In one of Pliny’s Epistles, speaking of Regulus, he says, Ut ipse mihi dixerit quum consuleret, quam citò sestertium sexcenties impleturus esset, invenisse se exta duplicata, quibus portendi millies et ducenties habiturum (Plin. Ep. l. 2, ep. 20). Thus translated by Melmoth, “That he once told me, upon consulting the omens, to know how soon he should be worth sixty millions of sesterces, he found them so favourable to him as to portend that he should possess double that sum.” Here a material part of the original idea is omitted; no less than that very circumstance upon which the omen turned, viz., that the entrails of the victim were double.
Analogous to this liberty of adding to or retrenching from the ideas of the original, is the liberty which a translator may take of correcting what appears to him a careless or inaccurate expression of the original, where that inaccuracy seems materially to affect the sense. Tacitus says, when Tiberius was entreated to take upon him the government of the empire, Ille variè disserebat, de magnitudine imperii, suâ modestiâ (An. l. 1, c. 11). Here the word modestiâ is improperly applied. The author could not mean to say, that Tiberius discoursed to the people about his own modesty. He wished that his discourse should seem to proceed from modesty; but he did not talk to them about his modesty. D’Alembert saw this impropriety, and he has therefore well translated the passage: “Il répondit par des discours généraux sur son peu de talent, et sur la grandeur de l’empire.”
A similar impropriety, not indeed affecting the sense, but offending against the dignity of the narrative, occurs in that passage where Tacitus relates, that Augustus, in the decline of life, after the death of Drusus, appointed his son Germanicus to the command of eight legions on the Rhine, At, hercule, Germanicum Druso ortum octo apud Rhenum legionibus imposuit (An. l. 1, c. 3). There was no occasion here for the historian swearing; and though, to render the passage with strict fidelity, an English translator must have said, “Augustus, Egad, gave Germanicus the son of Drusus the command of eight legions on the Rhine,” we cannot hesitate to say, that the simple fact is better announced without such embellishment.
CHAPTER IV
OF THE FREEDOM ALLOWED IN POETICAL TRANSLATION.—PROGRESS OF POETICAL TRANSLATION IN ENGLAND.—B. JONSON, HOLIDAY, SANDYS, FANSHAW, DRYDEN.—ROSCOMMON’S ESSAY ON TRANSLATED VERSE.—POPE’S HOMER.
In the preceding chapter, in treating of the liberty assumed by translators, of adding to, or retrenching from the ideas of the original, several examples have been given, where that liberty has been assumed with propriety both in prose composition and in poetry. In the latter, it is more peculiarly allowable. “I conceive it,” says Sir John Denham, “a vulgar error in translating poets, to affect being fidus interpres. Let that care be with them who deal in matters of fact or matters of faith; but whosoever aims at it in poetry, as he attempts what is not required, so shall he never perform what he attempts; for it is not his business alone to translate language into language, but poesie into poesie; and poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit is not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum” (Denham’s Preface to the second book of Virgil’s Æneid).
In poetical translation, the English writers of the 16th, and the greatest part of the 17th century, seem to have had no other care than (in Denham’s phrase) to translate language into language, and to have placed their whole merit in presenting a literal and servile transcript of their original.
Ben Jonson, in his translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry, has paid no attention to the judicious precept of the very poem he was translating: