Seaward: An Elegy on the Death of Thomas William Parsons

by Richard Hovey

"The dead sleepers of the vulgar track,"

and commercial greatness smacked ever of the Philistine. He would probably have been as uncomfortable in Athens as in Boston; and while he could love Venice dead, Venice living (where, as so often in history, Trade and Art went out hand in hand, conquering and to conquer) would have been as distasteful as Chicago. It is true that the traders of Athens and the Adriatic braved great personal dangers, and brought back from their voyages strange and gorgeous fabrics, "barbaric pearl and gold," and tales of incredible adventure in the unknown world. Our modern conquests, in commerce as in science, with some notable exceptions, are of a more impalpable kind, and make no such sensuous appeal to the imagination. And so, for some, the circumnavigation of the globe has ended all romance, even though the unknown be still as mysteriously present in New York as in the "shining vales of Har."

The risk and the imagination involved in modern achievement are enormous, and even the element of personal danger is by no means eliminated; and if there were vulgar things in the conquest of California, I doubt not there were also vulgar things, more nearly of the same kind than we are apt to think, in the conquest of Gaul. But anybody can see the vulgarity. It is the poet's function to show that this is a mere accident, and that the essential reality still throbs as ever with a lyric rapture; that

"in the mud and scum of things
There's something ever, ever sings."

Few poets, indeed, have been completely catholic of insight, nor do they necessarily lose their title of interpreters because they are not universal interpreters, and limit themselves to the field or fields for which they have a spontaneous sympathy. Parsons, even when he rationally approved, had no spontaneous sympathy for the present, its attitude or its tendencies. To sing of it, or to sing of the past with the voice of the present, his æsthetic instinct felt would be but a tour de force, and seldom and reluctantly was he persuaded to attempt it. Occasionally he poured his fine rhetoric into denunciation, written from the heart; but here, too, his artistic feeling stepped in and restrained him to brief utterance, for he knew well that scolding is not great nor dignified.

One thing there was that he saw clearly his way to do—to reproduce for this age the voice of the age which he did love, and of the poet for whom, even from boyhood, he cherished a devotion almost personal. In making this choice and following his instinct, I believe he was right, and that we have obtained a greater poem than we should have done had he forced himself into attempting a sustained work of his own. Nor is this a derogation in any way from Parsons's unquestioned poetic power, as any one who knows anything about the almost insuperable difficulties of translation is well aware. In fact, it may be said with perfect truth that a good translation is rarer than a good original poem. The successful transfer of even the briefest lyric from one language to another is an achievement so unusual as to demand the most unreserved commendation, while even the partly successful renderings of the great masters, in all languages, are so few that their names may be spoken in one breath.

Parsons's translation of the "Divine Comedy" is far from being a paraphrase of the original, but yet it makes no pretense to absolute literalness. Indeed, a truly literal translation is a linguistic impossibility. Over and above the merely metrical difficulties of such an undertaking, there must always be two classes of phenomena in which the two poems, the original and the version, will differ, and often very materially, from each other. The metrical scheme may be preserved, but the rhythmical filling in of this scheme must necessarily vary; for the syllables of the corresponding words in different languages will almost certainly have different time values. In one they may have many consonants, and be perforce slow in articulation; in the other they may consist entirely of short vowels and tripping liquids. The predominance of short syllables in Italian enabled Dante to use feet of three or more syllables in an iambic measure with much greater frequency than would be possible in English, and this fact alters wholly the character of a measure of which the metrical scheme is the same in both languages. It is, of course, so evident as hardly to warrant allusion that the sounds themselves cannot be the same; and yet their expression as mere sounds is a very vital factor in their poetic force.

The other class of phenomena in which an original and its translation must always differ is not acoustic, but linguistic. As I have had occasion to say elsewhere, "words differ in what, for lack of a better word, we must call color. With the possible exception of Volapük, in which, for this very reason, no one but a statistician would ever think of writing poetry, there is no language in existence in which the words are merely conventional symbols of the ideas for which they stand. Every word we speak has a pedigree that goes back to Adam. It has been developing into what it now is, through uncounted accretions and curtailments and transformations, ever since man was, and, since Professor Garner's experiments with monkeys, we may suspect even a little longer; and in the course of that long, eventful history it has gathered to itself a multitude of little associations which, without presenting themselves directly to the understanding, modify, enrich and color the effect of the primary meaning, like the overtones of a musical note. Without this colorific value of words, we could express little more by speech than by the symbols of algebra. This is the chief difficulty of the translator, and one that he can never surmount."

Prose translations of what in the original was verse vary, of course, from that original in even more respects, since they deliberately sacrifice an entire group of expressional devices which formed an important part of the poet's intention. An argument may be made for the use of prose in translating the poetry of the ancients, for their versification differed from ours in a radical manner. But there can be no excuse for an English prose version of a poem written in any modern European language, if it be intended for more than an assistance in the study of the original. Admirable as the workmanship in some of our prose versions of Dante has been, I cannot but think that, except for some such scholarly purpose, the labor and the skill expended upon them have been misapplied.

At the opposite extreme from the prose versions are those that have been made into terza rima. It cannot be denied that the use of Dante's own arrangement of rhymes is an advantage, nor that Dante himself laid much stress upon it. But he had mystical reasons for doing so that are not of great consequence to us now, and Parsons's translation, while preserving, in common with the versions in terza rima and with those in blank verse, the meter of the original (the iambic pentameter), loses but little of the effect of the rhyme structure. His quatrains, by the liberal use of run-on lines and the occasional introduction of a third rhyme, achieve that effect of continuity which is the most distinguishing characteristic of the original. I venture to think that almost no one, even among poets, would be able to tell whether the complex rhyme system of the terza rima were exactly carried out in any poem to the reading aloud of which he should listen for pure enjoyment, and without special effort to observe that particular phenomenon. Still, however slight the advantage be, it is nevertheless an advantage to have preserved the terza rima; but this gain is more than overcome by the Dantesque quality of the style in Parsons's version. The manner of the others often suggests the contemporaries of Dante, rather than Dante himself.