So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone,”
translated the italicized words thus: “So, grief, be off with you!” In the opera of “Macbetto,” the term “hell-broth” in the witches’ scene is rendered in Italian polto inferno. Hardly less ridiculous is the blunder made by a translator of Alexander Smith’s “Life-Drama,” who metamorphoses the expression, “clothes me with kingdoms,” into “me fait un vêtement de royaumes,”—“makes me a garment of kingdoms.” Even so careful a writer as Lord Mahon, in his “History of the War of the Succession in Spain,” translates the French word abbé by “abbot.” One of the chief difficulties in translating into a foreign language is that, though every word the translator uses may be authorized by the best writers, yet the combination of his terms may be unidiomatic. Thus the words arène and rive are both to be found in the best French writers; yet if a foreigner, not familiar with the niceties of that language, should write
“Sur la rive du fleuve amassant de l’arène,”
he would be laughed at, not only by the critics, but by the most illiterate workmen in Paris. The French idiom will not admit of the expression sur la rive du fleuve, correct though each word may be taken singly, but requires the phrase sur le bord de la rivière, as it does amasser du sable, and not amasser de l’arène. What can be more expressive than one of the lines in which Milton describes the lost angels crowding into Pandemonium, where, he says, the air was
“Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings,”
a line which it is impossible to translate into words that will convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions that are roused by a perusal of the original? Suppose the translator to hit so near to the original as to write
“Stirred with the noise of quivering wings,”
will not the line affect you altogether differently? Let one translate into another language the following line of Shakespeare,
“The learned pate ducks to the golden fool,”
and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the words we have italicized would be reproduced?