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UNIVERSITY OF CA RIVERSIDE. LIBRARY

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

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THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION

Pamphlet No. 42

Some Eemarks on Translation
and Translators

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.]

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).

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4 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS

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

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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 «<wequal in expressiveness, several
consequences may be expected. The translator, complaining as
Lucretius complained, of the patrii sermonis egestas, ' the beggarj' of
our national language,' enriches and improves it by this discipline of
translation. Needs must when the devil drives. Such and such a
term, or a phrase, has perfect neatness and unambiguity in Greek :
Mhcre can I find it in English, or how can I get it made? The
slo\\ness of invention is stimulated. The junior tongue, confronted
with the problem, or piqued by the challenge, of keeping pace with its
ciders and betters, must develop missing organs, borrow for its
deficiencies, strain itself to unsuspected capacities and attainments.
' To change is to live, and to be perfect is to have changed often.'
We change in response to a challenge. One might add : to improvise

TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 7

is to live at a very high rate of existence. To improvise without
])kindering is the great test of Qmnt'ilinn^ s firma /acilltas, the mark of
mastery. By translation a language both learns what it is lacking in
— -the beginnings of change are in the imagination : till it be awakened,
a language like a mind may remain sunk in self-unconsciousness and
(juiet hereditary fatuity ; and again, by translation it learns how to
make good. Since Latin improved itself, patiently and humbly, up
to the model of Greek^ by translations, the Greek map of life has been
preserved in tradition ; and, even where it had got blurred in detail,
nevertheless this charter of civilization was easily recoverable at the
Renascence. And when next a shrinkage of human intellect takes
place (as seems very probable before long) the Greek model is still
there to limit and correct the shrinkage. Only a self-enclosed language
is damned to decline. Translation is the very symbol of human tradition
and continuity. The great translators are ^pivotal' people in the
history of literature.

Sometimes it is a rich personality like Ennius, who knew that
possessing three languages his mind was triply engined ; sometimes a
great artist with just the impelling touch of mania added to raise the
doggedness of ambition to the point of fury. You will recognize
Lucretius : docti furor arcluus Lucreti. One pictures him as a man
digging, hewing, blasting through rugged natural obstacles, an inlet for
the irrigating stream to be derived from an abundant reservoir that
he has struck in the next valley. Greater than these is Cicero : perhaps
the man who of all others has served in opening the main channel
by which past and present communicate and European civilization
maintains identity in development.

Cicero taught Philosophy to speak Latin ; and through Latin she
learned to express herself in the modern languages. He was moved
by no fanatical enthusiasm for a creed ; nor even by the venturesome
curiosity of a facile artist trying his hand in a new medium. His
philosophical works were the pastimes and distractions of an enforced
abstention from politics. His industry and energy must find em-
ployment ; he must speak or burst. And so he spoke, to no small
purpose ; for it is largely owing to him that our minds are articulate.

So much then for the regular case of translation serving as a food
and discipline for the development of a young language. There would
be materials for another chapter in studying the profitable effects on
the translator himself. To instance Dryden : one might suppose that
his exercises in translation helped him to the easy abundance and
simplicity which are at his command both in prose and verse. I cannot
imagine any one who has made a translation of any pretty large amount

A 4

8 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS

of a foreign author and not had for a reward of his labours at any rate
an improved fluency of his pen.

Ill

And now that we have considered the normal phenomenon when
a language of inferior power and accomplishment borrows by trans-
lation for its own improvement, shall we stop to inquire whether
the opposite be also possible ? At any rate few will be found to
subscribe to Perrault's paradox that ancient authors can better be
judged in translations than in the originals. And yet, like most
paradoxes, it represents a minority truth which could hardlj'^ be safe-
guarded save under the form of paradox. Or shall we dismiss this
as another unwritten chapter, with the heading O71 Translators icho
have bettered their oriyinal ? I will only remark in passing that good
scholars, Persian born^ iiave declared that Fitzgerald is finer than
Omar ; M'hether thanks to old Fitz's talent or to tlie superiority of the
instrument that was at his disposal. One has also heard it said that
Gilbert Murray is better than Euripides ; but this not so much by good
judges of Greek as by inveterate Romanticists to whom both Rhetoric
and Cynicism are unpermissible in verse, and who find just these
disturbing Euripidean qualities painlessly eliminated in Murray.

We will pass to a much more interesting point : let it next be a
(juestion whether, as each modern language develops, it comes up,
stage by stage — as the traveller arrives at one landmark after another
on his road — with the ancient masterpieces ; ^ and thus, each of them by
the series of their development, from time to time, reaches the proper
and perfect moment for translating each in turn of the law-giving monu-
ments of Greece and Rome ? I had formulated this question to myself,
roughly, but with considerable zest in the prospect, for it lies in the
domain of that great and, in the true sense, epoch-making piece
of criticism, Brunetiere's Developpement des Genres^ when I found, in
an appendix to the Poet Laureate's volume,- a (juotation from Prof.
Egger (who taught him Greek at the Sorbonne fifty years ago)
which expresses very clearly and well an affirmative solution of my
(|uery :

' Talent is not everything in successful translation : works of this
kind usually have their appropriate season, wliich, once past, seldom
returns. At a certain age in their respective development two

> 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<iea in Fitzgerald.

TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 11

in the English of Dryden's and Temple's period, when the written
and the spoken word were in happy adjustment. This Plato ex-
emplified ; and deserved of us nothing less than this. This is the we
plus ultra of pi'ose ; but to talk well and yet not be stilted, to write
with easy frankness and yet escape triviality, these are consummations
which no one man may command. They happen in the halcyon days.
They are bred out of a certain natural homogeneity — almost a covenant
of culture and manners — which is perhaps only possible in a small
society free from anarchic liberty of prophesying and from competitive
wilfulness. For a time our language had this ; but it failed in that
time to give us our Plato truly Englished.

Therefore I doubt if, in ultimate residue, Egger's doctrine leaves us
niore than this : that there are moments when in power and aptitude
two languages are most nearly matched for the production of a certain
sort of literature — be it Epic poem or prose dialogue, or what
you will.

Those are the happiest ages when a man '^ writes the language of his
time% having no necessity or temptation to do otherwise. Under
these conditions even second-rate talent has a career open to attain
distinguished success. For frugality is so much a note of true
classicism — and these conditions are those of classicism — that not
merely the individual but also the community economizes. Its inherit-
ance is improved. For the great men's use of language leaves it
more efficacious for smaller men coming after them, to employ well :
whereas your Dervish Contortionists, the Strong men or Supermen of
literature — I will instance Carlyle — leave a trail of destruction behind
them. Our language is an instrument which their wilfulness has
abused and left less fit for the next workman. Their successors are
sacrificed to their egotistical perversity. Every one will write better
for taking a course of Swift, Hazlitt, or Newman, or other writers of
^ central ' prose ; but a course of Carlyle will merely betray itself in
certain nervous tricks and outlandish grimaces.

Thanks to this law then, any language at its classical period is
more foolproof, and more able to comfort and supplement a modest
talent, enabling it to render useful service; especially in translation.
It was no singular genius which enabled Amyot by his versions to
take so honourable a place in French literature. We must therefore
revise what is sometimes too hastily asserted : when we ask for a trans-
lation of a masterpiece, we are not requiring a miraculous repetition
of a genius which was itself unique. The highest creative power of

12 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS

genius is not requisite ; if the time be of the right tenor and sugges-
tion, and if the htnguage fully contribute its part, then curiosity,
ambition, personal fancy and partiality — modest everydaj- substitutes
for genius, but not at all to be despised — may move a writer to
produce ^vhat shall prove to be a true masterpiece in its kind.

It is not merely in homage to the great memory of Brunetiere
that I labour these points. His analyses go so deep ; and the
biological analogy for literature (discreetly pursued, of course) gives
a penetrating power to criticism, which is quite modern. Ancient
critics could not fail to remark — Latins especially, with their
perennial genius for self-depreciation — that though young they were
already corrupt; that language advanced from rudeness to civilization ;
and they had left the rude stage only a little behind : witness both
Cicero and Horace. Tacitus takes the point of view M'hich regards
Cicero and the Augustans as antiquated. But by the time when
that development A^as really stationary or already turning to decline
there were no critics to mark the transformation or to watch the
rudimentary beginnings of quite new kinds. Criticism as we under-
stand it now, criticism as a branch of history, is the nineteenth
century's creation ; and chiefly Brunetiere's.

But it is time to show how it bears upon the translator's task. In
this way. A beginner in a language sees each separate uork as
a detached creature, much too near the eye ; without horizon, and in
no relation to the rest of the literature, whether antecedent or con-
temporary. He repeats parrot homages to its greatness ; but if you
ask him — say — with whom in English is Plato level ? Is it Bacon,
or Browne, or Lamb ? *^ What's your notion of Horace ? Is he like
a Tom Moore, or an Austin Dobson, or a Thomas Campbell r Could
Marvell produce the most Horatian ode in English, or Tennyson ? ' —
he will either not apprehend the question or at any rate be in no
position to answer it. And yet it is surely a great piece of presump-
ton to set about bringing something out of Greek or Latin into our
own language witiiout realizing what it meant, how it stood, in the
judgement of Greeks and Latins.

Now to estimate the pitch or key of any given style is the greatest
of problems for translators. It is like discovering the family history
and antecedents of a stranger; nay more, trying to determine the
e.xpression of a face. It takes many years deep reading in the
ancient languages to acliie\e this. It is a mystery entirely unknown
as a rule to the editors of school texts. To give a crucial instance
from my own experience, it was not b} any aid from modern editors,
(iur little Pages and Sidgwicks, <S:c., nor even from Conington himself.

TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 13

that lifter many years I came to perceive that when Horace attributed

to Virgil the (jiialities

molle atquefacetum

lie meant something — something quite definite, and something
quite inconsistent with tlie prevailing conception of Virgil in terms
of the modern English Public Schoolboy. In Virgil you may learn
to discern the humour and the irony (which are so easily lost in the more
or less thick veil A\'hich separates us from anj' foreign language) by
studying the old commentators, Servius & Co. Virgil the sentimental
humorist ! What a revelation, when you have read some hundreds
of English schoolboy's essays on the fourth Book of the Aeneid — Was
Aeneas a perfect Boy Scout ? Did he say Noblesse oblige to himself
three times a day ? Did he always remember to be sorry for those
who were not like himself ? Alas, he did not ; and he was horrid to
Dido. He was no gentleman — what a revelation, to read that simple
sentence in which Servius characterizes the book

paene comicus est stilus.

'^Almost in the manner of comedy.' It is a touchstone thesis for
an essay ; one can hardly write upon it without betraying ignorance
either of Virgil or of comedy. Such a sentence is a key. Until you
have hit the pitch of an author, you risk an utter falsification in
rendering him. You may be able to construe every sentence in him,
and yet slander him in gross and your total result be a lie. What an
actor calls ' conception of the part ' is really much more important
than knowing words correctly.

It may seem a difficult — certainly it is an expert's achievement to
appraise the level of a classical author's writing. Above all things
the unlettered like poetry to be very poetical, and they are apt to resent
violently any pretension to familiarity in the rendering of those whom
they have known in English — only caparisoned in gorgeous tatters
of Authorised Bible diction, patched with Kipling in his Sunday
manner. I remember protests against allo\^'ing Tragedy persons
even to say ' You ' for Thou and Thee : yet why should Shakespeare's
practice come amiss in a rendering of Sophocles ? The objector's
answer, if he dared or cared to express it, Mould be that lie couldn't
bear his classics to be familiarized. He wishes them to appear remote
and of another world. Perhaps this is his way of feeling what
Dr. Bridges asserts (see below, p. 16). Illusion is, of course, essential
in Art ; but ought our illusion to be quite different from theirs who
enjoyed the original r This seems to be untrue and therefore bad art.
I want to discover and reconstruct an environment, not a master-

14 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS

piece in vacuo; because contemporaries must have known it better
than we can do witliout their assistance. Difficult it is ; but not so
hopelessly difficult after all, if we set about it in the right way.
Style is not all airy and immeasurable, but a thing patient of com-
parative estimate. Here are two simple rules. Do you want to
determine the pitch of, say, Sophocles ? Take a standpoint in the
central classical period when the Greek language is at its maturity
of expressiveness, and judge him by the prose writers. Does he use
a common vocabulary with them ? If so, his pitch is evidently more
familiar than that of Aeschylus, whom Aristophanes testifies to have
been, to the taste of the next generation, grandiloquent to the verge of
bombast.

The second test is more searching and demands perhaps more
scholarship to apply it. It depends on a great principle in the
ancient teaching of style — Rhetoric, as they called it : a most proper
subject for teachers of English nowadays to teach. The ancient
Professors of Literature saw that a language has for its backbone
a vocabidary of pure idiom, KvpLa propria, in which we regularly
express ourselves — the language of educated and businesslike people
whose code is common sense — in the old full meaning of that glorious
term. Dithyrambists, stockbrokers, sporting journalists, and other
votaries of Dionysus, do not think or speak in propria, but in a wild and
fanciful jargon of metaphors, allusions, &c. They write for the few,
(Po)vavTa avr^To'Laiv. The moment you depart from propria, you are
using Figured Language. Your nouns wear masks and dress up, your
sentences attitudinize.^ Take Horace and Virgil and assay them by
this test : their more or less of Figured or of Real, in vocabulary and
syntax — which the old commentators especially can help us to deter-
mine — will give you a base for calculating their pitch of language.
Now English, since Wordsworth, affords us similar scales. If you
make highfalutin English of familiar Latin, you falsify ; just as, if
you suggest bathos, you fail. But for ninety-nine critics who will
exclaim at the latter fault, hardly one will be aware of the former.
As an instance we need go no further afield that Alrgil's Eclogues
once more. Since the Germans started belittling Virgil, as they
belittled all Latin, in order to glorify Greek — of which they fondly
suppose themselves to be the literary heirs in Europe-; our English
scJKjlars, with the degrading sequacity which was the prescribed
atiitu(h' of Oxford towards German scholarship untiMhe day before

' lliitlii'ifonl, A C/iiiptrr in (he Hislon/ oj Annotation.

^ I'li'^-i'^, ill liib I'lcfare to llit^tuin: tie Iti Poiiie intine, lias some good remarks
OJ) tlii>- 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.

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<r, ])ut must bridge o\er a chasm, especially
if lie determine to complete tlie antiphony of Strophe and Antistrophe
in English verse.

' Thus encumbered with forms which sometimes, I think, hang
heavy on Aeschylus himself: struggling with indistinct meanings,
obscure allusions, and even with puns which some have tried to re-
produce in English ; tliis grand play, which to the scholar and poet,
lives, breathes and moves in the dead language, has hitherto seemed to
me to drag and strifle under conscientious translation into the living;
that is to say, to have lost that which I think the drama can least
afford to lose all the world over. And so it was that, hopeless of suc-
ceeding where as good versifiers, and better scholars, seemed to me to
have failed, I came first to break the bounds of Greek Tragedy ; then
to su'erve from the Master's footsteps ; and so, one licence drawing
on another to make all of a piece, arrived at the present anomalous
conclusion. If it has succeeded in shaping itself into a distinct, con-
sistent and animated Whole, through which the reader can follow
without halting, and not without accelerating interest from beginning
to end, he will perhaps excuse my acknowledged transgressions, and
will not disdain the Jade that has carried him so far so well till he
find himself mounted on a Thoroughbred whose thunderclothed neck
and long-resounding pace shall better keep up with the Original.

' For to recreate the Tragedy, body and soul, into English, and
make the Poet free of the language which reigns over that half of the
^\•orld never dreamt of in his philosophy, must be reserved — especially
the Lyric part — for some poet, worthy of that name, and of congenial
Genius with the Greek. Would that every one such Mould devote
himself to one such work ! — whether by Translation, Paraphrase, or
Metaphrase, to use Dryden's definition, whose Alexander's Feast, and
some fragments of whose plays, indicate that he, perhaps, might have
rendered such a service to Aeschylus and to us, or to go further back
in our own drama, one thinks what Marlowe might have done.'

' Well, I have not turned over Johnson's Dictionary for the last
month, having got hold of Aeschylus. I think I want to turn his
Trilogy into what shall be readable English verse ; a thing I have
always thought of, but was frightened at the Chorus. So I am now ;
I can't think them so fine as People talk of; they are terribly nutimed;
and all such Lyrics require a better Poet than I am to set forth in Eng-
lish. But the better Poets won't do it ; and I cannot find one readable
translation. I shall (if I make one) make a very free one; not for
Scholars, l)ut for those who are ignorant of Greek, and who (so far as
I have seen) have never been induced to learn it by any Translations
yet made of these Plays. I think I shall become a bore, of theBowring
order, by all this Translation ; ])ut it amuses me without any labour,
and I really think I have the faculty of making some things readable
which others have hitherto left unreadable.' ^

' Idem, Letttrs, Coll. Worhs, vol. ii, p. 72, to C'owell, 1857.

TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 19

^I suppose very few People have ever taken such pains with
Translation as I have, thouj^h certainly not to be literal. But at all
Cost, a Thing must live, Mdth a transfusion of one's own worse life
if one can't retain the Original's better. Better a live sparrow than
a stuffed eagle.' ^

That is the challenge and this is the replique. The issue is quite
squarely drawn for decision. What is your verdict ?

Let us first remark that Browning's position is distinctively modern ;
such a claim would be inconceivable earlier than the nineteenth
century. Call it, if you like, one of many significant symptoms of
the anarchy of thought and art M'hich marked that century. But
at least you Mill admit that so long as recognized standards of form
were there to correct eccentricity and assimilate barbarisms (in the
Greek sense — shall we say Extei'isms ?), a clear difference was drawn
between a translation which claims literary rank and a translation
which is only useful or agreeable to those who are learning the
original language. For instance, here are words taken from George
Colman the younger's Preface to his rendering of Terence (1766) :

' Those who have (i. e. since Echard) since employed themselves on
this author, seem to have confined their labours to the humble
endeavour of assisting learners of Latin in the construction of the
original text.'

Cribs, in fact, to use our brutal modern term. Of cribs and
the queer jargon which crawled into being when cribs began to set up
literary pretensions, the criblingo, which is current only in the limbo
where books attempted to be carried from one language into another
and dropped half-way have a pale unhonoured existence, no treatment
could be attempted in less space than a whole lecture ; I must thei-e-
fore deny myself any excursion into this interesting field.

You will recognize something that they all take for granted —
Colma« and Fitzgerald and Browning, — which can be resolved into
this : a necessary and invincible residual inequalitj^ between the
original and the translation, and a consequent question — which is
to be master ? Is it an absolute position to say, ' Good English is good
English, and nothing shall enter here which cannot or ivill not assume
national colours ' ? Or is Aeschylus allowed an indefeasible right to
have the English language cut into rags and patched together to
fit him ? To fit him with what ? A coat of motley ! For fear lest
the cut of his clothes be too English. Authority, which some call
Tyranny, and Freedom, which some say is Anarchy, have to fight

1 Idem, ib. p. 100, 1859.

20 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS

it out, here ;is elsewhere. Of course there are great Victorian voices,
Carlvle Mith his German soul and Browning with his German-Jewish
intellect, instinctively in rehellion against the sacred and vital
institution of national language. But although (as we have seen) one
of the proper functions of translation, and just that which makes
it a natural diet for languages in their adolescence, is to expand
the capacities, force a growth even of new organs in the translators,
to satisfy the needs and perform the feats to which the ancients
challenge it ; does it follow that the needs for expansion and
adaptation which were present in the language 500 years ago, still
exist unsatisfied ? Has English not yet realized what it means to be,
or found its true genius ? For that is the renunciation implied in
Browning's claim and practice. Or is it merely a fickleness of
fashion and a restlessness of personal ambition in men who are
in 'the sulks ^ or '^on the make', which indulges these eccentricities?

AYe must dig rather deeper within the site indicated b)^ Brunetiere.
Try here. What do we mean Avhen we say (one often hears it) that
the Classics need retranslating for the taste of a new age ? Chapman,
Hohbes, Pope, none of them but thinks scorn of his predecessors ;
and then the nineteenth century disowns them all, allowing a pre-
ference though for the earliest. No one reads Chapman ; but he is
good enough to beat Pope Avith. He owes most of his remembrance
to the chance word that Keats threw to him.

If we admit that the language had hardly reached its classical
maturity when any of Pope's predecessors made their essays (which,
of course, does not mean that Pope's was the period or the hand best
(jualified to English Homer) ; and if, furthermore, we admit that the
knowledge of Greek (a prerequisite, of course) Avas greatly improved
in the nineteenth century, still there remains, after taking these two
abatements, an important cause to be drawn out. Some French
statesman (M. Hanotaux, I think) observed that it is nonsense to
talk of the decadence or destruction of France, because the Western
nations, being composite, have internal resources of repair. Alternate
strains in the breed revive and recover ; when the Frank wears out, the
Gaul reappears; Mhen the Norman shows senescence, the Iberian
element provides a new force of blood, ^c.^ And it is all France :
provided the institutions are sound, it is all France, successive and
alternate phases of an identical thing. Leaving the German to his
fatuous brag of being pure-blooded and uncrossed — a boast which the
crabtree has made to the apple, and the sloe tree to the jjlum, for

^ Since this was writteji I find in Hrunetiere's Hitit. de la Lift, f'ranr., vol. iv,
pp. 100-71, some valuable indications on this subject.

TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS 21

thousands of years — what is true of France is fully as true of us. The
fact is a commonplace, but the consequences are strangely neglected.
There are great chapters unwritten on the ethnological bases of great
historic revolutions. What strain wore out, what new strain came up
and took charge in our revolutions — that of the sixteenth century
and that which we are still painfully traversing ? And you can never
separate history from literature. The disfavour into which our
Augustans fell means a change of ear in the reader. Every racial
constituent has its unconscious sympathies and aptitudes in rhythm
and vocabulary. If you hate the very idea of Speaking Verse and
deny the title of poetry to anything but Singing Verse, the reason lies
deeper than your schooling or your studies. If you think begin is a
beautiful word and commence an abomination, even in the pure idioms
'^commence tradesman', ' commence firing', you declare yourself of a
racial faction. (You are so much tiie poorer for it. The great motlier-
tongue is a mother to all her children ; good English ought to employ
these doublets as an organist employs the different registers of his
instrument. This by the way.)

Now in the light of this fact we can see how the power and office
of translation will be prolonged or recalled at intervals. Since now
one, now another, element of a composite language is in youth, the
standardizing as well as developing discipline of translation has far
from exhausted its opportunity. (May I even suggest that part of the
activity of English in development is a perpetual process of internal
translation — translation from one fund of the language to another ? )
The nineteenth century craved for Homer dressed in a pastiche of
Jacobean Bible English ; and Butcher and Lang furnished the British
schoolboy with his authorized version. Thus was he expected — nay,
required under penalty to translate. The Laureate reckons it a fault
if Homer in English reminds us of Pope ; thirty years ago it was
thought anything but a fault if Homer reminded a boy of the head
master declaiming at the lectern. In the last resort, we come to a
phase of religious history. And to that subject my paper makes no
pretence of contributing. Homer was swept into the wake of a
craze. As Opheltes in the Theban legend was killed, sleeping, by an
unconscious flick of the passing Dragon's tail, so Homer must fall in
with the anti-Augustan reaction. A generation had arisen which
could not bear domes and dames, but whose ears were tickled by a
vocabulary of Tudor words arranged in a syntax which might be of the
nineteenth century, or of no century whatever. If one may say tliat
translation is a Foreign Legion in which great writers of other languages
are enrolled ; then, pursuing the same metaphor, one must add that

22 TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATORS

in the Victorian Age it was no longer a question of enlisting Homer in
the English language — that had been done ; but of drawing him into
a faction. Not Homer in English, but Homer in a different English.
A new party wished to saj"^, 'We have our Homer'.

And now to return finally to the case of Browning and Fitz-
gerald, which we have kept at avizandum. The verdict I suggest to
you is that the rights of English are supreme. A translation
should be read for pleasure, not merely for curiosity ; and read as
literature. Not scholars (least of all self-taught scholars), but men
of letters are the authorities of this custom-house. What claims
to pass into English by the gate of translation must be chalked with
their approval. But in affairs of art practice can always override
principle.

Treason can ne'e)' succeed, and what's the reason'^
When it succeeds we do not call it treason.

All the rules serve Beauty ; show you can serve her by breaking
them, and all their sanctions shall be waived for you. And in practice,
if you start two good craftsmen, one from the principle that English is
paramount : nothing shall pass but what is perfectly sterling English,
and another from the other extreme, the Greek's the thing: not a
hair of its head shall be sacrificed — irreconcilably far distant
as their points of departure may appear to be, yet the excellence,
the adroitness of their craftsmanship will be the measure of their
approach to each other. ' In as Greek a fashion as English can
bear' says Browning; and old Fitz replies (in effect) 'as English as
Aeschylus can be made.' Browning is out to try the patience, Fitz
the powers, of English. But an artist is often a better man tiian his
principles. And after a masterpiece, critics must often revise their
legislation ; though unless their measures have been very ill conceived,
it ought never to reduce them to anarchy.

For forms of Government let fools contest ;
Whate'er is best administered is best.

Is that the last Mord on the question ? No, that is the abrogation
of criticism. Whatever can be Mell administered is so far good.
But you can never define what you mean by 'good' administration,
or success of a literary experiment, without recourse to classicist
standards — (piod nhirjve qvod semper — durability and power to com-
mand consent, lirowning's claim, doii])tful now, is ever less likely
to be allowed in the future; Fitzgerald's is unquestionable now.
Therefore — judgement for Fitzgerald.

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Contents : — What English Poetry may still learn from Greek, by
Gilbert Murray ; Some Childish Things, by A. A. Jack ; A Lover's
Complaint, by J. W. Mackail ; Arnold and Homer, by T. S. Omond ;
Keats's Epithets, by David Watson Rannie ; Dante and the Grand
Style, by George Saintsbury ; Blake's Religious Lyrics, by H. C.
Beeching.

Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association.
Vol. IV. CoUected by C. H. Herford. Clarendon Press.
2s. 6d. to members.

Contents : — A Note on Dramatic Criticism, by J. E. Spingam ;
English Prose Numbers, by O. Elton ; Some Unconsidered Elements
in English Place-names, by A. Mawer; Platonism in Shelley, by L.
Winstanley ; Defoe's True-born Englishman, by A. C. Guthkelch ; The
Plays of Mr. John Galsworthy, by A. R. Skemp ; Dramatic Technique in
Marlowe, by G. P. Baker.

Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association.

Vol. V. Collected by Oliver Elton. Clarendon Press.

2s. 6d. to members.

Contents: — Rhythm in English Verse, Prose, and Speech, by D. S.
MacColl ; Tlie Novels of Mark Rutherford, by A. E. Taylor ; English
Place-names and Teutonic Sagas, by F. W. Moorman; Shelley's
Triumph of Life, by F. Melian Stawell ; Emily Bronte, by J. C. Smith ;
Translation from Old into Modern English, by A. Blyth Webster.

Poems of To-day, An Anthology. Published for the English
Association by Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd. Price 2s.

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