"No man is capable of translating poetry, who, besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author's language and of his own; nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers. When we are come thus far it is time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his, to give his thought either the same turn, if our tongue will bear it, or, if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance. The like care must be taken of the more outward ornaments—the words. When they appear (which is but seldom) literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But, since every language is so full of its own proprieties, that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words; it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense. I suppose he may stretch his chain to such a latitude, but, by innovation of thoughts, methinks he breaks it. By this means the spirit of an author may be transfused, and yet not lost; and thus it is plain that the reason alleged by Sir John Denham has no further force than the expression; for thought, if it be translated truly, cannot be lost in another language; but the words that convey it to our apprehension (which are the image and ornament of that thought) may be so ill chosen, as to make it appear in an unhandsome dress, and rob it of its native lustre. There is, therefore, a liberty to be allowed for the expression; neither is it necessary that words and lines should be confined to the measure of the original. The sense of an author, generally speaking, is to be sacred and inviolable. If the fancy of Ovid be luxuriant it is his character to be so; and if I retrench it he is no longer Ovid. It will be replied, that he receives advantage by this lopping of his superfluous branches, but I rejoin that a translator has no such right. When a painter copies from the life, I suppose he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments, under pretence that his picture will look better: perhaps the face which he has drawn would be more exact if the eyes and nose were altered; but it is his business to make it resemble the original. In two cases only there may a seeming difficulty arise; that is, if the thought be notoriously trivial or dishonest; but the same answer will serve for both, that then they ought not to be translated—
'Et qua
Desperes tractata nitescere posse, relinquas.'
"Thus I have ventured to give my opinion on this subject against the authority of two great men, but, I hope, without offence to either of their memories; for I both loved them living, and reverence them now they are dead. But if, after what I have urged, it be thought by better judges that the praise of a translation consists in adding new beauties to the piece, thereby to recompense the loss which it sustains by change of language, I shall be willing to be taught better, and recant. In the meantime, it seems to me that the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable, is not from the too close pursuing of the author's sense, but because that there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise, and so small encouragement, for so considerable a part of learning."
We could write a useful commentary on each paragraph of that lively dissertation. The positions laid down are not, in all their extent, tenable; and Dryden himself, in other places, advocates principles of Translation altogether different from these, and violates them in his practice by a thousand beauties as well as faults. We confine ourselves to one or two remarks.
Dryden, in assigning the qualifications of a poetical Translator, seems to speak with due caution—"He must have a genius to the art." How much, then, of the powers are asked in him which go to making the original poet? Not the great creative genius. In order effectively to translating the Song of Achilles, he need not have been able to invent the character of Achilles, or to delineate it, if he found it, as Homer might largely, invented in tradition to his hands. But he must be the adequate critic of the Song full and whole. He must feel the Achilles whom Homer has given him, through chilling blood, and thrilling nerve, and almost through shivering, shuddering bone. Neither need he be, inverse and word possibly, the creator for thoughts of his own. That Homer is. He is not called upon to be, in his own strength, an audacious, impetuous, majestic, and magnanimous thinker. It is enough if he have the sensibility, the simplicity, the sincerity, the sympathy, and the intellectual capacity, to become all this, on the strength of another. But if he could not create the thoughts, neither could he, upon his own behalf, create the verbal and metrical expression of the thoughts; for in these last is the inspiration that brings into the light of existence both words and music. Yet nothing seems to hinder, but that if endowed for perfectly accepting and appropriating the thoughts, he may then become in secondary place inspired, and a creator for the "new utterance." In all our observation of the various constitutions bestowed, in different men, upon the common human mind, nothing appears to forbid that an exquisite and mastering faculty of language, such as shall place the wealth of a mother-tongue at command, and an exquisite ear and talent for melodious and significant numbers, may be lodged in a spirit that is not gifted with original invention. Much rather, the recognition of the compensating and separable way in which faculties are dealt, would lead us to look from time to time, for children of the Muse gifted for supereminent Translators. Do we not see engravers, not themselves exalted and accomplished masters, who yet absorb into their transcript the soul of the master? Dryden's phrase, "have a genius," seems to express this qualified gifting—the enthusiasm, and the narrower creative faculty excellently given, and kept alive and active by cultivation and exercise.
Hoole's Orlando Furioso, and Jerusalem Delivered, are among the world's duller achievements in the art of Translation. They have obtained some favour of public opinion by the interest which will break through them, and which they in their unambitious way singularly attest—the interest of the matter. What is the native deficiency which extinguishes in them every glimmer of the original Style? The clerk at the India-House, or some other house, had not, in the moulding of heart or brain, any touch of the romantic. And Ariosto and Tasso are the two poets of Romance. Take a translator of no higher intellectual endowment than Mr Hoole—perform some unknown adjuration to the goddess Nature, which shall move her to infuse into him the species of sensibility which grounds the two poems, and which we have said that we desiderate in the bold Accountant,—read the poems through with him, taking care that he understands them—as far as a matter of the sort may be seen to, teach him, which is all fair, a trick or two of our English verse to relieve the terrible couplet monotony—run an eye over the MS. on its way to the printer, and he shall have enriched the literature of his country with, if not two rightly representative, yet too justifiable Translations.
Dryden's defence of the manner in which Pindar has been made to speak English by Cowley, cannot be sustained. A translator must give the meaning of his author so as that they who are scholars in the vernacular only—for to the unread and uncultivated he does not address himself—may be as nearly as possible so impressed and affected as scholars in the original tongue are by the author; or, soaring a little more ambitiously, as nearly as may be as they were affected to whom the original work was native. To Anglicize Pindar is not the adventure. It is to Hellenize an English reader. Homer is not dyed in Grecism as Pindar is. The profound, universal, overpowering humanity of Homer makes him of the soil everywhere. The boundaries of nations, and of races, fade out and vanish. He and we are of the family—of the brotherhood—Man. That is all that we feel and know. The manners are a little gone by. That is all the difference. We read an ancestral chronicle, rather than the diary of to-day. But Pindar is all Greek—Greek to the backbone. There the stately and splendid mythology stands in its own power—not allied to us by infused human blood—but estranged from us in a dazling, divine glory. The great theological poet of Greece, the hymnist of her deities, remembers, in celebrating athlete and charioteer, his grave and superior function. To hear Pindar in English, you must open your wings, and away to the field of Elis, or the Isthmian strand. Under the canopying smoke of London or Edinburgh, even amongst the beautiful fields of England or Scotland, there is nothing to be made of him. You must be a Greek among Greeks.
Therefore, in the Translator, no condescension to our ignorance at least. And no ignoble dread of our ignorant prejudices. The difficult connexion of the thoughts which Dryden duly allows to the foreign and ancient poet, a commentary might clear, where it does as much for the reader of the Greek; or sometimes, possibly, a word interpolated might help. But the difficulty of translating Pindar is quite distinct from his obscurity. For it is his light. It is the super-terrestrial splendour of the lyrical phraseology which satisfied the Greek imagination, lifted into transport by the ardour, joy, and triumph, of those Panhellenic Games. It is the simple, yet dignified strength of the short, pithy, sage Sentences. It is the rendering of the now bold and abrupt, now enchained sequences of expressive sound, in those measures which we hardly yet know how to scan. It is not the track but the wing of the Theban eagle that is the desperation.
It is always delightful to hear Dryden speaking of Cowley. He was indeed a man made to be loved. But to students in the divine art, his poetry will for ever remain the great puzzle. His "Pindarque Odes, written in imitation of the style and manner of the Odes of Pindar," are unique. Cowley was a scholar. In Latin verse he is one of the greatest among the modern masters; and he had much Greek. There can be no doubt that he could construe Pindar—none that he could have understood him—had he tried to do so. "If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another." Instead, therefore, of translating him word for word, "the ingenious Cowley" set about imitating his style and manner, and that he thought might best be effected by changing his measures, and discarding almost all his words, except the proper names, to which he added many others of person or place, illustrious at the time, or in tradition. Events and exploits brought vividly back by Pindar to the memory of listeners, to whom a word sufficed, are descanted on by Cowley in explanatory strains, often unintelligible to all living men. The two opening lies of his first Imitation characterize his muse.
"Queen of all harmonious things,
Dancing words, and speaking things."