A most entertaining volume might be made from the amusing and often absurd blunders perpetrated by translators. For instance, Miss Cooper tells us that the person who first rendered her father’s novel, “The Spy,” into the French tongue, among other mistakes, made the following:—Readers of the Revolutionary romance will remember that the residence of the Wharton family was called “The Locusts.” The translator referred to his dictionary, and found the rendering of the word to be Les Sauterelles, “The Grasshoppers.” But when he found one of the dragoons represented as tying his horse to one of the locusts on the lawn, it would appear as if he might have been at fault. Nothing daunted, however, but taking it for granted that American grasshoppers must be of gigantic dimensions, he gravely informs his readers that the cavalryman secured his charger by fastening the bridle to one of the grasshoppers before the door, apparently standing there for that purpose.
Much laughter has deservedly been raised at French littérateurs who professed to be “doctus utriusque linguæ.” Cibber’s play of “Love’s Last Shift” was translated by a Frenchman who spoke “Inglees” as “Le Dernière Chemise de l’Amour;” Congreve’s “Mourning Bride,” by another, as “L’Epouse du Matin;” and a French scholar recently included among his catalogue of works on natural history the essay on “Irish Bulls,” by the Edgeworths. Jules Janin, the great critic, in his translation of “Macbeth,” renders “Out, out, brief candle!” as “Sortez, chandelle.” And another, who traduced Shakspeare, commits an equally amusing blunder in rendering Northumberland’s famous speech in “Henry IV.” In the passage
“Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone.”
the words italicized are rendered, “ainsi douleur! va-t’en!”—“so grief, be off with you!” Voltaire did no better with his translations of several of Shakspeare’s plays; in one of which the “myriad-minded” makes a character renounce all claim to a doubtful inheritance, with an avowed resolution to carve for himself a fortune with his sword. Voltaire put it in French, which, retranslated, reads, “What care I for lands? With my sword I will make a fortune cutting meat.”
The late centennial celebration of Shakspeare’s birthday in England called forth numerous publications relating to the works and times of the immortal dramatist. Among them was a new translation of “Hamlet,” by the Chevalier de Chatelain, who also translated Halleck’s “Alnwick Castle,” “Burns,” and “Marco Bozzaris.” Our readers are, of course, familiar with the following lines:—
“How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! Oh, fie! ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank, and gross in nature,