Dies Irae: in Thirteen Original Versions. By Abraham Coles, M.D. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1859. pp. xxxiv., 70.
It is pleasant to see how many wiles Nature employs to draw off into side channels the enthusiasm which is always secreting itself and gathering in the human brain. She knows what a dangerous clement it may become, if the individual rills of it run together, and, with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,—anything will serve the purpose. Divide et impera is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on some errand of his own, caring little what direction he takes, provided only it be the other. The Fifth-Monarchy men might have been troublesome, but for the Beast in Revelation;—each insisted on a Beast to himself. Protestantism might have become Democracy, had either Luther or Calvin been willing to ride behind. The five points of the Charter are blunted to a Lancashire weaver who is fattening a prize-gooseberry.
We sympathize heartily with such gentle enthusiasms as this of Dr. Coles. It is the interest of all Grub Street that men should be encouraged whose amiable weakness it is to fall in love with pieces of poetry. In this case, to be sure, the verses are Latin, and the author more nameless even than Junius; but who knows but some one's turn shall come next whose verses were at least meant to be English, and whose name is—Legion? If some translator, charged from the other pole of Dr. Coles's enthusiasm, should favor us with thirteen Latin versions of some modern English poems, it would give them a chance of being more generally intelligible to the laity. Nay, even if such a baker's-dozen of mediæval-Latin renderings of Mrs. Browning's last poem—and by this term we mean, of course, the rather shady Latin of middle-aged men—should be shuffled together, we are not sure that it would not be a help to the understanding of the Coptic original. But this, perhaps, is hoping too much.
In the case of Dr. Coles, how lucky the direction of the superfluous energy! how wise the humane precaution of Nature! For there is no destructive agency like a doctor with a hygienic hobby. If your constitution be a salt or sugar one, he will melt you away with damp sheets and duckings; if you are as exsanguine as a turnip, his scientific delight in getting blood out of you will be only heightened. For such erratic enthusiasms as this of Dr. Coles we want a milder term than monomania. Something like monowhimsia would do. It is seldom that an oddity takes so pleasant a turn. He has published a dainty little volume, with a well-written introduction, giving the history of the "Dies Iræ," and an account of the various versions of it; this is followed by his own thirteen translations; and an appendix tells us what is meant by a Sequence, has a page or two on the origin of rhyming Latin, and concludes with the music of the hymn itself. The book is illustrated by delicate photographs from the Last Judgments of Michel Angelo, Rubens, and Cornelius, and from the "Christus Remunerator" of Ary Scheffer. It is exquisitely printed at the Riverside Press, which is doing such good service to everybody but the spectacle-makers.
We hold the translation of any first-rate poem, nay, even of any second-rate one which has any peculiar charm of rhythm or tone, to be an impossibility. The translation of rhyming Latin verses presents peculiar difficulties. The rhythm is always simple and strongly accented, it is true; but the ear-filling sonority, the variety of female rhymes, and the simple directness of expression cannot be echoed by our muffling consonants, our endings in ing and ed, and a-s, the-s, and of the-s. For example, the stanza,
"Tuba, mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum,"
is very inadequately represented by
"Trumpet, scattering sounds of wonder
Rending sepulchres asunder,
Shall resistless summons thunder,"
in which, to speak of nothing else, there are thirteen s-s to five in the original. Even Crashaw, whose translation of Strada's "Music's Duel" is a masterpiece for litheness of phrase and sinuous suppleness of rhythm, quails before the "Dies Iræ," and contents himself with a largely watered paraphrase. No one has ever yet succeeded more than tolerably with the opening stanza,—
"Dies Iræ, dies illa,
Solvet sæclum in favillâ,
Teste David cum Sibyllâ."