To cure this soul-tormenting pain,
That owns no other remedy
Than madness, death, inconstancy.
“The torments then that I endure—no mortal remedy can cure.” Who ever heard of a mortal remedy? or who could expect to be cured by it? In the next line, the epithet of languid is injudiciously given to Hope in this place; for a languid or a languishing hope was already dying, and needed not so powerful a host of murderers to slay it, as Absence, Jealousy, and Disdain.—In short, the latter translation appears to me to be on the whole of much inferior merit to the former. I have remarked, that Motteux excels his rival chiefly in the translation of those poems that are of a graver cast. But perhaps he is censurable for having thrown too much gravity into the poems that are interspersed in this work, as Smollet is blameable on the opposite account, of having given them too much the air of burlesque. In the song which Don Quixote composed while he was doing penance in the Sierra-Morena, beginning Arboles, Yerbas y Plantas, every stanza of which ends with Del Toboso, the author intended, that the composition should be quite characteristic of its author, a ludicrous compound of gravity and absurdity. In the translation of Motteux there is perhaps too much gravity; but Smollet has rendered the composition altogether burlesque. The same remark is applicable to the song of Antonio, beginning Yo sé, Olalla, que me adoras, and to many of the other poems.
On the whole, I am inclined to think, that the version of Motteux is by far the best we have yet seen of the Romance of Cervantes; and that if corrected in its licentious abbreviations and enlargements, and in some other particulars which I have noticed in the course of this comparison, we should have nothing to desire superior to it in the way of translation.
CHAPTER XIII
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPOSITION, WHICH RENDER TRANSLATION DIFFICULT.—ANTIQUATED TERMS—NEW TERMS—VERBA ARDENTIA.—SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION—IN PROSE—IN POETRY.—NAÏVETÉ IN THE LATTER.—CHAULIEU—PARNELL—LA FONTAINE.—SERIES OF MINUTE DISTINCTIONS MARKED BY CHARACTERISTIC TERMS.—STRADA.—FLORID STYLE AND VAGUE EXPRESSION.—PLINY’S NATURAL HISTORY.
In the two preceding chapters I have treated pretty fully of what I have considered as a principal difficulty in translation, the permutation of idioms. I shall in this chapter touch upon several other characteristics of composition, which, in proportion as they are found in original works, serve greatly to enhance the difficulty of doing complete justice to them in a translation.
1. The poets, in all languages, have a licence peculiar to themselves, of employing a mode of expression very remote from the diction of prose, and still more from that of ordinary speech. Under this licence, it is customary for them to use antiquated terms, to invent new ones, and to employ a glowing and rapturous phraseology, or what Cicero terms Verba ardentia. To do justice to these peculiarities in a translation, by adopting similar terms and phrases, will be found extremely difficult; yet, without such assimilation, the translation presents no just copy of the original. It would require no ordinary skill to transfuse into another language the thoughts of the following passages, in a similar species of phraseology: