touched up and polished, until the exact word is found for every elusive
epithet, the precise equivalent for every tantalizing phrase, and the
entire ode lies before us, its foreign garb bagging, indeed, a little
here and there, but fitting as snugly as our art can make it, and we are
content. That is a moment of such supreme satisfaction, of such tranquil
triumph, as life but rarely yields. Less than any other that dabbles in
ink has your true Horatian the fever of the type. His virtue is
really—what virtue, alas! so seldom is in this perverse world—its own
reward. Like Joubert, _il s’inquiète de perfection bien plus que de
gloire_; to have hit upon what he feels to be a happy rendering is glory
enough; enough that he and Horace should share his exultation; a
felicitous adjective will put him in good-humor for a week. And so,
before he well knows it, his portfolio is nearly full, and the notion
first dawns upon him—the duty it almost seems—of sharing his good
fortune with his fellows. “Rather would I have written the _Quem tu
Melpomene semel_ or the _Donec gratus eram tibi_,” cried Scaliger, “than
to be king of Aragon.” Rather would I make a perfect translation of
these or any other of the _Odes_, cries our Horatian, than to be king of
all Spain, with all _Cuba libre_ to boot—
“Quam si Libyam remotis
Gadibus jungas et uterque Pœnus
Serviat uni.”[74]
Somewhat in this wise, we fancy, have most versions of Horace come to be
and to be printed; certainly, we incline to think, all the best
versions. Thus, too, partly for the reason M. Sainte-Beuve gives, partly
from the poet’s universality and the charm which lies in the very
difficulty of the task—an impossibility Johnson called it, but it is one
of those “sweet impossibilities” which ennoble failure—do we count so
many renderings of single odes by famous men. There are few names
eminent in English letters or statesmanship that are not thus allied to
the genial Venusian—names, too, of the most diverse order. Not only
poets like Cowper and Montgomery, Chatterton and Byron,[75] essayists
like Addison, or dramatists like Congreve, Rowe, and Otway, but grave
historians such as Mitford and Merivale, judges like Lord Thurlow and
Sir Jeffrey Gilbert, philosophers like Atterbury and Sir William Temple,
bitter satirists like Swift, tender sentimentalists like “Namby Pamby”
Phillips, professors and prime ministers, doctors and divines, lords and
lawyers, archdeacons and archtraitors, have joined in paying court to
the freedman’s son. In his ante-room, or _atrium_, prim John Evelyn is
jostled by tipsy Porson humming somewhat huskily one of the bacchanalian
lyrics to a tune of his own (perhaps the _Ad Sodales_, i. 27, which that
learned Theban has rendered with true Porsonian zest—a little too much
so to quote); Warren Hastings there meets Edmund Burke in friendlier
contest than at the bar of the House of Commons; Dr. Bentley takes issue
with Archdeacon Wrangham over a doubtful reading; Mr. Gladstone leads a
poetic opposition to Lord Derby in Englishing the _Carmen Amabœum_. In
that modest _cœnaculum_ we can greet these great men all on a familiar
and equal footing, made one of them for the nonce by the fellowship of a
common taste—nay, may even flatter ourselves that here, at least, we are
at their level; that our poet’s door may even be opened to us sooner
than to the tallest and wisest among them. It is true greatness has no
prerogative in Horace; the meanest may win to his intimacy, be admitted
to his _penetralia_, sooner than the mightiest. Of all the distinguished
names we have quoted, few would have had much distinction as translators
alone, though Bishop Atterbury’s versions, especially that of the _Ad
Melpomenen_, iv. 2, are deservedly famous. Hastings’ translation of the
_Ad Grosphum_, written during his passage from Bengal to England in 1785
(he was going home to the famous trial), merits notice for its curious
adaptation to his Indian experiences:
“For ease the slow Mahratta spoils
And hardier Sikh erratic toils,
While both their ease forego....
“To ripened age Clive lived renowned,
With lacs enriched, with honors crowned,
His valor’s well-earned meed.
Too long, alas! he lived, to hate
His envied lot, and died too late
From life’s oppression freed.”
Another verse had perhaps a still more personal application; there is
but a trace of it in the Latin:
“No fears his peace of mind annoy
Lest printed lies his fame destroy
Which labor’d years have won;
Nor pack’d committees break his rest,
Nor avarice sends him forth in quest
Of climes beneath the sun.”
The fashion of fitting Horace to contemporary persons and events was
much in vogue in Hastings’ time and earlier. Creech tells us in his
preface that he was advised “to turn the Satyrs to his own times.” It
was carried out to the fullest extent in the well-known _Horace in
London_ of Horace and James Smith.
Within the past twenty-five or thirty years many complete versions of
the _Odes_ have been put forth, including those of H. G. Robinson, the
Rev. W. Sewell (printed in Bohn’s Library), Lord Ravensworth, Mr. Whyte
Melville, Mr. Theodore Martin, the late Prof. Conington, and the late
Lord Lytton. Of these, Mr. Martin’s, which we should feel inclined to
pronounce upon the whole the best, and the most notable Lord Lytton’s,
have alone been reprinted here. In giving this pre-eminence to Mr.
Martin’s work we are perhaps influenced by a strong individual liking,
amounting even to a prepossession, in its favor, dating from that very
potent time Sainte-Beuve speaks of—“_le temps des études qui nous
étaient chères_.” When it first fell into our hands it was the only
version we had yet seen which at all reproduced, even to a limited
degree, for us its original’s charm. By many Prof. Conington’s
translation, easy, fluent, and in the main faithful—just what, from his
_Æneid_, one might expect it to be—will be preferred to Mr. Martin’s,
which it certainly surpasses in single odes. As to the worst there need
be no such doubt. The Rev. Mr. Sewell’s is not, perhaps, the worst
possible version of the _Odes_, as one is half tempted to believe who
remembers how it was recommended to the readers of the _Dublin
University Magazine_ long ago—how we relished that literary execution
with all boyhood’s artless delight in slaughter! Time, alas! soon sobers
that youthful vivacity of temper, and, better than Æsop, teaches us to
respect the frogs whom it loves to revenge in kind. No; the
possibilities and varieties of badness in this direction are unhappily
too great for that; but it is as bad as need be—as need be, let us say,
for admission to Bohn’s Library.[76] Great indulgence is certainly to be
extended to translators of Horace; much is to be forgiven them; but one
must finally draw the line, and probably most Horatians would feel like
drawing the line at the Rev. Mr. Sewell.
It was in the process of pointing out this fact to that gentleman, in a
review of his book in the magazine mentioned, that Mr. Martin some
twenty years ago put forth, we believe, the first specimens of his own
translation, which was completed and published some years later. Its
success was immediate and deserved; for its positive no less than its
comparative merits were great. Mr. Martin was one of the first to
discern, or at least to put in acceptable practice, the true theory of
translating the lighter odes—“a point of great difficulty,” as he truly
says. “They are,” he adds, “mere _vers de société_ invested by the
language, for us, with a certain stateliness, but which were probably
regarded with a very different feeling by the small contemporary circle
to whom they were addressed. To catch the tone of these, to be light
without being flippant, to be playful without being vulgar, demands a
delicacy of touch which it is given to few to acquire, even in original
composition, and which in translation is all but unattainable.” The
graver odes have their own difficulties; but the skilful translator
handles them more easily, we fancy, than the gay fluttering swarm of
laughing Lydias and Neæras that flash athwart their statelier pomp like
golden butterflies through the Gothic glooms of summer woods—butterflies
whose glossy wings, alas! lose something of their down and brilliance at
every, even the lightest and most loving, touch. The thought of a poem
is always easier to transplant into other speech than its form. Ideas
are essentially the same, whatever tongue interprets them—Homer’s Greek
or Shakspeare’s English; but the infinite delicate shades of beauty or
significance added to them by the subtle differences of words, by that
beauty of their own and intrinsic value which, as Théophile Gautier puts
it—himself a master of language—words have in the poet’s eyes apart from
their meaning, like uncut and unset jewels, the deftest, most patient
art of the translator toils in vain to catch. They vanish in his grasp
like the bubble whose frail glories dazzle the eyes and mock the
longing, chubby fingers of babyhood; to render them is like trying to
paint the perfume of a flower.
Now, it is true enough, whatever iconoclasts like Stendhal may pretend,
that in poetry thought cannot be divorced from form; it is the
indissoluble union of both that makes the poem. Try to fancy any really
great passage of verse expressed in other words, even of the same
speech, and you see at once how important form is. Take once more
Shakspeare’s
“Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty,”
and try to change or misplace a single word. One feels instantly that
any change would be fatal; it almost seems, with such passages, as
though noble thought and perfect word had been waiting for each other
from all time until the high-priest of Apollo should come to wed them.
To quote Sainte-Beuve again—the critic who wishes to instruct his
readers can scarcely quote him too often: “Je conçois qu’on ne mette pas
toute la poesie dans le métier, mais je ne conçois pas du tout que quand
il s’agit d’un art on ne tienne nui compte de l’art lui-même et qu’on
déprécie les parfaits ouvriers qui y excellent.”[77] Yet it is none the
less true that a poem in which the idea is paramount is more susceptible
of translation than one whose form is the chief element of its charm.
One can imagine Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on Milton, “Milton, thou
shouldst be with us at this hour,” being turned into Latin with
comparatively little loss; indeed it has been so turned by one of the
most accomplished of English scholars—Dr. Kennedy—into Alcaics of which
the purity and finish make a fitting casket for that gem of poetry;
though even here one feels the wide difference between the original of
that immortal line,
“Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,”
and the Latin
“Mens tua lumine
Fulgebat, ut sidus, remote,”
missing, as we do, the “lovely marriage of pure words,” that in the
English is itself a poem. But take such a bit of verbal daintiness as
George Darley’s “Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,”
with its peculiar and _saisissant_ rhythm, the perfection of verbal
music; or Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” where the poetry—and
undeniable poetry it is—lies in a certain faint aroma of suggestion that
seems to breathe from the very words, and try to reproduce the effect of
them in other speech. As well try with earthly tools to rebuild
Titania’s palace of leaf shadows and the gossamer, to weave her mantle
on any mortal loom out of moonbeams and the mist.
Much the same is it to attempt to transfer to an English translation
aught of the peculiar grace which invests Horace’s lightest lyrics with
a charm we feel but cannot analyze, which resides in the choice of
epithets, the arrangement of words, the cadence of the rhythm, the
metrical form, and which yet is something more than any or all of these.
The noble thought which lies embodied in the _Justum et tenacem
propositi virum_ we may not despair of rehabilitating, with somewhat of
its proper majesty, in our own vernacular; but the shy, fugitive
loveliness of that wildwood picnic to which the poet bids us, to forget
the cares of life,
“Quo pinus et ingens albaque populus
Umbram hospitalem consociare amant
Ramis, et obliquo laborat
_Lympha fugax trepidare rivo_”
—what art can coax away from its native soil? Do we find it in Francis?—
“Where the pale poplar and the pine
Expel the sun’s intemperate beam;
In hospitable shades their branches twine,
And winds with toil, though swift, the tremulous stream”;
or in Creech—though Creech is here luckier than usual?—
“Where near a purling Spring doth glide
In winding Streams, and softly chide
The interrupting Pebble as it flows”;
or in Prout?—
“While onward runs the crooked rill,
Brisk fugitive, with murmur shrill”;
or in Lord Lytton?—
“Wherefore struggles and murmurs the rill
Stayed from flight by a curve in the shore.”
Even Mr. Martin gives it up, and presents us, instead of a translation,
with a couplet which is very pretty English verse, but about as far
from Horace as can be:
“Where runs the wimpling brook, its slumb’rous tune
Still murmuring as it runs to the hush’d ear of noon.”
It is passages such as this especially which have caused Horace to be
called the untranslatable.
To come from theory to practice, it is in the lighter odes, and in
those parts of all the odes the beauty of which in the original lies
chiefly in expression, that all Horace’s translators have most
conspicuously failed. Take Milton’s _Ad Pyrrham_, for example (Ode v.).
The _Ad Pyrrham_ is not only one of the most charming but also one of
the most difficult of the minor odes, and for that reason among the
oftenest translated. It is one of the many _mitten_-pieces wherein the
inconstant bard seems to have taken a somewhat ostentatious delight in
celebrating the numerous snubbings he had to put up with from the no
less inconstant fair who were the objects of his brief and fitful
homage. In it, as in the _Ad Neæram_ (_Epod._ xv.) and the _Ad Barinen_
(_Carm._ ii. 8), reproaches to the lady for her perfidy are mingled
with self-gratulations on the poet’s own lucky escape and sinister
warnings to his rival—the time-old strategy and solace of the discarded
lover the world over. He has been shipwrecked, he says, on that
treacherous sea of love; but having, the gods be praised! made shift to
scramble ashore in safety, and got on some dry duds, sits in gleeful
expectation of seeing his successor get a like ducking. The poem is
simply a piece of mock heroics, for the counterpart of which we must
look to such minglings of cynicism and sentiment as we find in the
poetry of Praed and Thackeray and Locker, or, to a less degree, in many
of Béranger’s lighter songs. The difference between the modern poets
and the ancient is that in the former the sentiment is real, veiled
under an affectation of cynicism: in the latter it is precisely the
reverse. But, bearing that difference in mind, the translator may find
in the methods of the poets named some hints for the handling of such
odes as the _Ad Pyrrham_.
But how do the translators treat it? Take Milton’s famous version,
which everybody knows:
“What slender youth bedewed with liquid odors
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou
In wreaths thy golden hair?
“Plain in thy neatness,” etc.
—’tis as solemn as a Quaker conventicle. Nor, with reverence be it said
_en passant_, is it altogether free from graver faults; undeniably
elegant as it is, this translation has had quite as much praise as it
deserved. It is full of those Latin constructions Milton loved—“on
faith and changed gods complain” for _fidem mutatosque deos flebit_,
“always vacant” for _semper vacuam_, “unwonted shall admire” for
_emirabitur insolens_, etc.—which are nowhere more out of place than in
a translation from the Latin. Some, indeed, claim that they carry with
them and impart a certain flavor of the original to those unacquainted
with it; but this seems to us a view at once fallacious and
superficial. The office of translation into any language is surely to
reproduce the original in the idiom of that language as nearly as may
be; and though the theory, like all theories, may be pressed to an
excess—as we think Mr. Morris has pressed it, for example, in his
translation of the _Æneid_—better that than such deformities as
“Always vacant, always amiable
Hopes thee.”
It is the suggestion not of Horace but of Milton here that is pleasant;
it is because Milton’s natural English style is a highly Latinized and
involved style that these oddities of his translation strike us less
than in another. Sometimes, too, oddly enough for so good a scholar, he
falls short of the full sense of his original. _Potenti maris deo_, the
commentators tell us, means, not “the stern god of sea,” but “the god
potent over the sea”; and “plain in thy neatness” for _simplex
munditiis_ misses the entire significance of the latter word, which
implies something of grace and beauty. “Plain in thy neatness” suggests
rather “Priscilla the Puritan maiden” than Pyrrha of the dull-gold
hair. Ben Jonson’s
“Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace,”
hits Horace’s meaning exactly, and certainly far more poetically.
Indeed, we often find in original English poetry much apter renderings
than the translators give us. Prof. Conington knew this when he went to
Shakspeare for “fancy free” as an equivalent for this very word
_vacuam_ we have been talking of—a perfect equivalent of its
association did not make it a little un-Horatian—and to Matthew
Arnold’s “salt, unplumbed, _estranging_ sea” for the very best version
we have seen of that most puzzling phrase (i. 3), “_oceano
dissociabili_.”
This is, perhaps, a digression; but as we set out for a ramble, we have
no apologies to make. Conington’s version, in the same metre as
Milton’s, only rhyming the alternate lines, is not all so good as
“fancy free,” though it gains from its rhyme a certain lightness
lacking in that of Milton’s:
“What slender youth besprinkled with perfume
Courts you on roses in some grotto’s shade,
Fair Pyrrha? Say for whom
Your yellow hair you braid.
“So true, so simple! Ah! how oft shall he
Lament that faith can fail, that gods can change,
Viewing the rough black sea
With eyes to tempests strange,” etc.
So true, so simple! We are not much nearer to _simplex munditiis_ than
before. Martin is not here at his best, and Francis is unusually
successful: “dress’d with careless art” and “consecrate the pictured
storm” are felicities he does not always attain. Prout is chiefly
noticeable for yielding to the almost irresistible temptation of a
false beacon in _intentata nites_:
“I the false light forswear,
A shipwreck’d mariner”;
and Leigh Hunt’s, though but a paraphrase, is surely a very happy one:
“For whom are bound thy tresses bright
With unconcern so exquisite?”
and
“Though now the sunshine hour beguiles
His bark along thy golden smiles,
Trusting to see thee for his play
For ever keep smooth holiday,”
admirably elude, if they do not meet, the difficulties of the Latin.
But in none of these, nor in any other rendering we have seen, is there
any trace of that _nuance_ of sarcasm or polite banter we seem to taste
in the original. The only American version we remember to have met with
is not in this respect more successful:
“In thy grotto’s cool recesses,
Dripping perfumes, lapped in roses,
Say what lissome youth reposes,
Pyrrha, wooing thy embrace?
Braid’st for whom those tawny tresses,
Simple in thy grace?
“Ah! how oft averted heaven
Will he weep, and thy dissembling.
And, poor novice, view with trembling
O’er the erewhile tranquil deep,
By the angry tempest driven,
Billowy tumult sweep;
“Now who in thy smile endearing
Basks, with foolish fondness hoping
To his love thou’lt e’er be open,
To his wooing ever kind,
Knowing not the fitful veering
Of the faithless wind?
“Hapless they rash troth who plight thee!
On the sacred wall my votive
Picture, set with pious motive,
Shows I hung in Neptune’s fane
My wet garments to the mighty
Monarch of the main.”
It may be said that this sly spirit of badinage which lurks, or to us,
at least, seems to lurk, in the shadows of the lighter odes, like some
tricksy Faun peering and disappearing through the thickets of
Lucretilis, it is impossible to seize; that when we try it “the
stateliness of the language” interposes itself like a wall, and we find
ourselves becoming vulgar where Horace is playful, flippant where
Horace is light. Doubtless this is so; what then? Because it is an
impossibility, shall any loyal Horatian balk at it? It is just because
of these impossibilities that translations are always in order, and
will, to a certain extent, always be in demand. Translations of other
poets pall; it is conceivable that a version of Virgil might be
produced which human skill could not better. But no such thing being
conceivable of Horace, every fresh version is a whet to curiosity and
emulation; each separate ode hides its own agreeable secret, every
epithet has its own individual surprise. Let there be no talk, then, of
impossibilities; for our own part, to paraphrase what Hallam says of
Lycidas, we look upon the ability to translate such odes as the _Ad
Pyrrham_, so as to demonstrate their impossibility, a good test of a
man’s capacity to translate Horace at all.
Another nice consideration for the translator of Horace is in respect
of metre. Undoubtedly the translator who can retain the metrical
movement of his original has gained so much towards reproducing his
general effect. But with Horace this attempt may as well be abandoned
at once. The Alcaic and the Sapphic stanza, much less the Asclepiad or
the Archilochian, have never yet been, and for obvious reasons never
will be, naturalized in our English verse, though poor Percival thought
differently, and added one more to a life of failures. Tennyson, in his
ode to Milton,
“Whose guardian-angels, Muriel, Abdiel,
Starred from Jehovah’s gorgeous armory,
Tow’r, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset,”
gives us, perhaps, as good Alcaics as we have any right to look for in
English (though “gōrgĕoŭs” is not a very gorgeous dactyl); yet how
different from the Horatian cadence:
“Æquam memento rebus in arduis
Servare mentem, non secus in bonis
Ab insolenti temperatam
Lætitia, moriture Delli.”[78]
As for Sapphics, whether we take Canning’s _Knife Grinder_ for our
model or Mr. Swinburne’s
“All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close, and with eyes of iron,
Stood and beheld me,”
we are not much nearer to Horace’s melody:
“Scandit æratas vitiosa naves
Cura, nec turmas equitum relinquit
Ocior cervis, et agente nimbos
Ocior Euro.”[79]
But, at least, following that rule of compensation with which all good
translators are familiar, some attempt may be made to suggest the
metrical variety and richness of the _Odes_ by a corresponding variety
and grace in the English measures of the translation. It is here that
the modern translators excel; indeed, it may be said that only within
the last hundred years have translators had this adjunct at their
command, for it is only during that period that English poets have
begun to comprehend and master fully the resources and possibilities of
English metre. Not that the earlier poets were at all deficient in the
metrical sense; that their ears were not quick to catch the finest
delicacies of verbal harmony. Not to mention a host of minor bards who
knew how to marry “perfect music unto noble words,” Milton’s lyrics are
melody itself. There is scarcely a more tunable couplet in the language
than his
“Sweetest Shakspeare, fancy’s child,
Warbles his native woodnotes wild.”
The open vowels and liquid consonants fairly sing themselves. Nor was
it for lack of experiment that they failed of
“Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony”