?^^^^ m-^:r. I PK214-1 PHILLIMORE, John Swinnerton. P5 Some Re'iiP >-' - '-- on 7r r^ >- <= 1 n h ' r and Trans UNIVERSITY OF CA RIVERSIDE. LIBRARY L 3 1210 01712 1078 LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION Pamphlet No. 42 Some Remarks on Translation and Translators By J. S. Phillimore ' January, 1919 A copy of this pamphlet is supplied to all full members of the Association. They can obtain further copies (price Is.) on application to the Secretary, Mr. A. V. Houghton, Imperial College Union, South Kensington, London, S.W, 7. The following Publications have been issued by the Association, and those still in print can be purchased by members : — 1907-18. 1. Types of English Curricula in Boys' Secondary Schools. (Out of print.) Price 6d. 2. The Teaching of Shakespeare in Secondary Schools (Pro- visional suggestions). (Out of print.) Price Id. 3. A Short List of Books on English Literature from the beginning to 1832, for the use of Teachers. Price 6d. (to Associate Members, Is.). 4. Shelley's View of Poetry. By A. C. Bradley, Litt.D. (Out of print.) Price Is. 6. English Literature in Secondary Schools. By J. H. Fowler, M.A. Price 6d. 6. The Teaching of English in Girls' Secondary Schools. By Miss G. Clement, B.A. (Out of print.) Price 6d. 7. The Teaching of Shakespeare in Schools. Price 6d. 8. Types of English Curricula in Girls' Secondary Schools. (Out of print.) Price 6d. 9. Milton and Party. By Professor O. Elton, M.A. (Out of print.) Price 6d. 10. Romance. By W. P. Ker, LL.D. Price 6d. 11. What still remains to be done for the Scottish Dialects. By W. Grant. Price 6d. 12. Summary of Examinations in English affecting Schools. Price 6d. 18. The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare's Art. By Sidney Lee, D.Litt. Price Is. 14. Early Stages in the Teaching of English. (Out of print.) Price 6d. 15. A Shakespeare Reference Library. By Sidney Lee, D.Litt. Price Is. 16. The Bearing of English Studies upon the National Life. By C. H. Ilerford, Litt.D. Price Is. 17. The Teaching of English Composition. By J. H. Fowler, M.A. ,^ (Out of print.) Price Is. THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION Pamphlet No. 42 Some Eemarks on Translation and Translators By J. S. Phillimore January, 1919 Oxford Printed by Frederick Hall, at the University Press SOME REMARKS ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS [This paper, originally written for the Glasgow Branch of the English Association, has been recast ; but the author still feels it necessary to ask indulgence for the casual and unstitched form of it. This is not fit prose for publication ; and yet such papers do not fail of their pvu'pose, although more hares be started than caught. We were hunting for exercise. If anything can be gained for the potj so much the better; but the run was the thing. — Dec. 1918.] I Illiterate men have been known to say, as an argument in their attack on classical studies, that all the Classics have been translated, and therefore there is no need to continue reading the originals. Sometimes they have the grace and intelligence to add a reservation, ' Except the poets '. So they do perceive a difference between the cases of Homer and Euclid. Euclid may be said to lose nothing in being decanted into another language ; Aristotle (as we have him) very little ; but ascend the scale to Plato, and — what a difference ! How falsified is Plato in Jowett's much-belauded version ! How inadequate was Jowett to apprehend, much more to reproduce, even with Swinburne's prompting, the finesse, the slyness, the deftness of his author ! But when you come to poetry, why is it any more reasonable to say that the translation supersedes the original, than to say that an engraving or a copy supersedes the original picture ? Since material progress exists and the capital of science rolls forward accumulating, much of the contents of ordinary prose may be passed on and the former vehicle become obsolete. Let us freely concede that, if some new Caliph were to collect and destroy the last copies of Euclid's Greek, civilization would not be substantially the poorer. But in Art progress either does not exist, or at least exists only in discontinuous series: poetry is much more wholly a work of art than healthy prose is ; and my concern will be more largely with poetry. It was Samuel Johnson who said that the poets are the best presei-vers of a language, because people must go to the original to relish them (April 11, 1776, quoted by Fitzgerald, ii. 61). A 2 4 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS II Just us it takes two to speak the truth, one to hear straight as well as one to speak straight, a frank correspondence between question and answer — so, I take it, perfect translation requires a sort of mutual action set up in both languages, both that from which and that into which it is to i)e performed. Exchange on the level must be possible if there is to i)e (|uite honest dealing. And that is to say each party must not oidy come furnished with an equal sum but equal resource in small change. Or, to drop metaphor, the two languages must be equivalent in point of expressiveness. Excuse me if I somewhat labour this matter. The foible of criticism is that so much of it may be resolved into fancy. It lacks what the Anglo-German jargon calls ' Objec- tivity'. But by taking expressiveness Me have (|uite a positive and real standard of comparison between any two languages as well as a measure of development within any one language, from time to time. Expressiveness no more needs (or, for that matter, comports) definition than health or maturity of body. Its absence is remarked ; when present, it is taken for granted. To block out the notion roughly, let us say that it implies both a competent wealth of voca- bulary, and that wealth economized by good taste, i.e. sense: new Mords brought in only to mean new things or new ideas. ^ If Brunetiere taught us that tlie life of a language is pretty accurately measurable in the forms it invents, modifies, and finally exhausts and discards, he gave us also a real criterion for estab- lishing relations between one literature and another. Mastery of any given form, or mastery in general, is a quite real and solid thing ; and the classical standard, in the true sense of the word, is irreducible : the full expressive power, comporting finesse no less than force, subtlety in distinction no less than grandeur in compre- hension ; to record, with economy of means, fundamental truth and general experience. When a language attains to this it is mature. The summit is reached. The solstice has begun. And though that saying of Velleius is terribly true of the single forms, Brevis in perfecto mora, yet by the law of the de\elopment of kinds, * Stupid iieoloffisnis such as Forruord for I'rijdcc, wliich some (Ierinaiiiziiif>- fool found himself sayiiif?, and tlien a liundred Jiglit-liearted parrots rciteated it — all round the Press — add nothinjj^ to tlie power or })eauty of a laujiiiafj^e. Preface is neitliei- ohsolete nor inexact. Such a neoloj2;isni is merely wanton, prompted by weariness of well-doiiifj. AVliereas tlie split infinitive (nuich as we may dislike it) may be defended as a new instrument of exact expression. TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 5 a richness and flexibility of adjustment may allow the language as a Avhole — 'Witness Greek, par excellence — to persist many centuries in full daylight. Probably as a rule maturity lasts longer in prose than in poetry. For prose is an institution. Latin poetry, for instance, is at full power fi*om Virgil to Lucan ; Lucan is an inventor, enriching his verse out of the losses of prose oratory. But after Lucan nothing of prime greatness is produced in poetry until Prudentius — whose case would take us altogether too long to analyse ; but, at any rate, he represents not continuity but a violent adaptation of literary forces into a new form. In Latin prose, on the other hand, it is simply true to say that Jerome and Augustine could drive their ship under all the sail that ever Cicero carried. To call them a decadence is a foolish pre- judice only possible to those who never read them. The inspiration is new, but no new expressive power is needed. They inherited that. Expressiveness in prose was maintained for nearly five centuries by the Latins : from Cicero to Augustine is a table -land on the high level. It is interesting to observe the arrival of the moment in various literatures. One might have expected Latin to reach maturity of expressiveness earlier than it did. Neither oligarchy nor demagogy is unfavourable to the florison of language, and of these two elements was Roman polity tempered. It is surprising when you recollect that more than a century passed between Terence's death and Cicero's. Terence was already so accomplished. The hall-mark of maturity — a close approach between prose and verse, when educated people talk well and write easily, writers use no pretension or solemnity because readers meet them half-way, with unobsequious intelligence: literature need be no more than recorded talk, because talk is not slovenly and inarticulate — is stamped on Terence as it is on Swift. So it was said of Vanbrugh by his biographer that ^ his most entertaining scenes seem to be no more than his common conversation committed to paper'. Why then was Latin at a standstill for all that time ? I believe the answer is : Civil War. Just when the moment was come for a step upstairs, in the decade of the Gracchi, began that horrible era of faction which devastated Rome and Italy for more than forty years. The Muses were silenced before they had finished their education — of which Translation is the great means. Massacre and proscription destroy Literature as effectively as the crushing engine of State Socialism. Rome after the Antonines exemplifies this latter. The former is exemplified in the literary stagnation of Rome during the period 130-80 B.C. But we need not look so far afield. We can see it exemplified at home. The influence of the Humanist Renascence, where it ran a normal course, worked on the European vernaculars A 3 6 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS through transhitions. You may say all the Classics were translated into Italian before 1500; and consequently Italian is fully matured in faculty and resource at the close of the Quattrocento. In England and France the Reformation broke in with disastrous effect : France lias not attained maturity in prose until about 1570, England hardly before the advent of Dryden. Yet if things had followed their natural course, and the translators had been there to take up their allotted part in the development, English prose would not have marked time as it does from More till Bacon. The celebrated Tudor translations were long overdue. That stage should have been past by 1550, but it was suppressed in the general destruction of learning by Henry VIII and his hopeful son. So far as a foreigner can judge, French and Italian seem to be ade- ([uate in expressiveness to Greek at its best, as fine-spun as Plato's thread, as rich in vocabulary, as sharp in precision and distinction ; natural and unconstrained in the temperamental or gesticulatory part of language, as the equipment of particles and the disciplined economies of syntax make Attic Greek of the fourth century B.C. I do not think one could roundly deny a claim that modern Englisji is the equal of Attic Greek in potential expressiveness ; and yet — an adequate Plato remains to be done. When you read some one who writes good modern English, do not you say, ' This is the kind of man who ought to translate Plato ^? But, alas, one has to admit some impediment every time. Matthew Arnold was a prig ; Shaw and Wells are buffoons, and know no Greek ; Pater knew too much Greek, and perhaps wrote English too much like a foreign language. The requirements have never yet been found co-existing. Mr. Compton Mackenzie is my present favourite for the appointment. Language, then, is measurable and comparable in terms of express- iveness. Now if two languages are « Whose esseiire, ami tlie very meaniiifr of wlio^e Classicipm is that they abide a«; norms or staiidanls— for wliat is classical ])ut qnod uhifiuf, quod setiiper} '-^ Ibant Ohscuri, p. 148. TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 9 languages (I mean those of civilized peoples) correspond by analogous characteristics; and this resemblance of idiom is the first condition of success in any attempt to translate a really original writer. Genius itself cannot make good the want of this. If this be so, we shall be asked at what epoch of its history (which already goes far back into the past) our (French) language was worthy to reproduce Homer. We answer without hesitation and without any affectation of paradox: //' the knowledge of Greek had been more extensive in the West during the Middle Age ; and had there been found in France in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, a poet capable of understanding the ancient rhapsode's Songs and spirited enough to translate them ; v)e should now be possessed of Iliad and Odyssey in a copy ivhich would be the most agreeable to the genius of antiquity. The heroism of Chivalry, which resembles that of Homeric heroes in so many features, had then made a language after its own image, a language already rich, harmonious, eminently descriptive ; only that it lacked the stamp of a bold and powerful imagination. The fact is easily seen nowadays, thanks to the numerous Chansons de Geste which are emerging f'om the dust of our libraries : the same tone of candour in Narrative, the same faith in an element of marvellous without artificiality, the same curiosity in picturesque detail ; strange adventures, great feats of arms related at length ; little or no serious tactics, but a great power of personal courage; a sort of brotherly affection for the vjarrior's comrade, his horse; ataste for fine accoutrement ; the passion for conquest, the passion {a less noble one) for looting and pillage ; a generous practice of hospitality; respect for ivomen moderating the roughness of barbaric manners. ' Such was a state of manners, which may truly be called epic : nothing urns to seek but a Homer's brush to paint the picture.' Thus Egger : his doctrine was approved and adopted by Littre, who put it to the test in an experiment on the first book of the Iliad, which seems to me highly successful. Dr. Bridges reserves his opinion. What do you say to the Eggerian doctrine ? At any rate it opens pleasant vistas of speculation. Confining ourselves for the moment to Greek authors, has there existed a perfect natural moment when Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Plato, could each pass level through open doors into English and find an unembarrassed lodging in our literature ? And when did the climacteric opportunity come to them respectively ? We are playing with ifs and ayis ; for as in other human affairs, so here it seems to be a case of ' Never the time and the place and the loved one all together '. In the fifteenth century English (witness Malory) was adequate for Epic, — if not already in Chaucer's time ; but after Chaucer no poet arose who was sufficient for such things. And nobody knew Greek until a later and a disparate phase of manners had succeeded. It may be set down to the back- wardness in learning which the arrest of the Renascence caused in 10 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATOKS England, that out of that hotbed of poetical talent under Elizabeth and James there proceeded no i^^reat naturalization of the Attic tragedians in our language.^ Milton could unquestionably have done it. And Greek Lyric ? When was that due ? Was the outburst of Romanticism the ideal moment when it should have been translated ? Perhaps had Fate spared us more Sappho and less Pindar, Shelley miglit have had the mind, as he had the hand, to do it ; and Byron might have helloed with Alcaeus. Or was it those Caroline gallants who let the moment pass ? Deal only Avith forms in the abstract and it is easy to rig up correspondences ; but as soon as ever you begin to consider real works and real writers, instead of abstractions, the personal equation is seen to be of overwhelming importance. To the producing of the original classic itself, as Brunetiere so well remarks, there go a peculiar happy alliance of conditions which are rarely united, and the personal begetting talent of the poet must supervene. Your altar and your fat burnt-offering will not avail unless the tire come down from heaven. And if, in order that the perfect translation may come about, genius must again be manifested, is it not like asking that a miracle be repeated in aftertime, with the addition of one uncommon factor into the bargain ? — I mean learning, for without that the translator has no credentials to negotiate the foreign potentate's visit. In poetry especially the comet-like intrusions of personality so baffle calculation, that one is often likely to be left repeat- ing the formula, '^If the man had been forthcoming, the time was ripe,' and leave it at that. But poets are a flying corps; prose-writers are infantry, or at least a terra firnia force. In prose the ' stunting ' genius is less indispensable. Writers of prose borrow more from the mind of their period than do poets. There is more chance for Egger iiere. For instance : surely we may say that our seventeenth century was the moment when Thucydides should have been made English once for all : the stiff gorgeousness of Milton's prose, and the narrative gait of Clarendon, somewhat encumbered and yet not incapable of a martial and dramatic agility, denote such a state of language as best would answer to the intricate elo(juence of that first great pupil of the Rhetoric school. These were promising auguries, and it turns out in fact that Hobbes's version does not belie the conjecture. Bating his inaccuracy of detail (his Greek was not perfect, and the text was still in bad case) it is a masterpiece. Read him in the famous speeches (never, since first they were penned, have they been so full of actuality as diu-ing these last years), and Jowett seems a nerveless paraphrase. And Plato migiit have taken on a very graceful and well-fitting (h-ess ' I find tliiv i- matter. TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 15 yesterday, also duly set to and glorified Theocritus at the expense of Virgil. It was an easy task to call Virgil's adaptation mere imita- tion : judged by the same criteria you might find Lyddas to be a very unoriginal piece of -work. In the process, having no loving curiosity to spend on A^irgil, and obeying almost unconsciously the Victorian prepossession that classical writers are always very very serious — unless when they announce This is a Joke — we lost all perception for the playfulness, the finesse, the irony, the humours of characterization, which Horace saw in his friend. Indeed, you must go back to Dryden to get any representation of these qualities. For Dryden — of wliom the present Laureate disapproves, and whom Macaulay tiiought horrid — has this great merit, a natural appreciation of the pitch of style in Virgil ; which atones for some limitations in his scholarship and in his metrical resource. Die mihi, Damoeta, cuium pecus ? An Meliboei ? What is the tone of die mihi ? Polite or peremptory ? How did euium for cuius strike a contemporary ear ? What a producer does when he coaches an actor is what a teacher ought to do for a pupil in these matters ; but the pupil often grows up into a translator without ever asking such questions or beginning to suspect the existence of problems M-hich are prerequisites to his success. V In all this I have been supposing that the translator's duty is to interpret, not to betray ; and that the original has its rights, and is not to be treated merely as the prey of the translator. But if any one shall object, * So long as the translator gives me a good poem or a good prose book in English, what do I care ? Has he betrajed his author ? Let him see to that ' : the objector must be answered with a distinction. As long as you take no liberties Math an ancient author's name, you are perfectly free to cut and carve, or swallow him whole, if he suits your palate, and your digestion can make food of him. That delightful sentence may be obsolete as a statement in Natural History, but it still does pleasant service as a canon of literary ethics in the matter of borrowing and translating. Serpens nisi serpentem comederit noa fit draco. Certainly the dragons of ancient poetry victualled themselves freely and profitably on their brother serpents. So do the moderns, and with the assurance that not many modern critics will be able to trace their depredations. Perhaps the only perfect translations are the scraps which poets bring in without acknowledgement : things got iji a lusty stealth. l(j TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS The u'orhPs yreut aye beyins aneiv, the golden years return. Nothing so perfect Mas ever seen in a professed translation ; yet Shelley does not trou])le to name Virgil. It is translation in excelsis, transmutation you may call it, which only comes about in a rare poetical heat, such as seldom kindles even in a great poet's brain when he is sitting down ex professo to translate. You could collect dozens of instances Mhere a single phrase or line of Greek or Latin has been done into English with utterly satisfying equivalence b}' Milton or Tennyson, or even Landor. No acknowledgement is neces- sary. This is Spartan thieving. If you can steal and not be found out, the conveyed booties are yours ^ith good enough title. ' It is about as easy to steal a line from Homer', said Virgil, 'as to rob Heracles of his club.' But M'hen we come to borrowing an ancient's name as well as his wares, Me must be cautious. There seems to me to be a real question of loyavte, of intellectual honesty, involved. So much that looks innocent in these days is at bottom tendencieux (what's the English for tendencieux, by the way ? Is tendencions authorized yet ?) that Me must bcMare lest a translation of a man's M'ork be not really a questionable procuring, not to say a forging, of his signature to some modern manifesto. Gilbert Murray's Euripides has many great merits which have gained it deserved success ; but I cannot feel it to be a disinterested work of beauty. And if Euripides is to be enlisted in various modern polemics, then I must call a rendering which contains so much that belongs to the translator's liberal fancy a pious fraud. It may be a foolish scruple, but my feeling is that if you say ' after ' Euripides, you are free : you have acknowledged a source of inspiration or suggestion. You are sailing under your own colours. But if \ou say the M-ord Translation, you adopt a borroM-ed authority. This is no censure on the literary quality of the M'ork : that lies open to criticism if Me allow one of the Laureate's doctrines for sound, which at any rate is interesting to discuss next. ' It is in my opinion a mistake to think that the best translations of Greek verse are those Mhich make it seem like M'ell-written conventional English verse. If an English reader who is unable to read Greek is to get a glimpse of M-liat Homer is like, he nmst read something M'hich does not remind him of Milton, or Pope, or Tennyson, or Swinburne.' The last word nuiy be taken for a hit at Murray. But this doctrine brings us suddenly face to face Mith a chasm : a question in M'hich }ou must plump absolutely for one side or the (jther. In tiie first place a distinction is necessary : it ma^• be a fault TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 17 in Murray's Euripides that it reminds us of Swinburne and Morris, but is it therefore a fault in Pope's Homer that it reminds us of Pope ? Is it not rather a dilettantist refinement this of requirinoj that, because an author lived long ago, and in other conditions, and wrote a language long since dead, our living language must put on weird airs and outlandish fashions to represent it ? To take proper pleasure is the function of taste ; but surely this is to be most nicely particular in the idiosyncrasy of the proper pleasure to be derived. This puts us quite at variance with Egger's canon (quoted above) ; for in Bridges' view it is a sin if Homer reminds us of the Song of Roland. But if we accept the theory of a natural fitness at a given epoch, this is implied. What is the solution ? Once more the central theory of Classicism provides one. Is Homer weird and outlandish ? No. That which in Homer or any other ancient master is qualified to live ubique et semper, i. e. of strictly classic quality, can be dressed in the native resources of any civilized language, and need not go ostenta- tiously badged and uniformed as an alien in our midst. Homer, remote as he is, is immeasurably nearer to us in mind and manners than the Arabian Nights. And again, if there is a natural personal sympathy between Tibullus and Andre Chenier, why is it vicious for a French rendering of Tibullus to remind the reader of his modern analogue ? But Bridges' question is nothing like exhausted yet : it is the fundamental question for translators. For in its largest terms you may put it in this way : is the ancient to come in on his own terms or ours ? His access by the gate, or by a breach in the wall ? For a test case consider Aeschylus's Agamemnon. YouknowBrowning's theory as stated in the preface to his translation : ' If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. The use of certain allowable constructions which, happening to be out of daily favour, are all the more appropriate to archaic workmanship, is no violence : but I would be tolerant for once — in the case of so immensely famous an original — of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear: while, with respect to amplifications and embellishments, — anything rather than, with the good farmer, experience that most signal of mortifications, " to gape for Aeschylus and get Theognis ".' Now, on the other part, hear Fitzgerald in his Preface to Agamemnon : ' I suppose that a literal version of this play, if possible, would scarcely be intelligible. Even Avere the dialogue always clear, the lyric Choruses, which make up so large a part, are so dark and abrupt 1 Collected Works, vol, vi. 18 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS in themselves, and therefore so much the more mangled and tormented by copyist and commentator, that the mostconscientioustranslator must not only jump at a meanin