CALDERON'S DRAMAS AND AUTOS,
BY DENIS FLORENCE MAC-CARTHY.
From Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature. London: 1863.
"Denis Florence M'Carthy published in London (in 1861) translations of two plays, and an auto of Calderon, under the title of 'Love, the greatest Enchantment; the Sorceries of Sin; the Devotion of the Cross, from the Spanish of Calderon, attempted strictly in English Asonante, and other imitative Verse', printing, at the same time, a carefully corrected text of the originals, page by page, opposite to his translations. It is, I think, one of the boldest attempts ever made in English verse. It is, too, as it seems to me, remarkably successful. Not that asonantes can be made fluent or graceful in English, or easily perceptible to an English ear, but that the Spanish air and character of Calderon are so happily preserved. Mr. M'Carthy, in 1853, had published two volumes of translations from Calderon, to which I have already referred; and, besides this, he has rendered excellent service to the cause of Spanish literature in other ways. But in the present volume he has far surpassed all he had previously done; for Calderon is a poet who, whenever he is translated, should have his very excesses, both in thought and manner, fully produced, in order to give a faithful idea of what is grandest and most distinctive in his genius. Mr. M'Carthy has done this, I conceive, to a degree which I had previously considered impossible. Nothing, I think, in the English language will give us so true an impression of what is most characteristic of the Spanish drama; perhaps I ought to say, of what is most characteristic of Spanish poetry generally".—tom. iii. pp. 461, 462.
Extracts from Continental Reviews.
From "Bläater für Literarische Unterhaltung". 1862. Erster Baude, 479 Leipzig, F. A. Brockhans.
"Erwähnenswerth ist folgender Kühne versuch einer Rachdildung Calderon' scher stücke in Englishchen Assonanzen.
"Love, the greatest enchantment; The Sorceries of Sin; The Devotion of the Cross, from the Spanish of Calderon, attempted strictly in English Asonante, and other imitative verse. By Denis Florence Mac-Carthy".
Diese Uebersetzung ist dem Verfasser der "History of Spanish Literature", George Ticknor, zugeeignet, der in einem Schreiber au den Uebersetzer die Arbeit "marvellous" nennt und dam fortfährt:
"Richt das sie die Assonanzen dem englischen Ohr so hörbar gemacht hätten, wie dies mit den Spanischen der Fall ist; unsere widerhaarigen consonanten machen dies unmöglich; das Wunderbare ist nur, das sie dieselben überhaupt hörbar gemacht haben. Meiner Meinung nach nehme ist Ihre Assonanzen so deutlich wahr, wil die Von August Schlegel oder Gries und mehr als diejenigen Friedrich Schlegel's. Aber dieser war der erste, der den versuch dazu machte, und ausserdem bin ich Kein Deutscher. Wurde es nicht lustig sein, wenn man einmal ein solches Experiment in französchicher Sprache wolte?"
"Ohne zweifel würde MacCarthy Ohne den vorgaug deutscher Nachbilder des Calderon ebenso wenig darauf gekommen sein englische Assonanzen zu versuchen, als man ohne das ermunternde Beispiel deutscher Dichter und Uebersetzer darauf gekommen sein wurde, in Uebersetzungen und originaldichtungen unter welchen letztern wol besonders Longfellow's 'Evangeline', zu nennen ist, englische Hexameter zu versuchen, was in letzter zeit gar nicht selten geschehen ist".
From "Boletin de Ferro-Carriles". Cadiz: 1862.
"La novedad que nos comunica de la existencia de traducciones tan acabadas de nuestro grande é inimitable Calderon, ostendando, hasta cierto punto, las galas y formas del original, estamos seguros será acogida con favor, si no con entusiasmo, per los verdaderos amantes de las letras españolas. A ellos nos dirijimos, recomendándoles el último trabajo del Señor Mac-Carthy, seguros de que participaran del mismo placer que nosotros hemos experimentado al examinar su fiel, al par que brillante traduccion; y en cuanto á la dificil tentativa de los asonantes ingleses, nos sorpende que el Señor Mac-Carthy haya podido sacar tanto parido, si se considera la indole peculiar de los dos idiomas".
Extracts from Letters addressed to the Author.
From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Esq.
Cambridge, near Boston, America, April 29, 1862.
"I thank you very much for your new work in the vast and flowery fields of Calderon. It is, I think, admirable; and presents the old Spanish dramatist before the English reader in a very attractive light.
"Particularly in the most poetical passages you are excellent; as, for instance, in the fine description of the gerfalcon and the heron in 'El Mayor Encanto'.—11 Jor.
"Your previous volumes I have long possessed and highly prized; and I hope you mean to add more and more, so as to make the translation as nearly complete as a single life will permit. It seems rather appalling to undertake the whole of so voluminous a writer. Nevertheless, I hope you will do it. Having proved that you can, perhaps you ought to do it. This may be your appointed work. It is a noble one.
"With much regard, I am, etc.,
"Henry W. Longfellow.
"Denis Florence Mac-Carthy, Esq.".
From the Same.
Nahant, near Boston, August 10, 1857.
"My Dear Sir,
"Before leaving Cambridge to come down here to the sea-side, I had the pleasure of receiving your precious volume of 'Mysteries of Corpus Christi'; and should have thanked you sooner for your kindness in sending it to me, had I not been very busy at the time in getting out my last volume of Dante.
"I at once read your work, with eagerness and delight—that peculiar and strange delight which Calderon gives his admirers, as peculiar and distinct as the flavour of an olive from that of all other fruits.
"You are doing this work admirably, and seem to gain new strength and sweetness as you go on. It seems as if Calderon himself were behind you whispering and suggesting. And what better work could you do in your bright hours or in your dark hours than just this, which seems to have been put providentially into your hands!
"The extracts from the 'Sacred Parnassus' in the Chronicle, which reached me yesterday, are also excellent.
"For this and all, many and many thanks.
"Yours faithfully,
"Henry W. Longfellow.
"Denis Florence Mac-Carthy, Esq.".
From George Ticknor, Esq., the Historian of Spanish Literature.
"Boston, 16th December, 1861.
"In this point of view, your volume seems to me little less than marvellous. If I had not read it—indeed, if I had not carefully gone through with the Devocion de la Cruz, I should not have believed it possible to do what you have done. Titian, they say, and some others of the old masters, laid on colours for their groundwork wholly different from those they used afterwards, but which they counted upon to shine through, and contribute materially to the grand results they produced. So in your translations, the Spanish seems to come through to the surface; the original air is always perceptible in your variations. It is like a family likeness coming out in the next generation, yet with the freshness of originality.
"But the rhyme is as remarkable as the verse and the translation; not that you have made the asonante as perceptible to the English ear as it is to the Spanish; our cumbersome consonants make that impossible. But the wonder is, that you have made it perceptible at all. I think I perceive your asonantes much as I do those of August Schlegel or Gries, and more than I do those of Friederich Schlegel. But he was the first who tried them, and, besides, I am not a German. Would it not be amusing to have the experiment tried in French?"
From the Same.
"Boston, March 20, 1867.
"The world has claims on you which you ought not to evade; and, if the path in which you walk of preference, leads to no wide popularity or brilliant profits, it is, at least, one you have much to yourself, and cannot fail to enjoy. You have chosen it from faithful love, and will always love it; I suspect partly because it is your own choice, because it is peculiarly your own".
From the Same.
"Boston, July 3, 1867.
"Considered from this point of view, I think that in your present volume ["Mysteries of Corpus Christi", or "Autos Sacramentales" of Calderon] you are always as successful as you were in your previous publications of the same sort, and sometimes more so; easier, I mean, freer, and more happily expressive. If I were to pick out my first preference, I should take your fragment of the 'Veneno y Triaca', at the end; but I think the whole volume is more fluent, pleasing, and attractive than even its predecessors".
From the first of English religious painters.
April 24, 1867.
"I cannot resist the impulse I have of offering you my most grateful thanks for the greatest intellectual treat I have ever experienced in my life, and which you have afforded me in the magnificent translations of the divine Calderon; for, surely, of all the poets the world ever saw, he alone is worthy of standing beside the author of the Book of Job and of the Psalms, and entrusted, like them, with the noble mission of commending to the hearts of others all that belongs to the beautiful and true, ever directing the thoughtful reader through the love of the beautiful veil, to the great Author of all perfection.
"I cannot conceive a nation can receive a greater boon than being helped to a love of such works as the religious dramas of this Prince of Poets. I have for years felt this, and as your translations appeared, have read them with the greatest possible interest. I knew not of the publication of the last, and it was to an accidental, yet, with me, habitual outburst of praise of Calderon, as the antidote and cure for the trifling literature of the day, that my friend (the) D—— made me aware of its being out".
[The work especially referred to in the latter part of this interesting letter is the following: "Mysteries of Corpus Christi (Autos Sacramentales), from the Spanish of Calderon, by Denis Florence Mac-Carthy". Duffy, Dublin and London, 1867.]
Extracts from American and Canadian Journals.
From an eloquent article in the "Boston Courier", March 18, 1862, written by George Stillman Hillard, Esq., the author of "Six Months in Italy"—a delightful book, worthy of the beautiful country it so beautifully describes.
"Calderon is one of the three greatest names in Spanish literature, Lope de Vega and Cervantes being the other two. He is also a great name in the universal realm of letters, though out of Spain he is little more than a great name, except in Germany, that land so hospitable to famous wits, and where, to readers and critics of a mystical and transcendental turn, his peculiar genius strongly commended him. To form a notion of what manner of man Calderon was, we must imagine a writer hardly inferior to Shakespeare in fertility of invention and dramatic insight, inspired by a religious fervour like that of Doune or Crashaw, and endowed with the wild and ethereal imagination of Shelley. But the religious fervour is Catholic, not Protestant, Southern, not Northern: it is intense, mystical, and ecstatic: like a tongue of upward-darting flame, it burns and trembles with impassioned impulse to mingle with empyrean fire. The imagination, too, is not merely southern, but with an oriental element shining through it, like the ruddy heart of an opal". . .
"But our purpose is not to speak of Calderon, but of his translator Mr. MacCarthy; and to make our readers acquainted with his very successful effort to reproduce in English some of the most characteristic productions of the genius of Spain, retaining even one of the peculiarities in the structure of the verse which has hardly ever been transplanted from the soil of the peninsula". . . .
"Mr. MacCarthy's translations strike us as among the most successful experiments which have been made to represent in our language the characteristic beauties of the finest productions of other nations. They are sufficiently faithful, as may be readily seen by the Spanish scholar, as the translator has the courage to print the original and his version side by side. The rich, imaginative passages of Calderon are reproduced in language of such grace and flexibility as shows in Mr. MacCarthy no inconsiderable amount of poetical power. The measures of Calderon are retained; the rhymed passages are translated into rhyme, and what is more noticeable still, Mr. MacCarthy has done what no writer in English has ever before essayed, except to a very limited extent—he has copied the asonantes of the original". . . .
"We take leave of Mr. MacCarthy with hearty acknowledgments for the pleasure we have had in reading his excellent translations, which have given us a sense of Calderon's various and brilliant genius such as we never before had, and no analysis of his dramas, however full and careful, could bestow".
From a Review of "Love the Greatest Enchantment", etc., in the "New York Tablet", July 19, 1862, written by the gifted and ill-fated Hon. Thomas D'Arcy M'Gee, of Montreal.
"This beautiful volume before us—like virtue's self, fair within and without—is Mr. Mac-Carthy's second contribution to the Herculean task which Longfellow cheers him on to continue—the translation into English of the complete works of Calderon. Two experimental volumes, containing six dramas of the same author, appeared in 1853, winning the well-merited encomium of every person of true taste into whose hands they happened to fall. The Translator was encouraged, if not by the general chorus of popular applause, by the precious and emphatic approbation of those best entitled by knowledge and accomplishments to pronounce judgment. So here, after an interval of seven years, we have right worthily presented to us three of those famous Autos, which for two centuries drew together all the multitude of the Madrilenos, on the annual return of the great feast of Corpus Christi. On that same self-same festival, in a northern land, under a gray and clouded sky, in the heart of a city most unlike gay, garden-hued, out-of-door Madrid, we have spent the long hours over these resurrected dramas, and the spell of both the poets is still upon us, as we unite together, in dutiful juxtaposition, the names of Calderon and Mac-Carthy.
"How richly gifted was this Spanish priest-poet! this pious playwright! this moral mechanist! this devout dramatist! How rare his experience! how broad the contrasts of his career, and of his observation. . . . . Happy poet! blessed with such fecundity! Happy Christian! blessed with such fidelity to the divine teachings of the Cross. . . .
"Very highly do we reverence Calderon, and very highly value his translator; yet, if it be not presumptuous to say so, we venture to suggest that Mac-Carthy might find nearer home another work still worthier of his genius than these translations. Now that he has got the imperial ear by bringing his costly wares from afar, are there not laurels to be gathered as well in Ireland as in Spain? The author of 'The Bell-Founder', of 'St. Brendan's Voyage', of 'The Foray of Con O'Donnell', and 'The Pillar Towers', needs no prompting to discern what abundant materials for a new department of English poetry are to be found almost unused on Irish ground. May we not hope that in that field or forest he may find his appointed work, adding to the glory of first worthily introducing Calderon to the English readers of this century, the still higher glory of doing for the neglected history of his fatherland what he has chivalrously done for the illustrious Spaniard".