cabbages, you could put him in prison. But into your poets he can stump his way at will, and upon them he can do his pleasure. And he does it. How many men have brutalised the elegance, the grace, the winning urbanity of Horace! By how many coarse and stupid fingers has Catullus been smudged and fumbled and mauled! To turn Faust into English (in the original metres) is a fashionable occupation; there are more perversions of the Commedia than one cares to recall; there is scarce a great or even a good work of the human mind but has been thus bedevilled and deformed. Don Quixote, le Père Goriot, The Frogs, The Decameron—the trail of the translator is over them all. Messrs. Payne and Lang and Swinburne have turned poor Villon into a citizen of Bedford Park, Fitzgerald and Florence Macarthy have Englished Calderon, Messrs. Pope, Gladstone and others have done their worst with Homer. If Rossetti had not succeeded with la Vita Nuova, if Fitzgerald had not ennobled Omar, if Mr. Lang had not bettered upon Banville and Gérard de Nerval, the word ‘translator’ would be odious as the word ‘occupy.’ And ‘occupy’ on the authority of Mrs. Dorothy Tearsheet is an odious word indeed.
The Proof of It.
The fact is, the translator too often forgets the difference between his subject and himself; he is
too often a common graveyard mason that would play the sculptor. And it is not nearly enough for him to be a decent craftsman. To give an adequate idea of an artist’s work a man must be himself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original. The typical translator makes clever enough verses, but Heine’s accomplishment is remote from him as Heine’s genius. He perverts his author as rhyme and rhythm will. No charge of verbal inaccuracy need therefore be made, for we do not expect a literal fidelity in our workman. Let him convey the spirit of his original, and that, so far as meaning goes, is enough. But we do expect of him a something that shall recall his author’s form, his author’s personality, his author’s charm of diction and of style; and here it is that such an interpreter as Sir Theodore Martin (say) fails with such assurance and ill-fortune. The movement of Heine’s rhythms, simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poet laboured at his cadences as at his meanings. Artificial he is, but he has the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial. His verses dance and sway like the nixies he loved. Their every motion seems informed with the perfect suavity and spontaneity of pure nature. They tinkle down the air like sunset bells, they float like clouds, they wave like flowers, they twitter like skylarks, they have in them something of the swiftness and the certainty of exquisite
physical sensations. In such a transcript as Sir Theodore’s all this is lost: Heine becomes a mere prentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browning himself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springless cart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailed breakdown. The poem disappears, and in its place you have an indifferent copy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impression is that they are not unlike Heine; you look into them, and Heine has vanished. The man is gone, and only an awkward, angular, clumsily articulated, entirely preposterous lay-figure remains to show that the translator has been by.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
His Verse.
In every page of Arnold the poet there is something to return upon and to admire. There are faults, and these of a kind this present age is ill-disposed to condone. The rhymes are sometimes poor; the movement of the verse is sometimes uncertain and sometimes slow; the rhythms are obviously simple always; now and then the intention and effect are cold even to austerity, are bald to uncomeliness. But then, how many of the rarer qualities of art and inspiration are represented here, and here alone in modern work! There is little of that delight in material for material’s sake which is held to be essential to the composition of a great artist; there is none of that rapture of sound and motion and none of that efflorescence of expression which are deemed inseparable from the endowment of the true singer. For any of those excesses in technical accomplishment, those ecstasies in the use of words, those effects of sound which are so rich and strange as to impress the hearer with something of their author’s own emotion of creation—for any, indeed, of the characteristic attributes of modern poetry—you shall
turn to him in vain. In matters of form this poet is no romantic but a classic to the marrow. He adores his Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shakespeare’s fashions. For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentiment and distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk for talking’s sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, to embody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount of richness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. In his scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent and Shakespearean—for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Human and interesting in themselves, the ideas apparelled in his verse are completely apprehended; natural in themselves, the experiences he pictures are intimately felt and thoroughly perceived. They have been resolved into their elements by the operation of an almost Sophoclean faculty of selection, and the effect of their presentation is akin to that of a gallery of Greek marbles.