Je le vis, je rougis, je palis à sa vue,
Un trouble s’éleva dans mon âme éperdue;
Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler,
Je sentais tout mon cœur et transir et brûler:
we recognise their source. We recognise, also, if it were not already
confessed, the source of this of Tennyson in his _Fatima_:
“Last night, when some one spoke his name,
From my swift blood, that went and came,
A thousand little shafts of flame
Were shivered in my narrow frame.”
If this physical perturbation seems strange to the more reticent man of
northern blood, it was in no way strange to Theocritus, to Catullus, or
to Lucretius. Once more, according to the German proverb, “he who would
comprehend the poet must travel in the poet’s land.”
And here we are confronted with a supreme difficulty. While mere fact
is readily translatable, and thought is approximately translatable,
the literary quality, which is warm with the pressure and pulsation of
a writer’s mood and rhythmic with his emotional state, is hopelessly
untranslatable. It can be suggested, but it cannot be reproduced. The
translation is too often like the bare, cold photograph of a scene of
which the emotional effect is largely due to colour and atmosphere. The
simpler and more direct the words of the original, the more impossible
is translation. In the original the words, though simple and direct,
are poetical, beautiful in quality and association. They contain in
their own nature hints of pathos, sparks of fire, which any so-called
synonym would lack. They are musical in themselves and musical in
their combinations. They flow easily, sweetly, touchingly through the
ear into the heart. The translator may seek high and low in his own
language for words and combinations of the same _timbre_, the same
ethical or emotional influence, the same gracious and touching music.
He will generally seek in vain. In his own language there may exist
words approximately answering in meaning, but, even if they are fairly
simple and direct, they are often commonplace, sullied with “ignoble
use,” harsh in sound, without distinction or charm. He may require a
whole phrase to convey the same tone and effect; he becomes diffuse,
where terseness is a special virtue of his original. Let a foreigner
study to render this--
“Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.”