English translator, public taste or rather
caprice is mainly to be blamed. The "general reader," the man not in the
street but the man who makes up the educated mass, greatly relishes a
novelty in the way of "plot" or story or catastrophe while he has a natural
dislike to novelties of style and diction, demanding a certain dilution of
the unfamiliar with the familiar. Hence our translations in verse,
especially when rhymed, become for the most part deflorations or excerpts,
adaptations or periphrases more or less meritorious and the "translator"
was justly enough dubbed "traitor" by critics of the severer sort. And he
amply deserves the injurious name when ignorance of his original's language
perforce makes him pander to popular prescription.
But the good time which has long been coming seems now to have come. The
home reader will no longer put up with the careless caricatures of
classical chefs d'oeuvre which satisfied his old-fashioned predecessor. Our
youngers, in most points our seniors, now expect the translation not only
to interpret the sense of the original but also, when the text lends itself
to such treatment, to render it _verbatim et literatim_, nothing being
increased or diminished, curtailed or expanded. Moreover, in the choicer
passages, they so far require an echo of the original music that its melody
and harmony should be suggested to their mind. Welcomed also are the
mannerisms of the translator's model as far as these aid in preserving,
under the disguise of another dialect, the individuality of the foreigner
and his peculiar costume.
That this high ideal of translation is at length becoming popular now
appears in our literature. The "Villon Society," when advertizing the
novels of Matteo Bandello, Bishop of Agen, justly remarks of the
translator, Mr. John Payne, that his previous works have proved him to
possess special qualifications for "the delicate and difficult task of
transferring into his own language at once the savour and the substance,
the matter and the manner of works of the highest individuality, conceived
and executed in a foreign language."
In my version of hexameters and pentameters I have not shirked the metre
although it is strangely out of favour in English literature while we read
it and enjoy it in German. There is little valid reason for our aversion;
the rhythm has been made familiar to our ears by long courses of Greek and
Latin and the rarity of spondaic feet is assuredly to be supplied by art
and artifice.
And now it is time for farewelling my friends:--we may no longer (alas!)
address them, with the ingenuous Ancient in the imperative
Vos Plaudite.