These are all genuine cases, but the <p 46>story of Lord Campbell and his criticism of Romeo and Juliet is almost too good to be true. It is said that when the future Lord Chancellor first came to London he went to the editor of the Morning Chronicle for some work. The editor sent him to the theatre. ``Plain John'' Campbell had no idea he was witnessing a play of Shakespeare, and he therefore set to work to sketch the plot of Romeo and Juliet, and to give the author a little wholesome advice. He recommended a curtailment in parts so as to render it more suitable to the taste of a cultivated audience. We can quite understand that if a story like this was once set into circulation it was not likely to be allowed to die by the many who were glad to have a laugh at the rising barrister.
CHAPTER III.
BLUNDERS OF TRANSLATORS.
THE blunders of translators are so common that they have been made to point a moral in popular proverbs. According to an Italian saying translators are traitors (``I traduttori sono traditori''); and books are said to be done into English, traduced in French, and overset in Dutch. Colton, the author of Lacon, mentions a half-starved German at Cambridge named Render, who had been long enough in England to forget German, but not long enough to learn English. This worthy, in spite of his deficiencies, was a voluminous translator of his native literature, and it became a proverbial saying among his intimates respecting a bad translation that it was Rendered into English.
The Comte de Tressan translated the <p 48>words ``capo basso'' (low headland) in a passage from Ariosto by ``Cap de Capo Basso,'' on account of which translation the wits insisted upon calling him ``Comte de Capo Basso.''
Robert Hall mentions a comical stumble made by one of the translators of Plato, who construed through the Latin and not direct from the Greek. In the Latin version hirundo stood as hir<u?>do, and the translator, overlooking the mark of contraction, declared to the astonished world on the authority of Plato that the horse- leech instead of the swallow was the harbinger of spring. Hoole, the translator of Tasso and Ariosto, was as confused in his natural history when he rendered ``I colubri Viscontei'' or Viscontian snakes, the crest of the Visconti family, as ``the Calabrian Viscounts.''
As strange as this is the Frenchman's notion of the presence of guns in the canons' seats: ``L'Archev<e^>que de Cantorbery avait fait placer des canons dans les stalles de la cath<e'>drale.'' He quite overlooked the word chanoines, which he should have used. This use of a word <p 49>similarly spelt is a constant source of trouble to the translator: for instance, a French translator of Scott's Bride of Lammermuir left the first word of the title untranslated, with the result that he made it the Bridle of Lammermuir, ``La Bride de Lammermuir.''
Thevenot in his travels refers to the fables of Damn<e'> et Calilve, meaning the Hitopodesa, or Pilpay's Fables. His translator calls them the fables of the damned Calilve. This is on a par with De Quincey's specimen of a French Abb<e'>'s Greek. Having to paraphrase the Greek words ``<gr 'Hrodotos kai iaxwn>'' (Herodotus even while Ionicizing), the Frenchman rendered them ``Herodote et aussi Jazon,'' thus creating a new author, one Jazon. In the Present State of Peru, a compilation from the Mercurio Peruano, P. Geronymo Roman de la Higuera is transformed into ``Father Geronymo, a Romance of La Higuera.''
In Robertson's History of Scotland the following passage is quoted from Melville's Account of John Knox: ``He was so active and vigorous a preacher that he was like <p 50>to ding the pulpit into blads and fly out of it.'' M. Campenon, the translator of Robertson into French, turns this into the startling statement that he broke his pulpit and leaped into the midst of his auditors. A good companion to this curious ``fact'' may be found in the extraordinary trope used by a translator of Busbequius, who says ``his misfortunes had reduced him to the top of all miseries.''
We all know how Victor Hugo transformed the Firth of Forth into the First of the Fourth, and then insisted that he was right; but this great novelist was in the habit of soaring far above the realm of fact, and in a work he brought out as an offering to the memory of Shakespeare he showed that his imagination carried him far away from historical facts. The author complains in this book that the muse of history cares more for the rulers than for the ruled, and, telling only what is pleasant, ignores the truth when it is unpalatable to kings. After an outburst of bombast he says that no history of England tells us that Charles II. murdered his brother the Duke of Gloucester. We should be sur<p 51>prised if any did do so, as that young man died of small-pox. Hugo, being totally ignorant of English history, seems to have confused the son of Charles I. with an earlier Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), and turned the assassin into the victim. After these blunders Dr. Baly's mention of the cannibals of Nova Scotia instead of New Caledonia in his translation of M<u:>ller's Elements of Physiology seems tame.