“While onward runs the crooked rill,
Brisk fugitive, with murmur shrill”;
or in Lord Lytton?—
“Wherefore struggles and murmurs the rill
Stayed from flight by a curve in the shore.”
Even Mr. Martin gives it up, and presents us, instead of a translation, with a couplet which is very pretty English verse, but about as far from Horace as can be:
“Where runs the wimpling brook, its slumb’rous tune
Still murmuring as it runs to the hush’d ear of noon.”
It is passages such as this especially which have caused Horace to be called the untranslatable.
To come from theory to practice, it is in the lighter odes, and in those parts of all the odes the beauty of which in the original lies chiefly in expression, that all Horace’s translators have most conspicuously failed. Take Milton’s Ad Pyrrham, for example (Ode v.). The Ad Pyrrham is not only one of the most charming but also one of the most difficult of the minor odes, and for that reason among the oftenest translated. It is one of the many mitten-pieces wherein the inconstant bard seems to have taken a somewhat ostentatious delight in celebrating the numerous snubbings he had to put up with from the no less inconstant fair who were the objects of his brief and fitful homage. In it, as in the Ad Neæram (Epod. xv.) and the Ad Barinen (Carm. ii. 8), reproaches to the lady for her perfidy are mingled with self-gratulations on the poet’s own lucky escape and sinister warnings to his rival—the time-old strategy and solace of the discarded lover the world over. He has been shipwrecked, he says, on that treacherous sea of love; but having, the gods be praised! made shift to scramble ashore in safety, and got on some dry duds, sits in gleeful expectation of seeing his successor get a like ducking. The poem is simply a piece of mock heroics, for the counterpart of which we must look to such minglings of cynicism and sentiment as we find in the poetry of Praed and Thackeray and Locker, or, to a less degree, in many of Béranger’s lighter songs. The difference between the modern poets and the ancient is that in the former the sentiment is real, veiled under an affectation of cynicism: in the latter it is precisely the reverse. But, bearing that difference in mind, the translator may find in the methods of the poets named some hints for the handling of such odes as the Ad Pyrrham.