When after this we read in the Phèdre of Racine these four lines—
Je le vis, je rougis, je palis à sa vue,
Un trouble s’éleva dans mon âme éperdue;
Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler,
Je sentais tout mon cœur et transir et brûler:
we recognise their source. We recognise, also, if it were not already confessed, the source of this of Tennyson in his Fatima:
“Last night, when some one spoke his name,
From my swift blood, that went and came,
A thousand little shafts of flame
Were shivered in my narrow frame.”
If this physical perturbation seems strange to the more reticent man of northern blood, it was in no way strange to Theocritus, to Catullus, or to Lucretius. Once more, according to the German proverb, “he who would comprehend the poet must travel in the poet’s land.”
And here we are confronted with a supreme difficulty. While mere fact is readily translatable, and thought is approximately translatable, the literary quality, which is warm with the pressure and pulsation of a writer’s mood and rhythmic with his emotional state, is hopelessly untranslatable. It can be suggested, but it cannot be reproduced. The translation is too often like the bare, cold photograph of a scene of which the emotional effect is largely due to colour and atmosphere. The simpler and more direct the words of the original, the more impossible is translation. In the original the words, though simple and direct, are poetical, beautiful in quality and association. They contain in their own nature hints of pathos, sparks of fire, which any so-called synonym would lack. They are musical in themselves and musical in their combinations. They flow easily, sweetly, touchingly through the ear into the heart. The translator may seek high and low in his own language for words and combinations of the same timbre, the same ethical or emotional influence, the same gracious and touching music. He will generally seek in vain. In his own language there may exist words approximately answering in meaning, but, even if they are fairly simple and direct, they are often commonplace, sullied with “ignoble use,” harsh in sound, without distinction or charm. He may require a whole phrase to convey the same tone and effect; he becomes diffuse, where terseness is a special virtue of his original. Let a foreigner study to render this—
“Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.”
Or this——
“Take, O take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn!
But my kisses bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain.”
Is it to be imagined that he could create precisely the effect of either of these stanzas in French or Italian? Is not much of that effect inseparable from the words?