Echo will chaunt thee back againe?”[[129]]
This will compare not too disadvantageously with the latest version—Lord Lytton’s—which, indeed, is not especially good:
“What man, what hero, or what god select’st thou,
Theme for sweet lyre or fife sonorous, Clio,
Whose honored name shall that gay sprite-voice, Echo,
Hymn back rebounding?”
As a rule, however, Sir Thomas is stiff—a fault common to almost all translations of the easiest of lyrists up to a much later period. Yet in this century there were many versions of single odes, epistles, and satires, some of which have scarcely ever been surpassed. Such, for instance, were Ben Jonson’s rendering of Ode IV. 1, Ad Venerem, and Milton’s of I. 5, Ad Pyrrhum, severally included by Mr. Theodore Martin and Lord Lytton in their respective versions as beyond their skill to better; Dryden’s fine paraphrase of III. 29, To Mæcenas, which Mr. Martin, non sordidus auctor, pronounces finer than the original; and, on a lower plane, however, Roscommon’s version of the Art of Poetry. Of these, Milton’s has been said to touch the high-water mark of translation, and is indeed very elegant and close.
Ben Jonson’s set translations are often injured by a rigid strictness which Horace might have warned him against:
“Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres,”[[130]]
and which evoked Dryden’s protest against “the jaw-breaking translations of Ben Jonson.” Yet even in fetters he danced better than most; and some of his translations, notably the one mentioned above and one of Martial, Liber, amicorum dulcissima cura tuorum, it would be hard to pick flaws in.