A volume of somewhat kindred use and purpose, though of additional value as suggestive of a standard of translation indisputably sound and high, is the collection of Translations, by Professor Jebb, Mr. Jackson, and Mr. Currey, of Trinity, Cambridge, published by Deighton, Bell, & Co., Cambridge, and George Bell & Sons, London, just a year ago. Its usefulness is enhanced by a fourfold applicability to the wants of translators into Greek and Latin, and out of those languages into English, whether in prose or poetry. The samples are, of course, limited considerably by the area of the field they cover, but they will be admitted to be amply sufficient for models and patterns, and no tiro, or even advanced student, can fail to be benefited by the variety, excellent choice, scholarly handling, brief but seasonable annotation, and general accommodation to student-use, of the selections which form the four divisions of this practical manual. The rule of “Ne quid nimis” has been sufficiently respected to forbid tedious reiteration of types of the same style, so that in Greek verse into English only three examples of Theocritus occur, one a sweet piece of idyllic description, a second illustrative of the mimes of Sophron, a third breathing the Alexandrian tone of poetic stimulus to the halting liberality of the would-be literary Ptolemies. The proportion of extracts from Homer and the dramatists is scarcely larger, and rather guides the reader to form a criterion of style for himself than helps him to be armed beforehand for passages which may be set in this or that examination. In translation the canon of accuracy and fidelity is tendered in preference to that of liveliness and effect, though it cannot be said that Messrs. Jebb and Jackson’s translations from Plautus and Terence, or those of Jebb and Currey from Martial, Juvenal, and Ausonius, are deficient in the life and spirit suggested by the originals. As much may be said without controversy for the prose models in either language; nor is it to be lightly regarded that the aim of the editors has been to help classical students to train themselves in preparation for examination. Not to be prolix in notice of a volume which may be referred to again and again in our examination of texts and school-books to follow in our chronicle, it may be admissible to quote in Latin and English some six lines of Professor Jebb’s translation from the Phormio (pp. 140-1) as a type of the neatness and spirit of the average of these translations. Phormio is explaining how, with all his ebullitions, he has never been indicted for assault:—
“Quia non rete accipitri tenditur neque miluo,
Qui male faciunt nobis: illis qui nihil faciunt tenditur;
Quia enim in illis fructus est, in illis opera luditur.
Aliis aliunde est periclum unde aliquid abradi potest:
Mihi sciunt nihil esse. Dices, ducent damnatum domum:
Alere nolunt hominem edacem: et sapiunt, meâ quidem sententia,
Pro maleficio si beneficium summum nolunt reddere.”—Phorm., act. ii. 2.
“Because we do not spread nets for hawks and kites that do us harm; the net is spread for the harmless birds. The fact is, pigeons may be plucked: hawks and kites mock our pains. Various dangers beset people who can be pilfered—I am known to have nothing. You will say, ‘They will get a writ of habeas corpus.’ They would rather not keep a large eater: and I certainly think they are right to decline requiting a bad turn with a signal favour.”
From a summary notice of these two volumes of wider range and scope, it is an easy leap to such noteworthy classical translations and texts of the year or season as lie on our table for review. Of the former we note with satisfaction a new and very readable version of The Letters of the Younger Pliny, literally translated by John Delaware Lewis, M.A. (London: Trubner & Co., 1879), whose version of Juvenal’s Satires some years back was accurate, lively, and well-achieved. In approaching another author of the silver age, well deserving of a more modern English transcript than those of Melmoth and Lord Orrery, Mr. Lewis has been minded to present this pleasantest of gossips, and most cultured of letter-writers, in a guise as little as possible encumbered with notes or excursions, and in such wise that the volume is admirably adapted for the library table, whether the object be comparison with the Latin text, or refreshment of the memory, anent this or that sentiment of the many-sided and voluminous man of law and letters. Under the conviction that enough has been done to present Pliny himself to his readers in the volumes by Church and Brodribb (in the Ancient Classics), and by Pritchard and Bernard, as well as the notices of life and letters by W. S. Teuffel and English bibliographers, Mr. Lewis has confined himself to the briefest of introductions, and been content to bestow most pains on apt and parallel English counterparts to the expressions and idioms of the Latin. Thus the task undertaken has been made to assume an easy, unaffected form, at the same time that it is calculated to stand close examination by the criterion of the Latin text. A good specimen both of the gossiping author and his latest translator might be cited from Book II. 6 to Avitus, in which is described the triple-graded dinner given by a shabby, purse-proud host (α) to himself and his intimates, (β) to his lesser friends, (γ) to his freedmen at the same board, but of fare graduated according to degree. Pliny tells his correspondent that he demurred to this procedure to his next neighbour at table, and propounded his own practice on this wise: “I invite people to dine, not to be invidiously ticketed, and I treat as my entire equals in all respects those whom I have already made my equals by inviting them at my table.” And this equality, for the time being, he extended to his freedmen, on the sensible point of view that they were then his guests, not his freedmen. In the same book (letter 15) occurs a letter of Pliny to Valerianus, brief enough for quotation, and yet expressing with lively brevity more than one home truth for those who realize Horace’s sketch, “O si angulus iste proximus accedat.” “How,” he asks, “does your old Marsian property treat you? And your new purchase? Are you pleased with the estate now that it is your own? Indeed, nothing is so agreeable when you have once got it, as it was when you longed to have it. As for me, the farms which I inherited from my mother treat me but so-so: yet they delight me as coming from my mother; and besides, long endurance has hardened me: constant growling comes to this at last, that one is ashamed to growl.” Next but one to this letter comes one of those charming descriptions which are, par excellence, Pliny’s chefs d’œuvre, minutely detailing the features and attractions of his villas. These constitute to the young student so many loci classici, by no means to be overlooked in preparation for facing the test-paper of a scholarship examination, and it is sound counsel to candidates for such to avail themselves of a translation like Mr. Lewis’s for general purposes, taking such letters as the one alluded to (II. xvii.) for special study and comparison with its original. Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Lewis adds pertinent and sensible notelets in cases of difficulty; but it is only fair to say à propos of the, as he would seem to imply in his preface, long-since shelved translation of Melmoth, that in Bohn’s Classical Library (George Bell & Sons) will be found a revision and correction of The Letters of Caius Plinius Cœcilius Secundus, as translated by Melmoth, annotated and otherwise accommodated to modern reading by the Rev. F. C. T. Bosanquet, B.A., of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which will be found in all respects excellently suited for the need of the current reader. Whilst here and there the style of Melmoth strikes us as forgetting itself for a brief space, where the modern editor has felt bound to interpose a more literal rendering, and in such cases it is simpler to refer to the uniform translation of Lewis, it is certainly a real boon to have the notes of Bosanquet’s Melmoth’s Pliny to consult, whether they represent the explanatory and illustrative labour of Melmoth, and his literary or antiquarian contemporaries, or the careful supplementary illustrations of his accommodator to modern eyes. So much explanation is due to one of the best recent volumes of Bohn’s Classical Series (1878).
The feeling is more mixed with which we touch upon Mr. T. Hart Davies’s Translation of Catullus into English Verse (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1879), the author of which is a quondam Oxonian in the Indian Civil Service. Fully persuaded that Catullus is very untranslatable, and that the subtle charm of his dainty versification evaporates, it is evidence alike of Mr. Hart Davies’s courage and culture that, afar from classical libraries, he has recreated his mind and tastes with the reproduction of one of the most genuine classical poets; given us anew the touching songs to Lesbia, and the unequalled nuptial songs (lxi. and lxii.); and rendered with more or less success the pictorial epic, in petto, of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, and the pathetic allusions to an early-lost brother in the poem to Hortalus. He deserves, too, the praise of having read carefully the recent literature of the subject, and guaged with creditable acuteness and discrimination the lucubrations of Professor R. Ellis, the criticisms of Mr. Munro, and the critical essays of Schwabe, Heyse, and Couat. He hesitates, however, it would seem, to accept Munro’s well-sustained rehabilitation of Cæsar and Mamurra (à propos of Poem xxix. on Cæsar), and in two or three passages seems to us to err in point of prolixity, which is as foreign as can be conceived to the style of his original, as well as, in one or two places, in misconception of his sense. In either aspect, he cannot be regarded as competing (which indeed he does not aspire to do) with Theodore Martin: but we cannot honestly say that we regard his version of the Atys as an improvement in readableness on that of one of the ablest of critics, but most puzzling and hopeless of verse-translators, Professor Robinson Ellis. Indeed, it is a question whether he has imported any improvement into the rendering of his Galliambics by adopting the Tennysonian rather than the Catullian rhythm and measure. Mr. Hart Davies is mostly happy in his shorter versions. The invitation to Cæcilius is bright and brisk (p. 33): there is a touching sadness in the lines to Cornificius (p. 35). The stanzas to the poet’s self on the “Coming of Spring” (p. 43) breathe much of the tiptoe of expectation and love of adventure infused into the original lines. And as a neat sample of the translator’s muse may be quoted the transcript of the “Lines to Sirmio,” adequately executed, and endorsed with some of the original pathos and picturesqueness—
“Sirmio, fairest of all isles that be,
Or all peninsulas that ocean laves,
Whether around them roll the mighty sea,
Or a lake’s placid waves.
Thee with what joy, what rapture do I view,
Returned from Thynia and Bithynia’s plain!
I scarce can credit that the bliss is true
Thee to behold again.
Oh! what more blessed is than labours past!
In weary wanderings abroad we roam,
Then spent with toil we come again at last,
Seeking our rest at home.
This for our toils the sole reward is found,
Hail, lovely Sirmio, and thou Lydian mere!
And now, my home, let all thy laughter sound,
Now is thy master here.”
Mr. Hart Davies’s temporary exile has obviously the solace of scholarship.