The great distinction which we have observed in these remarks on Translation, between compositions in Prose and Verse, seems here to demand from us some remarks. A question of the very highest importance in literature arises—can the Fictitious which the poet relates in Verse be as well related in Prose? The voice of all ages, countries, languages, answers—NO! The literature of every civilized nation presents this phenomenon—a division broad and deep, running through it, and marked by that distinction in the musical structure of discourse, which we habitually designate by the names, Prose and Verse. The distinction, as we all know, is as decided in the substance itself of the composition, as it is in the musical putting together of the words. Homer, Pindar, Alcæus, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, or Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, upon the one side; and upon the other, Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato, and the Stagyrite—or under another still fortunate sky, Livy, Cæsar, Tacitus, Cicero and Seneca—here bare names of the poets on the one side, of the writers of prose on the other, express alike to our soberest judgment, and to our most awakened enthusiasm, nothing less than two distinct Worlds of Thinking.
How so commanding, so permeating, so vivifying, and so transfusing a power should reside in a fact of human speech, seemingly so slight and slender as that ruled and mechanical adjustment of a few syllables which we call a verse, is perhaps not explicable by our philosophy; but of the power itself, the uniform history of mankind leaves us no liberty to doubt. Yet may we understand something of this wonderful agency; and conceive how the new and strange wealth of music brought out from words, of which the speaker in verse finds himself the privileged master, may lift up, as on wings, his courage to think and utter. We may suppose that the sweet and melting, or the solemn, the prolonged, the proud swell, or flow, or fall of his own numbers, may surprise his own ear, and seize his own soul with unexpected emotions; and that off his guard and unawares, and, as grave ancient writers have said, in a sort of sacred madness, he may be hurried into inventions of greatness, of wonder, and beauty, which would have remained for ever locked up and forbidden to the colder and more reserved temper, which seems fittingly to accompany prose, the accustomed language of Reason. Versification is Measure, and it is Harmony. If you hear the measure you listen expectantly, and there is a recurring pleasure in the fulfilment of that expectation. But the pleasure thus afforded would soon be exhausted, did not the power of Harmony tell. That is a musical pleasure which cannot be exhausted. Here, then, is a reason why the natural music of speech shall be elaborated to its height in verse. You assume that the mind of the orator, the historian, the philosopher, is given up wholly to the truth of his matter. Therefore in him the palpable study of harmonious periods (as in Isocrates) impairs your confidence in his earnestness and sincerity. Not so, we venture to say, in the case of the poet. In his composition the very law of the verse instals the sound in a sort of mysterious sovereignty over the sense. He hurries or he protracts—he swells notes as of an organ, he attenuates them as of a flute. He seeks in the sound of words their power—and their power is great—to paint notions and things—to imitate the twanging of a bow, the hissing of an arrow, the roaring of the winds, the weltering of the waves. His verse laughs with merriment, and wails with sorrow; and that, which would in a grave writer of prose be frivolous, be sonorous trifles, crowns his muse with praise. Consequences follow, deeply penetrating into the substance of the whole composition, which is thus delivered up, in a manner unknown to prose, to the wonder-working power of a delighted inspiration.
We know if any one begins to recite a passage of Milton, that we expect to hear a charm of sound which we never for a moment dream of hearing in prose—a new and a more beautiful speech. For having made one mode of speech more musical than another, we have placed it more immediately under the dominion of the faculty by which we are cognizant of beauty. Accordingly we feel, and know, and universally admit, although Eloquence is musical, that Poetry far excels Eloquence in its alliance with the beautiful. Music is beauty, addressing itself to the sense of hearing, and therefore the beautiful is showered upon poetry, and therein everlastingly enshrined. Verse, then, is a language seized upon by the soul gratifying itself in the indulgence of its own emotions, under a law of beauty. Thus we have seen a power introduced into human discourse, by a cause that hardly promised such wonderful effects. A modulation of sounds, a musical rising, and falling, and flowing, fitted for expressing a fervour, a boldness, an enthusiasm in the thinking, suddenly transforms the whole character of composition, creates or infuses a new spirit of thought. A kind of literature is produced, of a peculiar, and that the highest order—Poetry. We have seen this take many beautiful, august, and imposing forms—the majesty of the Epopeia—the pathetic energy of the Tragic Drama—the rapturous exaltation and prodigal splendour of the Lyrical Ode. The names of the species recal the names of the great works belonging to each, and of the great masters whose memory the works have made immortal. Those masters of the divine art thus breathing delight, are numbered among the loftiest and most powerful spirits. Nations, illustrious in peace and war, heroic in character and action, founders of stable and flourishing republics and empires, have set on the front of their renown the fame of having produced this or that other glorious poem. What wonder, since the poet, in forms given by imagination, embodies the profoundest, the loftiest, the tenderest, the innermost acts and movements of that soul which lives in every human bosom? What wonder if each of us loves the poet, when in his work, as in a celestial mirror, each of us beholds himself naturally and truly pictured, and yet ennobled? What wonder if the nation, proud of itself, of its position, and of its memories, exalts its own darling son of song, who may have fixed, in a precious throng of imperishable words, the peculiar spirit of thinking, of loving, of daring, which has made the nation what it has been, is, and hopes long to be? What wonder if humankind, when mighty ages have departed, and languages once cultivated in their beauty, have ceased from being spoken, should bring across lands and seas crowns of undying laurels to cast at the feet of some awful poet who cannot die? In whose true, capacious, and prophetic mind, the coming civilization of his own people was long beforehand anticipated and predisposed? And in whose antique verse we, the offspring of other ages, and tongues, and races, drink still the freshly-flowing and ever-living waters of original and unexhausted humanity?
Oh! how shall such strains as these, in which each single word and syllable has in itself a spell, more potent by its position, survive, in undiminished force and beauty, the art that would fain spirit them away out of one language, which they have breathed all life long, into another which they have to learn to love? Lived there ever such a magician? Never.
There is reason for sadness in the above little paragraph. But after due rumination, let us forget it, and proceed. Hear Dryden prosing away upon paraphrase, and metaphrase, and imitation, in his very best style.
"All translation, I suppose, may be reduced to these three heads—First, that of metaphrase, or turning an author, word by word, and line by line, from one language into another. Thus, or near this manner, was Horace his Art of Poetry translated by Ben Jonson. The second way is that of paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense; and that, too, is admitted to be amplified, but not altered. Such is Mr Waller's translation of Virgil's fourth Æneid. The third way is that of imitation, where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion, and taking only some general hints from the original, to run divisions on the ground-work as he pleases. Such is Mr Cowley's practice in turning two odes of Pindar, and one of Horace, into English.
"Concerning the first of these methods, our master, Horace, has given us this caution—
'Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres'———
'Nor word for word too faithfully translate,'
as the Earl of Roscommon has excellently rendered it. 'Too faithfully is, indeed, pedantically.' It is a faith like that which proceeds from superstition, blind and zealous. Take it in the expression of Sir John Denham to Sir Richard Fanshaw, on his version of the Pastor Fido—
'That servile path thou nobly dost decline,
Of tracing word by word, and line by line:
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,
To make translations, and translators too;
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.'