Want of space compels us to leave many other passages, which we had marked for comment, unnoticed. We are surprised that Mr. Hazlitt, (see his Introduction to “Vittoria Corombona,”) in undertaking to give us some information concerning the Dukedom and Castle of Bracciano, should uniformly spell it Brachiano. Shakespeare’s Petruchio might have put him on his guard. We should be glad also to know in what part of Italy he places Malfi.
Mr. Hazlitt’s General Introduction supplies us with no new information, but this was hardly to be expected where Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We wish that he had been able to give us better means of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John Websters one from the other, for we think the internal evidence is enough to show that all the plays attributed to the author of the “Duchess” and “Vittoria” could not have been written by the same person. On the whole, he has given us a very respectable, and certainly a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet.
We could almost forgive all other shortcomings of Mr. Smith’s library for the great gift it brings us in the five volumes of Chapman’s translations. Coleridge, sending Chapman’s Homer to Wordsworth, writes, “What is stupidly said of Shakespeare is really true and appropriate of Chapman; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties.... It is as truly an original poem as the Faery Queene;—it will give you small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope’s epigrams, or Cowper’s cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet,—as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and beauty of language, all over spirit and feeling.”[28] From a passage of his Preface it would appear that Chapman had been criticised pretty sharply in his own day for amplifying his author. “And this one example I thought necessary to insert here to show my detractors that they have no reason to vilify my circumlocution sometimes, when their most approved Grecians, Homer’s interpreters generally, hold him fit to be so converted. Yet how much I differ, and with what authority, let my impartial and judicial reader judge. Always conceiving how pedantical and absurd an affectation it is in the interpretation of any author (much more of Homer) to turn him word for word, when (according to Horace and other best lawgivers to translators) it is the part of every knowing and judicial interpreter not to follow the number and order of words, but the material things themselves, and sentences to weigh diligently, and to clothe and adorn them with words and such a style and form of oration as are most apt for the language in which they are converted.” Again in his verses To the Reader, he speaks of
“The ample transmigration to be shown
By nature-loving Poesy,”
and defends his own use of “needful periphrases,” and says that “word for word” translation is to
“Make fish with fowl, camels with whales, engender.”
“For even as different a production
Ask Greek and English: since, as they in sounds
And letters shun one form and unison,
So have their sense and elegancy bounds
In their distinguished natures, and require
Only a judgment to make both consent
In sense and elocution.”
There are two theories of translation,—literal paraphrase and free reproduction. At best, the translation of poetry is but an imitation of natural flowers in cambric or wax; and however much of likeness there may be, the aroma, whose charm of indefinable suggestion in the association of ideas is so powerful, is precisely what is lost irretrievably. From where it lurked in the immortal verse, a presence divined rather than ascertained, baffling the ear which it enchanted, escaping the grasp which yet it thrilled, airy, evanescent, imperishable, beckoning the imagination with promises better than any fulfilment,
“The parting genius is with sighing sent.”
The paraphrase is a plaster-cast of the Grecian urn; the reproduction, if by a man of genius, is like Keats’s ode, which makes the figures move and the leaves tremble again, if not with the old life, with a sorcery which deceives the fancy. Of all English poets, Keats was the one to have translated Homer.