Den fjerde: Læs Testamentet; vi ville høre det, Antonius! Du maae læse Testamentet for os, Cæsars Testament!
Antonius: Ville i være rolige? Ville I bie lidt? Jeg er gaaen for vidt at jeg har sagt Eder noget derom—jeg frygter jeg fornærmer de hederlige Mænd, som have myrdet Cæsar—jeg befrygter det.
Den Fjerde: De vare Forrædere!—ha, hederlige Mænd!
The translation continues to the point where the plebeians, roused to fury by the cunning appeal of Antony, rush out with the cries:[I.2]
2. Pleb: Go fetch fire!
3. Pleb: Plucke down Benches!
2. Pleb: Plucke down Formes, Windowes, anything.
But we have not space for a more extended quotation, and the passage given is sufficiently representative.
The faults are obvious. The translator has not ventured to reproduce Shakespeare's blank verse, nor, indeed, could that be expected. The Alexandrine had long held sway in Danish poetry. In Rolf Krage (1770), Ewald had broken with the tradition and written an heroic tragedy in prose. Unquestionably he had been moved to take this step by the example of his great model Klopstock in Bardiete.[I.3] It seems equally certain, however, that he was also inspired by the plays of Shakespeare, and the songs of Ossian, which came to him in the translations of Wieland.[I.4]
A few years later, when he had learned English and read Shakespeare in the original, he wrote Balders Død in blank verse and naturalized Shakespeare's metre in Denmark.[I.5] At any rate, it is not surprising that this unknown plodder far north in Trondhjem had not progressed beyond Klopstock and Ewald. But the result of turning Shakespeare's poetry into the journeyman prose of a foreign language is necessarily bad. The translation before us amounts to a paraphrase,—good, respectable Danish untouched by genius. Two examples will illustrate this. The lines: