When the fragments of Petronius made a great noise in the literary world, Meibomius, an erudit of Lubeck, read in a letter from another learned scholar from Bologna, "We have here an entire Petronius; I saw it with mine own eyes, and with admiration." Meibomius in post-haste is on the road, arrives at Bologna, and immediately inquires for the librarian Capponi. He inquires if it were true that they had at Bologna an entire Petronius? Capponi assures him that it was a thing which had long been public. "Can I see this Petronius? Let me examine it!"—"Certainly," replies Capponi, and leads our erudit of Lubeck to the church where reposes the body of St. Petronius. Meibomius bites his lips, calls for his chaise, and takes his flight.
A French translator, when he came to a passage of Swift, in which it is said that the Duke of Marlborough broke an officer; not being acquainted with this Anglicism, he translated it roué, broke on a wheel!
Cibber's play of "Love's Last Shift" was entitled "La Dernière Chemise de l'Amour." A French writer of Congreve's life has taken his Mourning for a Morning Bride, and translated it L'Espouse du Matin.
Sir John Pringle mentions his having cured a soldier by the use of two quarts of Dog and Duck water daily: a French translator specifies it as an excellent broth made of a duck and a dog! In a recent catalogue compiled by a French writer of Works on Natural History, he has inserted the well-known "Essay on Irish Bulls" by the Edgeworths. The proof, if it required any, that a Frenchman cannot understand the idiomatic style of Shakspeare appears in a French translator, who prided himself on giving a verbal translation of our great poet, not approving of Le Tourneur's paraphrastical version. He found in the celebrated speech of Northumberland in Henry IV.
Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone—
which he renders "Ainsi douleur! va-t'en!"
The Abbé Gregoire affords another striking proof of the errors to which foreigners are liable when they decide on the language and customs of another country. The Abbé, in the excess of his philanthropy, to show to what dishonourable offices human nature is degraded, acquaints us that at London he observed a sign-board, proclaiming the master as tueur des punaises de sa majesté! Bug-destroyer to his majesty! This is, no doubt, the honest Mr. Tiffin, in the Strand; and the idea which must have occurred to the good Abbé was, that his majesty's bugs were hunted by the said destroyer, and taken by hand—and thus human nature was degraded!
A French writer translates the Latin title of a treatise of Philo-Judæus Omnis bonus liber est, Every good man is a free man, by Tout livre est bon. It was well for him, observes Jortin, that he did not live within the reach of the Inquisition, which might have taken this as a reflection on the Index Expurgatorius.
An English translator turned "Dieu défend l'adultère" into "God defends adultery."—Guthrie, in his translation of Du Halde, has "the twenty-sixth day of the new moon." The whole age of the moon is but twenty-eight days. The blunder arose from his mistaking the word neuvième (ninth) for nouvelle or neuve (new).
The facetious Tom Brown committed a strange blunder in his translation of Gelli's Circe. The word Starne, not aware of its signification, he boldly rendered stares, probably from the similitude of sound; the succeeding translator more correctly discovered Starne to be red-legged partridges!