In Dryden’s Lucian, “translated by several eminent hands,” this passage is thus translated: “Ah! Lord, Sir, I see you keep up your old merry humour still; you love dearly to rally and break a jest. Well, but have you got a noble supper for us, and plenty of delicious inspiring claret? Hark ye, Timon, I’ve got a virgin-song for ye, just new composed, and smells of the gamut: ’Twill make your heart dance within you, old boy. A very pretty she-player, I vow to Gad, that I have an interest in, taught it me this morning.”
There is both ease and spirit in this translation; but the licence which the translator has assumed, of superadding to the ideas of the original, is beyond all bounds.
An equal degree of judgement is requisite when the translator assumes the liberty of retrenching the ideas of the original.
After the fatal horse had been admitted within the walls of Troy, Virgil thus describes the coming on of that night which was to witness the destruction of the city:
Vertitur interea cœlum, et ruit oceano nox,
Involvens umbrâ magnâ terramque polumque,
Myrmidonumque dolos.
The principal effect attributed to the night in this description, and certainly the most interesting, is its concealment of the treachery of the Greeks. Add to this, the beauty which the picture acquires from this association of natural with moral effects. How inexcusable then must Mr. Dryden appear, who, in his translation, has suppressed the Myrmidonumque dolos altogether?
Mean time the rapid heav’ns roll’d down the light,