haec studio, adnlescentiam alunt, senectutem 
 
 oblectant, secundas res ornaiit, adversis perfugium 
 ac solatium praebent, deledant domi, non iin- 
 pediunt foris, pernoctant nolnscum, peregrinantnr, 
 rnsticantur. Cic., PRO ARCH., 16. 
 
 PRIVATE LIBRARY OF 
 
 ED. H. HEFFNER 
 
 No
 
 THE 
 
 ART OF TRANSLATING 
 
 WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO 
 
 CAUER'S DIE KUNST DES UEBERSETZENS 
 
 BY 
 
 HERBERT GUSHING TOLMAN, PH.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY 
 
 ov TroXX* dAAa TTO\V 
 
 BENJ. H. SANBORN & CO. 
 
 BOSTON, U. S. A. 
 
 1901
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1900, BT 
 BENJ. H. SANBORN & CO.
 
 TO 
 
 MY SISTER 
 ANNA TOLMAN 
 
 IN TOKEN OF HER MANY YEARS' WORK 
 IN THE 
 
 FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 I have read no book during my eight years of teaching which 
 has been so suggestive as Cauer's "ZH'e Kunst des Uebersetz- 
 ens." That work has proved itself to me what the author 
 entitles it: "Ein Hilfbuch fur den lateinischen und griechischen 
 Unterricht." I have found the principles therein laid down not 
 only sound theoretically, but of practical benefit in the teaching 
 of the classics. These same principles we ought, I believe, to 
 extend and apply in the translation of any language, ancient 
 or modern. 
 
 Our teaching of a foreign tongue is apt to be too mechanical. 
 The student must be made to feel that the language he is study- 
 ing is not something strange and mysterious, but natural and 
 simple. This he cannot do until he changes his position and 
 looks at the unfolding of the thought from the standpoint of 
 the original. It is then, and not till then, that he really reaches 
 the heart of his Latin or Greek, his French or German. It is 
 then that he is prepared to enter upon what is as much an art 
 as that of the sculptor, of the painter, of the designer ; I mean 
 the art of reproducing into living English his appreciation of 
 all that the original has brought to him. 
 
 This little book is not based on that of Cauer in the sense 
 that it is a translation or an adaptation of his work. I alone am 
 responsible for many of the views herein expressed. Whatever 
 I have translated from the German is indicated by quotation 
 marks. Wherever an idea of Cauer's has been put in my own
 
 VL PEEFACE. 
 
 language, his name follows within parentheses, or reference is 
 given in a footnote. Due recognition has been made of other 
 writings. Especially I would thank Professors W. G. Hale, 
 H. C. G. von Jagemann, G. H. McKnight, and E. H. Babhitt, 
 for their cordial permission to quote the passages given. In 
 regard to Professor Hale I feel that it is not out of place in 
 the preface of a book of this kind to state that to him more 
 than to any other American scholar we owe the practical 
 method of reading Latin now so generally adopted. The ex- 
 tracts from Tyrrell, Lowell, and Bayard Taylor I have used by 
 special arrangement with and permission of Houghton, Mifflin 
 & Company, the authorized publishers of Tyrrell's " Latin 
 Poetry," the writings of James Russell Lowell, and Bayard 
 Taylor's translation of "Faust." Several excellent translations 
 of the late Professor Lane have been cited with the sanction 
 of his son, Mr. G. M. Lane. I wish also to express my grati- 
 tude to my dear friends Dr. C. E. Little and Mr. Edwin Wiley 
 for their careful criticism of my manuscript. My assistant, 
 Dr. Benjamin M. Drake, has given valuable help in the read- 
 ing of the proof. 
 
 The subject is such a broad one that I feel I have merely 
 touched upon it here and there, but my hope is that these 
 principles will be found at least suggestive in the reading and 
 teaching of foreign languages. 
 
 HEBBFBT GUSHING TOLMAN. 
 
 VANDEBBILT UNIVEBSITY, 
 November, 1900.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 READING THE ORIGINAL 
 
 THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR .... 
 
 TRANSLATION NOT EXPLANATION 35 
 
 THE CHOICE OF WORDS 
 
 PRIMITIVE SIGNIFICATION 44 
 
 SYNONYMS 47 
 
 ETYMOLOGY 52 
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS 55 
 
 FIGURES OF SPEECH '" 
 
 THE GREEK PARTICLES ? 6
 
 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 READING THE ORIGINAL. 
 
 In reading a foreign tongue one must not tnink of 
 translation : reading a language is one thing, translat- 
 ing it is another. At the very outset we must im- 
 merse ourselves in the current of the native thought 
 and feeling. Vast the gulf between translation and 
 its original. "The stream that escapes from the 
 waste pipe of a fountain gives no notion of the rise 
 and fall and swirl and spray and rainbow glitter of 
 the volume of water that rejoices to return the 
 sportive touch of the sunlight." l 
 
 To him alone who has entered the living heart of 
 the French come the pathos and the power of Victor 
 Hugo's famous lines ; 
 
 O ma pauvre opprimee ! 
 
 Ma Blanche ! mon bonheur ! ma fille bien-aim6e ! 
 Lorsqu'elle etait enfant, je la tenais ainsi. 
 Elle dormait sur moi, tout comme la voici ! . 
 Quand elle reveillait, si vous saviez quel ange ! 
 Je ne lui semblais pas quelque chose d'etrange, 
 1 Gildersleeve, Introductory Essay to Pindar.
 
 10 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 Elle me souriait avec ses yeux divins, 
 Et moi je lui baisais ses deux petites mains ! 
 Pauvre agneau ! Morte! oh non! elle dort et repose. 
 Tout a 1'heure, messieurs, c'etait bien autre chose, 
 Elle s'est cependant reveillee. Oh ! j'attend. 
 Vous 1'allez voir rouvrir ses yeux dans un instant ! 
 Vous voyez maintenant, messieurs, que je raisonne, 
 Je suis tranquille et doux, je n' offense personne ; 
 Puisque je ne fait rien de ce qu'on me defend, 
 On peut bien me laisser regarder rnon enfant. 
 J'ai deja rechauffe ses mains entre les miennes ; 
 Voyez, touchez les done un peu ! . . . 
 
 Le Hoi s'amuse, Act V, Scene 5. 
 
 As one whose eye is trained to receive a finer 
 vision of the landscape detects delicacies of shade 
 and outline on a great master's canvas, so the more 
 the reader feels the heart throb of the original, the 
 more he sees the skill of the poet translator who has 
 rendered 
 
 My poor down-trodden child! 
 My Blanche, my joy, my well-beloved one ! 
 When she was but a child, I held her thus ; 
 She slept upon my breast, even as you see. 
 And when she woke oh, could you know the angel 
 That looking from her eyes, saw me nor strange 
 Nor terrible, but smiled with heavenlike eyes 
 The while I kissed those poor small childish hands ! 
 Poor lamb ! Dead ? Nay, she sleeps and takes her rest. 
 You will see soon, gentles, it is naught, 't is naught :
 
 BEADING THE ORIGINAL. 11 
 
 Even now she wakes to life oh ! I am watching 
 You will see her ope her eyes one moment yet ! 
 She will ope her eyes you see my sense is clear 
 I brave no man I am calm, I pray you see ! 
 And seeing I have no will but to obey you, 
 I pray you let me look upon my child. 
 No furrow on her brow, no out- worn grief : 
 Already I have warmed her hands in mine. 
 Come, feel them now ! 
 
 It is because the spirit of Tennyson is native to us 
 that we appreciate how admirably Strodtmann has 
 reproduced the familiar stanza : 
 
 The splendor falls on castle walls 
 
 And snowy summits old in story; 
 The long light shakes across the lakes 
 
 And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 
 Blow, bugle, blow ; set the wild echoes flying. 
 Blow, bugle ; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying. 
 
 Es fallt der Strahl auf Burg und Thai 
 
 Und schneeige Gipfel, reich an Sagen ; 
 Viel' Lichter wehn auf blauen Seen, 
 
 Bergab die Wasserstiirze jagen! 
 Bias, Hufthorn, bias, in Wiederhall erschallend 
 Bias, Horn Antwortet, Echos, hallend, hallend, hallend. 
 
 And so we see that we are compelled to grasp the 
 idea from the standpoint of the original, a stand- 
 point which may be, and often is, entirely different 
 from or directly opposed to that of the English. Let
 
 12 THE AKT OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 us suppose the student is reading Greek and meets 
 the simple Greek idiom /caXw? e%iv. In nine cases 
 out of ten he is first taught the idiomatic English 
 translation and then endeavors to work backward 
 to the standpoint of the Greek. This is a sad case 
 of hysteron-proteron. He is looking at the construc- 
 tion with English eyes, and it appears as foreign to 
 him as if he were in a strange country ; he does 
 not and cannot feel the spirit of the Greek, since 
 instinctively there steals into his mind the feeling 
 that Ka\a)<f ex^tv by some mysterious process be- 
 comes the equivalent of *:a\o<? elvai. This is all 
 wrong. He should be led to appreciate fully the 
 Greek point of view before even attempting to ren- 
 der the phrase into the idiom of his own language. 
 
 Again, one ought to associate the words of a for- 
 eign language with the objects themselves, of which 
 words are but vocal pictures. Take German, for 
 instance : when the reader meets the word Baum 
 there should recur at once to his mind the object 
 itself, and not the English word tree ; I mean by this 
 that the mental process should be, not Baum, tree, 
 the object, but Baum, the object and then the English 
 tree. This last stage ought only to be reached when 
 the reader assumes the role of a translator. While 
 he is merely reading German, the English tree should 
 not intrude into the thought. 
 
 There is some truth in Dr. Jagemann's words : 
 " It is not necessary to translate Iphigenie into Eng-
 
 READING THE ORIGINAL. 13 
 
 lish in order to obtain the greatest possible amount 
 of mental discipline which Goethe's wonderful work 
 can yield. The mental process of translation con- 
 sists of two parts : first, we must grasp the thought 
 of the author ; second, we must express this thought 
 in the language into which we are translating. Now, 
 in making the translation from German into English, 
 only the first part of this mental process has any 
 effect upon the student's knowledge of German; 
 consequently, for the study of German we may be 
 content if the student grasps the author's ideas, and 
 this he can do without translating." l 
 
 I am very sure, to generalize from my own experi- 
 ence, that every American who has studied at the 
 German universities has tried at first to take in 
 English the notes of his professor, and desperately 
 failed. It is only when he forgets English and 
 grasps the idea in German itself that he can carry 
 away any satisfactory conception of what he has 
 heard. The reason of this is plain enough. It is 
 that the mind has not to go through any intervening 
 stage before gathering the idea from the spoken 
 language. 
 
 A student spends six years in the study of Latin, 
 let us say, and at the end of that time has to worm 
 his way painfully through a Latin sentence, often 
 with slavish dependence on a dictionary. Or he 
 
 1 Transactions of Modern Language Association, Vol. I, pp. 226, 
 226.
 
 14 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 devotes five years to French and does not acquire 
 such freedom in the spoken language as a child gains 
 during a six months' stay in Paris in constant 
 association with French playmates. When this 
 state of things exists there must be something wrong 
 with our method of instruction. Where is the 
 fault? Undoubtedly, it lies in the fact that the 
 student is made to feel that the language he is study- 
 ing is foreign to his way of thinking. Something 
 comes between him and the text which he is read- 
 ing. If it be Latin, for example, he unfortunately 
 has the misconception that he must strain and twist 
 his English to fit the Latin form of expression. 
 There will never be a remedy for this until the pupil 
 is taught to think in Latin, until he is brought to 
 feel that the Latin sentence is natural, not mysteri- 
 ous. It is the spirit of the original that he must 
 get this is the life of the sentence ; and until he 
 breathes this spirit, Latin or any other language will 
 be in too true a sense a dead language. 
 
 Professor Hale put it strongly and concisely when 
 he said : " Reading the original is the one method that 
 should everywhere be rigorously used from the day 
 of the first lesson to the last piece of Latin that the 
 college graduate reads to solace his old age. Only, 
 the process which at first is at every point conscious 
 and slow, as it was not with the Romans, becomes in 
 Latin of ordinary difficulty a process wholly unconscious 
 and very rapid, precisely as it was with the Romans.
 
 HEADING THE ORIGINAL. 15 
 
 . . . We must for some time think out, at every 
 point, as the sentence progresses (and that without 
 ever allowing ourselves to look ahead), all those con- 
 veyings of meaning, be they choice of words, or choice 
 of order, or choice of case, or choice of mode, or 
 choice of tense, or whatever else which at that point 
 suffice for the Roman mind. And, when these indi- 
 cations which after all are not so many in num- 
 ber have come to be so familiar to us that most of 
 them are ready to flash before the mind without our 
 deliberately summoning them, we shall be very near 
 the point at which, in Latin graded to our growing 
 powers, we shall interpret indications unconsciously. 
 And the moment we do that we shall be reading 
 Latin by the Roman's own method." 1 
 
 Read the original, think in the original, that is 
 the whole story. The advice of a famous German 
 professor for the acquisition of a vocabulary applies 
 here equally well : "Lesen, viel lesen, seTir viel lesen, 
 sehr viel viel lesen." 
 
 It is only by reading the foreign tongue that we 
 really enter, as we must, its life and strength. How 
 widely different its spirit often is from that of our 
 own has been well observed in De Quincey's splendid 
 differentiation of Greek and English tragedy: "To 
 my own feeling the different principle of passion 
 which governs the Grecian conception of tragedy as 
 compared with the English, is best conveyed by say- 
 !The Art of Beading Latin, pp. 15-17.
 
 16 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 ing that the Grecian is a breathing from the world of 
 sculpture, the English a breathing from the world of 
 painting. What we read in sculpture is not abso- 
 lutely death, but still less is it the fullness of life. . . . 
 It affects us profoundly, but not by agitation. Now, 
 on the other hand, the breathing life life kindling, 
 trembling, palpitating that life which speaks to us 
 in painting, this is also the life that speaks to us in 
 English tragedy. Into an English tragedy even fes- 
 tivals of joy may enter ; marriages and baptisms, or 
 commemorations of national trophies; which, or 
 anything like which, is incompatible with the very 
 being of the Greek. In that tragedy what uni- 
 formity of gloom; in the English what light alter- 
 nating with the depths of darkness! The Greek, 
 how mournful ; the English, how tumultuous ! Even 
 the catastrophes how different! In the Greek we 
 feel a breathless waiting for a doom that cannot be 
 evaded ; a waiting, as it were, for the last shock of 
 an earthquake, or the inexorable rising of a deluge ; 
 in the English it is like a midnight of shipwreck, 
 from which up to the last and till the final ruin 
 comes, there still survives a sort of hope that clings 
 to human energies." 
 
 But De Quincey's words give us only one point of 
 view. While it is true that we have to transport our 
 sentiments and feelings to what is distinctly foreign, 
 and to immerse ourselves, as I have said, in the life 
 and thoughts of other lands and peoples in order to
 
 HEADING THE ORIGINAL. 17 
 
 imbibe their spirit, yet the great lessons of mankind 
 are the same for all ages, because the human heart 
 and human life must always wrestle with the prob- 
 lems of duty and trial. How admirably is this 
 brought out by Symonds in his feeling comments on 
 the matchless choric odes of ^Eschylus' "Agamem- 
 non " : " To read the Greek aright in this wonderful 
 lyric, so concentrated in its imagery, and so direct in 
 its conveyance of the very soul of passion, is no 
 light task ; but far more difficult it is to render it 
 into another language. Yet, even thus, we feel that 
 this poem of defrauded desire and everlasting fare- 
 well, of vain outgoings of the spirit after vanished 
 joy, is written not merely for Menelaus and the 
 Greeks, but for all who stretch forth empty hands to 
 clasp the dreams of dear ones, and then turn away, 
 face-downward on the pillow, from the dawn, to 
 weep or strain hot eyes that shed no tears. Touched 
 by the same truth of feeling, which includes all 
 human nature in its sympathy, is the lament, shortly 
 after uttered by the Chorus, for the numberless fair 
 men who died before Troy town. Ares, the grim 
 gold-exchanger, who barters the bodies of men, sends 
 home a little dust shut up within a narrow urn, and 
 wife and father water this with tears, and cry, 
 Behold, he perished nobly in a far land, fighting for 
 a woman, another's wife. And others there are who 
 come not even thus again to their old home ; but 
 barrows on Troy plain enclose their young flesh, and
 
 18 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 an alien soil is their sepuicher. This picture of 
 beautiful dead men, warriors and horsemen, in the 
 prime of manhood, lying stark and cold, with the 
 dishonor of the grave upon their comely hair, and 
 with the bruises of the battle on limbs made for 
 love, is not meant merely for Achaians, but for all 
 for us, perchance, whose dearest moulder on Crimean 
 shores or Indian plains, for whom the glorious faces 
 shine no more ; but at best some tokens, locks of 
 hair, or books, or letters, come to stay our hunger 
 unassuaged. How truly and how faithfully the 
 Greek poet sang for all ages, and for all manner of 
 men, may be seen by comparing the strophes of this 
 Chorus with the last rhapsody but one of the chants 
 outpoured in America by Walt Whitman, to com- 
 memorate the events of the great war. The pathos 
 which unites these poets, otherwise so different in 
 aim and sentiment, is deep as nature, real as life ; 
 but from this common root of feeling springs in the 
 one verse a spotless lily of pure Hellenic form, in 
 the other a mystical thick growth of fancy, where 
 thoughts brood and nestle amid tufted branches ; for 
 the powers of classic and of modern singers upon 
 the same substance of humanity are diverse." l 
 
 Translation is like the art of painting. No artist 
 
 feels ready to paint until he knows what he is going 
 
 to paint. He does not paint a bush and then a tree 
 
 and then a stone as they come along, but first of all 
 
 i The Greek Poets, Vol. I, pp. 425, 426.
 
 HEADING THE OEIGINAL. 19 
 
 he gets a grand vision of the landscape, he lets it 
 sink into his soul, and then he is ready to begin his 
 painting. Precisely so with the art of the transla- 
 tor. He should never attempt to translate until the 
 idea of the original is clearly before his mind. How 
 many jump at a Greek sentence in the following 
 way : " Tijv8\ this one ; 'opa?, you see ; Sa/iapra, wife; 
 a-r)v, thy." To use our figure again, this method of 
 translating is like painting bit by bit, without the 
 extended vision. Get first the Greek idea, regardless 
 of corresponding English words; then when called 
 upon to translate, reproduce the Greek thought in an 
 English sentence which will conserve the emphasis ; 
 for example, " In her you behold your wife." Morris 
 may render the words of "Ast ego quae divum incedo 
 regina " (Vergil, ^En. i, 46), " I who go for the queen 
 of the gods," but Thornhill gives us the spirit in " I 
 who queen it through these courts of heaven." 
 
 As E. H. Babbitt remarks in his article on " Mental 
 Discipline of Modern Languages " : " Suppose that 
 the pupil has a clear understanding of a French sen- 
 tence : his work is only half done ; he has then to 
 make English of it. Here the difficulty is that the 
 pupil will render words without much regard to 
 their sense when taken in connection with the whole. 
 . . . The aim should be to get a clear conception of 
 what the author means, and then bearing in mind 
 that nothing has often been said in French or Ger- 
 man which cannot be said equally well in English,
 
 20 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 insist on having an English rendering which ex- 
 presses the idea correctly, and does no violence to 
 the English idiom." 
 
 The more one enters into the spirit of the language 
 he is reading, the more he appreciates the responsi- 
 bility of the translator, and realizes that many times 
 it is impossible to bring over into English the heart 
 of the original construction. Just as the eye of the 
 artist, which by training enters more deeply into the 
 soul of nature, realizes more than the inexperienced 
 eye the difficulty of the task, and is more keenly 
 aware of the powerlessness of the brush to portray 
 all that is in the landscape, so the trained translator 
 appreciates how exacting is his art. Take Cicero's 
 fine translation from the " Cresphontes " of Euripides 
 and note how Tyrrell has delicately reproduced the 
 same : 
 
 Nam nos decebat coetu celebrantes domum 
 Lugere ubi esset aliquis in lucem editus, 
 Humanae vitae varia reputantes mala ; 
 At qui labores morte finisset graves 
 Hunc omni amicos laude et laetitia exsequi. 
 
 Tusc. Disp., i, 115. 
 
 When a child 's born, our friends should throng our halls 
 And wail for all the ills that flesh is heir to ; 
 But when a man has done his long day's work 
 And goes to his long home to take his rest, 
 We all with joy and gladness should escort him. 1 
 i Tyrrell, Latin Poetry, p. 19.
 
 BEADING THE ORIGINAL. 21 
 
 " The task of the translator," says Bayard Taylor, 
 "is not simply mechanical; he must feel, and be 
 guided by, a secondary inspiration. Surrendering 
 himself to the full possession of the spirit which 
 shall speak through him, he receives, also, a portion 
 of the same creative spirit." 1 
 
 Here are four simple rules which, if observed, will 
 lead, I believe, to a deeper appreciation of a foreign 
 tongue: (1) Read, READ, READ the original with- 
 out endeavoring to translate. (2) Cultivate inde- 
 pendence of the lexicon. (3) Acquire vocabulary. 
 (4) Cease to fear the foreign sentence as some- 
 thing strange or uncanny. The test is not what 
 one has read, but the ability he has acquired from 
 reading what he has, to read more just like it with 
 greater ease. 
 
 In one word, we must think in the original. That 
 is no impossible ideal ; it is the only true goal of 
 language study. When this is acquired, Latin and 
 Greek, French and German, will not be laid aside on 
 leaving the college walls, for it is true that what is 
 once learned can never be unlearned, what is once 
 gotten can never be forgotten. Then the wish of 
 Goethe respecting the classics will be fulfilled : " Moge 
 das Studium der griechischen und romischen Liter- 
 atur immerfort die Basis der hoheren Bildung blei- 
 ben."* 
 
 1 Translation of Faust, Preface, p. vlil. 
 
 2 Sprtiche in Prosa.
 
 22 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 
 
 Before the translator begins his task he must nave 
 read thoroughly the sentence in the original and 
 grasped its meaning. Should he attempt translation 
 before this, he is like the builder who essays to build 
 a house before knowing its plan. No architect allows 
 a single block of stone to be put in place without 
 having before him the design of the completed struc- 
 ture. So if one plunges immediately into translating 
 the words in the order in which they come without 
 knowing the idea of the finished sentence, he is like 
 one who is simply building blocks, but not erecting 
 an edifice after some great pattern. 
 
 Remember that translation is not rendering the 
 words of a foreign language into English, but it is 
 the metamorphosis of the feeling, the life, the power, 
 the spirit of the original. In other words, and I 
 put them in italics for their emphasis, translation is 
 arousing in the English reader or hearer the identical 
 emotions and sentiments that were aroused in him who 
 read or heard the sentence as his native tongue. Trans- 
 lation is nothing more than this, and it certainly is 
 nothing less. As Wilamowitz puts it : " The transla- 
 tor's object must be to construct a sentence which will 
 make upon readers of to-day exactly the same im-
 
 THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 23 
 
 pression that was made by the original upon people 
 who were contemporaries of the author, awakening 
 as nearly as possible the same thoughts and senti- 
 ments." l 
 
 Let us illustrate again by the art most nearly like 
 the art of translating, that is, painting. The subject 
 of the painting may be the war-steed. The trained 
 hand portrays him with flashing eye, arched neck, 
 expanded nostrils ; the artist feels the martial spirit 
 and reproduces it in his work. The unskilful hand 
 and the untrained eye give us only legs and head and 
 body. Perhaps we cannot deny that the object is a 
 horse, but one thing surely is not there, that is, the 
 spirit of the original. In the same way one trans- 
 lator reproduces the idea of a sentence with all the 
 feeling, grandeur, beauty, and delicacy that it con- 
 tains ; the other gives us in shabby garments the idea 
 which had been clothed by the writer in majestic 
 robes. The strong line of Ennius, which, as Tyrrell 
 says, has been compared to the voice of an oracle, 
 
 Moribus antiquis stat Res Romana virisque, 
 one may render, " The Roman State stands on its 
 ancient customs and men " ; another, 
 
 Broad-based upon her men and principles 
 Standeth the state of Rome. ( Tyrrell.)] 
 
 Perhaps we can't deny that both translations contain 
 the same idea ; but where the spirit in the former ? 
 < Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 5.
 
 24 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 It is just as much the duty of the translator to trans- 
 fuse the force of the original into his translation as 
 it is the duty of the artist to reproduce the grandeur 
 of nature in his picture. Anything short of this is 
 failure. Anything short of this does not constitute 
 translation. But how difficult the task ! Note the 
 confessions of some of the greatest translators. 
 "All translation," writes Wilhelm von Humboldt to 
 Wilhelm von Schlegel, the German translator of 
 Shakespeare, " seems to me but an attempt to accom- 
 plish what is impossible. Every translator must run 
 shipwreck on one of two rocks : either at the cost of 
 the style and idiom of his own nation, he will hold 
 too closely to the original, or at the cost of the 
 original, he will hold too closely to the peculiarity of 
 his nation. The middle ground between these is not 
 only hard, but absolutely impossible." 1 
 
 It was Haupt who said of translation that it was 
 death to understanding. Julius Keller, in his "Die 
 Grenzen der Uebersetzungskunst" remarks that lan- 
 guage is not a garment which can be replaced by 
 another, 2 but it grows inseparably with the thought, 
 at once both form and parcel of its content. 3 The 
 
 1 Cf. Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 4. 
 
 2 "<Artthou that Virgil?' the question of Dante must be put 
 to every adventurous spirit who attempts to clothe Virgil in the garb 
 of a new tongue." Tyrrell. 
 
 8 Most aptly does Keller remark: "Das wirklich Uebersetzbare an 
 der Dialektdichtung, d. h. der begriffliche Kern, 1st nichts welter als 
 der gerupf te Vogel."
 
 THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 25 
 
 translator must seek out those elements in the gram- 
 matical and logical framework of speech which with 
 some surety may be taken as similar, and which may 
 serve as a scaffolding for translation. In spite of the 
 limitations of translation, he should adyance towards 
 an intelligent and expressive use of this art. 1 
 
 Significant are the following words of Cauer : " A 
 double task confronts the translator; first, the lan- 
 guage into which he translates must be genuine living 
 (English), not an artificial, Grecized or Latinized 
 (English); else how can it come near to our feel- 
 ings ? In the second place, the peculiar style of the 
 old poet or author must be preserved. Homer 
 must be translated into different (English) from 
 Vergil, Tacitus from Cicero. For the first task the 
 translator must have mastery over his own language. 
 For the second, the translator must breathe the spirit 
 of his author and from that standpoint build his 
 (English) sentence. From this it is obvious that 
 there must be a distinct art of translating for each 
 separate author. One must constantly be on guard 
 against too great literalness. The translation which 
 follows the original, word by word, and sentence by 
 sentence, may give us an idea of the author's pecu- 
 liarities of form, but in ugly diagram. So Don 
 Quixote (x, 10) compares translation to the wrong 
 side of a Dutch tapestry, where the figures appear, it 
 is true, but are obscured by the crossing of diagonal 
 1 Cf. Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 5.
 
 26 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 threads. 1 On the other hand, if one strives to do 
 away with great and small blemishes, there is danger 
 that while the picture may be made more regular, it 
 will lose the characteristics of the original. While 
 the translator cannot reach an absolute settlement 
 between these conflicting demands upon his art, yet 
 should he abandon his effort he becomes like the 
 painter who refuses to paint the landscape or human 
 face because he cannot reproduce each individual 
 part, twigs, leaves, wrinkles, hair. It is his art that 
 can bring out the living delineations which photog- 
 raphy by pedantic faithfulness annihilates." 2 
 
 Our translation must be genuine English. Wil- 
 helm Munch, in his "Kumt des Uebersetzens aus dem 
 Franzosischen" says : " There has arisen in translation 
 a jargon which advances in an inflexible armor that 
 is peculiarly foreign." It behooves every teacher of 
 the classics to banish this " school jargon." 3 Certainly 
 no author more than Homer abounds in opportunities 
 to bring a translator down from a stilted style. In 
 
 1 " Alwaies conceiving how pedanticall and absurd an affectation it 
 is, in the interpretation of any Author, to turn him word for word ; 
 when, according to Horace and other best lawgivers to translators, it 
 is the part of every knowing and judicial! interpreter, not to follow the 
 number and order of the words, but the material things themselves, 
 and sentences to weigh diligently ; and to clothe and adorn them with 
 words, and such a stile and form of oration as are most apt for the 
 language into which they are converted." Chapman's Translation 
 of Homer, 1598. 
 
 2 Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 7. 
 
 8 Cf. Lattmann, Der Schul-Jargon des latein. Unterrichts.
 
 THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 27 
 
 the majority of cases the beginner will translate, "In 
 very truth you are a base man," whereas he ought to 
 say, if faithful to his English idiom, " You are a vil- 
 lain, no doubt about it" (</. Cauer). 1 How many 
 students render, Is M. Messala et M. Pisone consulibus, 
 " He, in the consulship of Messala and Piso." They 
 forget that the natural English order is, " In the con- 
 sulship of Messala and Piso he made a conspiracy." 
 Often the cumbersome and prosaic " that one " grates 
 upon the ear and mars what might otherwise be a 
 good translation. Render multum ille et terris iacta- 
 tus et alto, " much tossed that man by land and sea " 
 (Lane). Our English abstract idiom requires that 
 we translate, Quid hostis virtute posset et quid nostri 
 auderent periclitabatur, " He was testing the valor of 
 the enemy and the courage of our men." 2 
 
 The Greek a /3ou\o/z<u is " my wishes," not " those 
 things which I wish." Don't translate "Alcestis," 
 1036, X/3oV&> 8e /cat a~v p atVetret? i<rft)?, " In time you 
 will approve me perhaps," but " Perhaps the time will 
 come when you will thank me." Avoid rendering 
 ov a ari&v " not dishonoring you," but say " with 
 no disrespect to you." In " Alcestis," 1095, eV^i/eo-' 
 a\d%(p TTio-ro? OVVCK el <f>i A.09, Heracles would hardly 
 have said, " I praise you because you are a faithful 
 
 1 Excellent examples are cited by G. Lejeune-Dirlchlet, Die Kunst 
 des Uebersetzens in die Muttersprache. Jabrb. Philol. Padag. 150 
 (1894), p. 514 fg. 
 
 2 Hints for Translating, Harper and Tol man's Caesar, p. 326.
 
 28 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 friend to your wife," but rather, " I commend you for 
 being so loyal to your wife." In Plato's " Republic " 
 the natural English equivalent for wcnrep avrbs wv 6 
 X/3wr?79 is not the literal translation of the words, but 
 " he takes the person of Chryses " (Jowett). 
 
 It demands some patience on the part of the 
 teacher to secure a natural and free rendering of 
 such French expressions as : Je sais qu'on vous a 
 rendu justice, "I see that you have met your deserts." 
 Si vous ecrivez a Jean dites-lui bien des choses de 
 ma part, " If you write to John remember me to 
 him." II pleut dejd moins fort, "It does n't rain so 
 much as it did." Nous avons arrete ensemble que 
 vous deviez en agir ainsi (Merimee's " Colomba," 
 xiv), "We have decided to do so." De quel cote 
 allait-il? (Merimee's "Colomba," xv), "What way 
 did he take?" 
 
 The English translator of the satirists has a lan- 
 guage at his command peculiarly fitted (especially in 
 its Saxon element) to lash, gall, and sting with a 
 vehemency unsurpassed and well-nigh unrivaled. 
 He should bring out the sharp edge of satire with 
 such effect that every word of his vocabulary should 
 cut as keenly and pierce as deep as the original; 
 for example : 
 
 Cum iam semianimum laceraret Flavins orbem 
 Ultimus, et calvo serviret Roma Neroni. 
 
 Juvenal, iv, 37.
 
 THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR, 29 
 
 When Flavius, drunk with fury, tore 
 
 The prostrate world which bled at every pore, 
 
 And Rome beheld in body as in mind 
 
 A bald-pate Nero rise again to curse mankind. 
 
 Tyrrell. 
 
 "Translation," says James Russell Lowell, "com- 
 pels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice 
 a discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and 
 shade of meaning, that we now first learn the secret 
 of the words we have been using or misusing all our 
 lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth 
 even the plainest matter as it should be set forth is 
 not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought 
 and practice, but an affair of conscience as well. 
 Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only 
 that there is a best way, but that it is the only way. 
 Those who have tried it know too well how easy it 
 is to grasp the verbal meaning of a sentence or of a 
 word. That is the bird in the hand. The real 
 meaning, the soul of it, that which makes it literature 
 and not jargon, that is the bird in the bush which 
 tantalizes and stimulates with the vanishing glimpses 
 we catch of it as it flits from one to another lurking 
 place. 
 
 " Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri. 
 
 " It was these shy allurements and provocations of 
 Omar Khayyam's Persian which led Fitzgerald to
 
 80 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 many a peerless phrase and made an original poet of 
 him in the very act of translating." 
 
 Since translation is the reproduction of the spirit 
 of the original, we ought to be faithful to the imper- 
 fections as well as to the beauties of the author we 
 are translating. Rothfuchs lays down the rule that the 
 translator should not weed out the weaknesses of a 
 writer, for by doing this he destroys his peculiarities 
 of style. The omission of videor or mihi videtur in 
 Cicero annihilates a marked flavor of his diction. 
 We must leave him the satisfaction he felt in tossing 
 about upon the waves of empty words. 1 
 
 Cauer suggests that the translator should always 
 observe any broken syntax or obscurity there may be 
 in the original. In Vergil's ^Eneid, iv, 625, Exoriare 
 aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor, how vivid the trans- 
 fer from the second to third person, "Arise, some 
 avenger from our bones." 
 
 Don't make the translation more elegant than the 
 original, for if the original creeps, the translation 
 should not soar. That is Frazer's mistake, if you 
 can call it such, in his monumental work on Pau- 
 sanias. The style of Pausanias is broken and 
 slovenly, but Frazer has rendered the Greek in a 
 stately English. This is like an artist giving to a 
 picture a higher coloring than that of the scene be- 
 fore him, or converting into a grand edifice on his 
 copy what is but a rude building in the landscape. 
 1 Cf. Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 78.
 
 THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 31 
 
 How effective is the plain, almost homely form of 
 expression, La verdad adelgaza, y no quiebra, y 
 siempre anda sobre la mentira, como el azeyte sobre el 
 aqua (Don Quixote, v, 10), "Truth may be thin, 
 but has no rent, and always mounts above the lie 
 as oil above the water." We can compare Jon- 
 son's blunt diction : 
 
 Get money ; still get money, boy ; 
 No matter by what means ; 
 
 or Cowper's familiar style : 
 
 The man that hails you Tom or Jack, 
 And proves by thumps upon your back 
 
 How he esteems your merit, 
 Is such a friend that one had need 
 Be very much a friend indeed 
 
 To pardon or to bear it. 
 
 Very cleverly has Rabutin translated Martial's epi- 
 gram : 
 
 amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare ; 
 Hoc tantum possum dicere ; non amo te. 
 
 Je ne vous aime pas, Hylas ; 
 Je n'en saurais dire la cause ; 
 Je sais seulement une chose, 
 C'est que je ne vous aime pas. 
 
 Every school boy is familiar with Tom Brown's 
 happy rendering of the same, a rendering which, we
 
 32 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 may say, has immortalized Dr. Fell, then dean of 
 Christ Church, Oxford : 
 
 I do not love thee, Doctor Fell, 
 The reason why I cannot tell ; 
 But this I 'm sure I know full well, 
 I do not love thee, Doctor Fell. 
 
 The doggerel appended to five of Euripides'dramas 
 
 r&v 8aifj.ovt(av, 
 
 xa} TO. duxtjOivr oux 
 
 T&V #' adoxijruiv iropov ijupe 
 
 roiovS" dnlr rods 
 
 hardly warrants a more dignified translation than 
 the jesting one which Gildersleeve gives it : 
 
 How many the shapes of these devilish japes ! 
 And much that is odd 's fulfilled by the gods ; 
 That comes not about for which you look out; 
 What you don't expect that God does effect, 
 And such was the course of this story. 
 
 Essays and Studies, p. 194- 
 
 When Sallust, Livy, or Tacitus, under influence of 
 vivid description, ignores tense and person, and uses 
 the so-called historical infinitive, the translator should 
 endeavor to convey into English the excitement and 
 confusion of the original ; for example, Interea Cati- 
 lina in prima acie versari, laborantibus succurrere,
 
 THE WORK OF THE TRANSLATOR. 33 
 
 (Sallust, Catiline, 60, 4), " Catiline meantime bustling 
 round in the forefront of battle, helping them that 
 were sore bestead " (Lane). 
 
 A word of caution is needed in reproducing such 
 a simple style as that of Homer. We must not fail 
 to remember that the Homeric narrative was accen- 
 tuated by voice and gesture. The spirit of the origi- 
 nal can only be preserved by an endeavor to convert 
 these into language. Cauer gives a good illustration 
 of this in his remarks on the Homeric tenses : " In 
 relating past events Homer always uses the same 
 tense, without considering in what relation the in- 
 dividual events stand to one another. He only 
 shows their remoteness from the standpoint of the 
 relater. Odysseus says to Nausicaa, 'I marvel at 
 the palm tree, for no such stalk had ever sprung 
 from earth,' eTrel OVTTCO rolov avfavdev etc Sdpv 701779 
 ( 167). If in such cases we should use simply 
 the (English) preterite in place of our natural 
 pluperfect, we should be like a painter who inten- 
 tionally ignores the art of perspective and represents 
 a landscape in the childishly helpless manner of 
 earlier times, a manner which pictures trees, houses, 
 and men all of equal size and of equal distinctness, 
 as if all were at an equal distance from the beholder. 
 This treatment is so foreign to us that it interferes 
 with our understanding and enjoyment. We are 
 consequently so much the more justified in altering 
 such treatment in translating, since by so doing we
 
 34 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 are only replacing a part of the help which was fur- 
 nished to the hearer by accentuation and gesture. 
 In later Greek also it is often the case that an aorist 
 or an imperfect in a subordinate clause must be 
 replaced by the (English) pluperfect; for example, 
 01 Kepicvpaioi }^.v\\ijvijv ro 'HXeiW 'eirtveiov everrpv)- 
 trav, OTI vavs icai ^prjfiara Trapea^ov "KopivBiois 
 (Thucydides, i, 30), ' the Corcyreans burned Cyllene, 
 the arsenal of the Eleans, because they had furnished 
 the Corinthians with ships and money.' The whole 
 system of the Greek tenses rests on a manner of 
 thought essentially different from that of (English) 
 German or Latin. To the Greek the most important 
 thing in what he was narrating was the manner of 
 the action. The different stages of the past did not 
 come into the expression. The temporal relation 
 between numerous past actions was unspecified, so 
 that the reader or hearer had to conclude from the 
 context the order of events." 1 
 
 1 Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 81.
 
 TRANSLATION NOT EXPLANATION. 35 
 
 TRANSLATION NOT EXPLANATION. 
 
 One thing I wish to emphasize strongly, transla- 
 tion is not interpretation. The work of the translator 
 is one, the work of the exegete is another. Very true 
 are the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt: "Eine 
 Uebersetzung kann und soil kein Kommentar sein" If 
 the original be ambiguous, a faithful translation should 
 be just as ambiguous as the original. " Here are tears 
 for sorrows and hearts grieve for mortal lot " is cer- 
 tainly a translation, however far short of the mean- 
 ing of the original it may come, of Vergil's exquisitely 
 touching line 
 
 Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt ; 
 
 but Tyrrell's " E'en things inanimate [res, the material 
 picture] can weep for us, and the works of man's 
 hands [mortalia] have their own pathetic power" is 
 a crowding it full of ingenious interpretations and la- 
 borious speculations. 
 
 Indefiniteness, often intentional on the part of a 
 writer, as well as the suspense which the developed 
 inflectional system of Latin and Greek readily intro- 
 duces into a sentence, must be imitated as far as our 
 idiom will allow. In the "Agamemnon " of ^Eschylus,
 
 36 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 ovro} 8' 'Ar/je'ct)? TratSa? 6 fcpeicrcrcov | eir ' A\e!;dv&pa> 7re/i- 
 ?ret feVto? | Zev?, 7ro\vdvopo<t apfyl yvvaiicos, note how 
 indefinite the poet has made the lines. When the 
 Greek met the emphatic tcpeiao-wv, he did not yet know 
 to whom it referred ; he mounts a ladder of which 
 eVto? is the next step and reaches the summit Zew. 
 The order of thought is : " And so a greater power 
 sends against Alexandros the sons of Atreus, a power 
 that guards hospitality, a power which is no other 
 than Zeus himself." Vergil's picture of Helen 
 crouching by the altar grows darker with each suc- 
 ceeding word : 
 
 Ilia sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama Teucros, 
 Et poenas Danatim et deserti coniugis iras 
 Permetuens, Troiae et patriae communis Erinnys, 
 Abdiderat sese atque aris invisa sedebat. 
 
 She, shrinking from the Trojans' hate, 
 Made frantic by their city's fate, 
 Nor dreading less the Danaan sword, 
 The vengeance of her injured lord : 
 She, Troy's and Argos' common fiend, 
 Sat cowering, by the altar screened. 
 
 Conington. 
 
 Goethe, in imitation of the Homeric style, writes : 
 So sprach, unter dem Thore des Hauses sitzend am 
 
 Markte, 
 
 Wohlbehaglich zur Frau der Wirth z\im goldenen 
 Lowen. 
 
 Hermann und Dorothea, i, 20.
 
 TRANSLATION NOT EXPLANATION. 37 
 
 We are at liberty to supply ellipses only when the 
 sense of the English sentence would be absolutely 
 defective without doing so. A free supplying of 
 words or phrases, to use a figure of Cauer, can 
 " easily play a role similar to that which the subsidi- 
 ary line often plays in the construction of a plani- 
 metric problem. It ought never to enter simply as 
 a deus ex machina." 1 
 
 1 Cauer, Die Kunst ties Uebersetzens, p. 69. 
 
 NOTE. As a good illustration of what a translation ought not to be 
 I might cite such a rendering as that given by Professor Max Mtiller 
 to Chandogya Upanishad, i, 1, 7. An exact translation of the original 
 Sanskrit would run : " By that [syllable] the threefold knowledge ad- 
 vances; OM he utters, OM he chants, OM he sings, for the glor7 of that 
 syllable because of its power and essence." Max Miiller translates: 
 ' By that syllable does the threefold knowledge (the sacrifice, more 
 particularly the Soma-sacrifice, as founded on the three Vedas) proceed. 
 When the Adhvaryu priest gives an order, he says Om. When the 
 Hotri priest recites, he says Om. When the Udgatri priest sings,, he 
 says Om, all for the glory of that syllable. The threefold knowledge 
 (the sacrifice) proceeds by the greatness of that syllable (the vital 
 breaths), and by its essence (the oblations)." 
 
 Such a " translation " is not a translation ; it is an interpretation so 
 stuffed with padding as even to obscure the sense of the passage.
 
 38 THE ART OP TRANSLATING. 
 
 THE CHOICE OF WORDS. 
 
 The choice of words in translation is what the 
 selection of color is in painting. It often happens 
 that no English word exists that contains all the full- 
 ness of meaning of the foreign word ; while on the 
 other hand, it is often the case that we can find no 
 English word but what is stronger than the idea con- 
 tained in the original. Let us illustrate by Greek 
 and English. The figure that Cauer has borrowed 
 from Schopenhauer is admirably adapted to illustrate 
 the frequent overlapping of ideas. Let us draw two 
 intersecting circles. If we take the idea in the Eng- 
 lish horse and that in the Greek tWo?, the circum- 
 ferences of the two circles must nearly coincide. But 
 if we put, for example, the idea in (r<a(f>pcov into one 
 circle and the idea in our English discreet into an- 
 other, it will follow that a part of the idea in the 
 circle discreet comes witliin the Greek circle o-<a<f>pa)v, 
 but a part of the circle crwfypwv lies outside of the 
 circle discreet, as also a part of the circle discreet lies 
 outside of the circle o-axfrpcov. The task of the trans- 
 lator is to get an English word whose circle will be 
 as nearly coincident with that of the Greek word as 
 possible. Accordingly he should not hesitate to use a 
 different English word for a-afypwv in a different appli-
 
 THE CHOICE OF WORDS. 39 
 
 cation, since if he always renders a-oKfrpcov by the same 
 English word, he may introduce a quality not in the 
 Greek at all. To make this clear we will use a dia- 
 gram. 
 
 Let a quality x of the Greek "circle a-wcppav be char- 
 acteristic of an object z, then the English discreet can 
 also apply to z, since x represents what crco^pwv and 
 discreet have in common. On the other hand, let a 
 quality y of crtu^pcoi/ be characteristic of an object w, 
 then we see that the English word discreet would be 
 inapplicable to w, since the quality of <To><j>pa>v repre- 
 sented by y lies outside the circle discreet. 
 
 Right here, let us note, is where the classical stu- 
 dent gets the fullest disciplinary value in his study 
 of Latin and Greek. The struggle in the discrimi- 
 nation of words which he encounters in the selection 
 of the most appropriate English term for <r<o<j>p(0v in 
 different applications is the same that increases his 
 power to choose the exact English word for his ideas. 
 All this is correspondingly true of modern languages,
 
 40 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 especially in the case of poetry. " In German," says 
 Bayard Taylor, " a word which in ordinary use has 
 a bare, prosaic character, may receive a fairer and 
 finer quality from its place in verse. The prose 
 translator should certainly be able to feel the mani- 
 festation of this law in both languages, and should so 
 choose his words as to meet their reciprocal require- 
 ments. A man, however, who is not keenly sensible 
 to the power and beauty and value of rhythm is likely 
 to overlook these delicate yet more necessary distinc- 
 tions. The author's thought is stripped of a last 
 grace in passing through his mind, and frequently 
 presents very much the same resemblance to the ori- 
 ginal as an unhewn shaft to the fluted column." l 
 
 The English, above all languages abounds in nice- 
 ties of expression, a neglect of which is stultifying. 
 When we strain the unfortunately elastic power of 
 such terms as good or thing, instead of using words 
 which might accurately express our ideas even to 
 the subtlest "shade of meaning, we sin against our- 
 selves as well as against our language. We shut 
 ourselves into a little circle and miss the vast out- 
 side. We do not draw on our treasure house. It is 
 well to remember the words of Jacob Grimm, which, 
 coming as they do from a foreigner, carry with them 
 greater force. "In copiousness," he says, "in close 
 arrangement of parts, in keen understanding, not 
 one of the living languages can be matched with 
 i Translation of Faust.
 
 THE CHOICE OF WORDS. 41 
 
 English, no, not even our own German, which must 
 rid itself of many imperfections before it proves it- 
 self equal to its possibilities." l 
 
 If it be true that ideas in a foreign word and in 
 an English word overlap, how much more true is it 
 in the case of the finished sentence. The effort of 
 the translator is to bring the original and the English 
 sentences into such coincidence as his skill will allow. 
 I doubt if absolute coincidence except in sentences 
 of simple meaning is possible, for the work of the 
 translator, like that of the painter, is toward an in- 
 finite goal. No painter, however skilful, can repro- 
 duce a landscape perfectly true to nature. The best 
 painter is not the one who paints the scene with ex- 
 actness in color and detail ; but the best painter is 
 he who, overmastered by the greatness of the vision 
 and realizing the limitations of his art, paints the 
 scene most true to nature. So the best translator is 
 not he who exactly reproduces the original in English, 
 for that is impossible, but he who mpst nearly re- 
 produces it. In saying this I do not depreciate the 
 work of translating ; on the other hand, I emphasize 
 the infinite possibilities of the art. Look at the pic- 
 ture of a mother's love in the beautiful lines of 
 Simonides : 
 
 8rs Idpvaxt xeTr' 
 
 av[j.6<i r iy>6f)i JMV itviiov ztvyffetffd TS 
 
 Setfj.a itpoffelpKe TOT oux ddtdvrotffi 
 
 1 Ueber den Ursprung der Spracke.
 
 42 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 t TS Uspffl'i ftaXXe <p{Xav %lp\ eTrev "i" u> 
 otov e^a* /royov ffb 3' fitocrs??' 
 yaAaffrjvui Idds'i 
 doopart x 
 
 vuxri dlafjixei xuavlui TS 8vb<pip 
 ' urtepffev reav xofj.dv fta 
 
 oux 
 , nopyvpla. 
 
 ei d TO: SIVQV TO ye dsivbv TJV, 
 xat x 
 
 L>dlr(u S' O./JLOTOV xaxov 
 
 Ix aldzv orrt 5e Oapaakiov e'/roy 
 
 i fj.ot. 
 
 Note how Symonds has given us that picture with 
 its pathos and its tenderness, but still we feel how 
 far short of the original his translation, artistic as it 
 is, really comes : 
 
 When, in the carven chest, 
 The winds that blew and waves in wild unrest 
 Smote her with fear, she, not with cheeks unwet, 
 Her arms of love round Perseus set, 
 
 And said : O child, what grief is mine ! 
 But thou dost slumber, and thy baby breast 
 Is sunk hi rest, 
 
 Here in the cheerless brass-bound bark, 
 Tossed amid starless night and pitchy dark.
 
 THE CHOICE OF WORDS. 43 
 
 Nor dost thou heed the scudding brine 
 Of waves that wash above thy curls so deep, 
 Nor the shrill winds that sweep, 
 Lapped in thy purple robe's embrace, 
 Fair little face ! 
 
 But if this dread were dreadful too to thee, 
 Then wouldst thou lend thy listening ear to me ; 
 Therefore I cry, Sleep, babe, and sea be still, 
 And slumber our unmeasured ill ! 
 
 Oh, may some change of fate, sire Zeus, from thee 
 Descend, our woes to end ! 
 But if this prayer, too overbold, offend 
 
 Thy justice, yet be merciful to me !
 
 44 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 PRIMITIVE SIGNIFICATION. 
 
 The ignoring of the primitive signification of a word, 
 which is encouraged by the unambitious method of 
 searching the vocabulary for that meaning which may 
 fit the context, cannot be too severely condemned. 
 Where is the mental discipline of independent dis- 
 crimination, if one is to turn to the vocabulary for a 
 eady-made selection ? I believe that the dictionaries 
 often become a mere mental crutch, and a slavish 
 dependence upon them is as stultifying as the use of 
 a translation. Special dictionaries which emphasize 
 special meanings tend to increase this evil. Nothing 
 can be more apt than the following figure of Cauer : 
 " The derived signification of words are like cut 
 flowers which soon wither, whereas one who has fixed 
 upon the primitive meaning possesses a living stem 
 from which with fostering he can secure blossoms 
 which are always new. The teaching of the primi- 
 tive signification is that branch of philology which 
 can be most productive of good results to the pupil, 
 for it furnishes him little problems which his youthful 
 mind investigates with success, and also helps toward 
 the understanding of his own language." 1 
 
 No task is more delicate than the choice of an 
 1 Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, p. 21.
 
 PRIMITIVE SIGNIFICATION. 45 
 
 English word to convey the idea of the orginal ; it 
 is, as I have said, precisely like the selection of color 
 by the artist. Take that Homeric word which well- 
 nigh baffles the translator, that is, Satpdvios. "Our 
 dictionaries seek in vain," says Cauer, " to give a 
 suitable rendering of it." Lehrs' explanation is a 
 good one, namely, " That person whose manner of 
 action is so different from what is usual or expected 
 that we can explain it only through the theory of a 
 divine interference." Let us take some of the ex- 
 amples cited by Cauer: 8. 774, "Are you crazy?" or 
 perhaps better, " What is the matter with you ? " 
 i/r. 165, "I don't understand you." Z. 407, Acu/ioW, 
 <f>0iaei ae TO <rov /ieW, " You infatuate man, your 
 courage will be your destruction." 
 
 As a general rule, the same English word should be 
 used to represent the same foreign word. But often, 
 as we have illustrated by the intersecting but non- 
 coincident circles, the idea of the English word cor- 
 responding to the idea of the foreign word in one 
 application may be entirely at variance with it in 
 another. The policy of Rothfuchs in translating 
 Homer is excellent, that is, to translate the orna- 
 mental epithets by the same word when they recur in 
 reference to the same person or thing. The idea in 
 OaXepds which is applicable in the phrase 6a\pbs 
 ydfjio? is entirely different from that in 6a\epov 
 8d/cpv (cf. Cauer, p. 48). No one English word 
 can be found whose circle of ideas can coincide with
 
 46 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 the circle of the widely divergent ideas which are 
 concentrated about the primitive meaning of 6a\.epd<>. 
 Now what shall the translator do ? He must not sin 
 against his own language by crowding into an English 
 word a lot of unnatural meanings. He has no right 
 to say " blooming marriage " and " blooming tear," 
 lest the epithet become but a meaningless sound. He 
 must select an English word which will cut the circle 
 of 0a\epds sufficiently to allow a common idea to lie 
 within both circumferences. In whatever application 
 the Greek epithet contains this idea, the English word 
 will adequately reproduce it. In the same way, the 
 circle of another English word must intersect the 
 circle of 0a\epd<; at other points, in order that a 
 common idea may be found for a different application. 
 In the translation of the same foreign word by the 
 same English word in the same application, and in 
 the translation by a consistently different word in dif- 
 ferent applications, the translator is faithful to his 
 real task, that is, the reproduction of the feelings 
 kindled by the use of the words in the original.
 
 SYNONYMS. 47 
 
 SYNONYMS. 
 
 When a foreign writer repeatedly uses the same 
 word, the translator has no right to attempt the so- 
 called refinement of his style by seeking to avoid 
 repetition. The superb diction of Matthew Arnold 
 is a standing contradiction to the old theory that the 
 same word or phrase must not recur in too close con- 
 nection. When a writer has occasion to express 
 exactly the same idea, there is no reason why he 
 should not repeat his former expression, instead of 
 studiedly endeavoring to run a synonym into its 
 place. For example, in Od., e. 217, el8os aKtSvore'pr) 
 Heyedds r ela-avra l&ea-0ai, we ought with Cauer to 
 translate elBos and l&e<?6ai by words of the same root. 
 Very effective is the repetition in nigris oculis nigroque 
 crine of Horace's stanza : 
 
 Liberum et Musas Veneremque et illi 
 Semper haerentem puerum canebat ; 
 Et Lycum nigris oculis nigroque 
 Crine decorum. 
 
 Of Bacchus and the Muses sung, 
 And Cupid, still at Venus' side, 
 And Lycus, beautiful and young, 
 Dark-haired, dark-eyed. 
 
 Conington.
 
 48 THE AKT OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 On the other hand, when synonyms exist in the 
 original, great care should be used in reproducing 
 them. Cauer suggests that the distinction between 
 Se/Lta?, (f>vrj, eZSo? (Od., e. 212 fg.) should be preserved 
 by translating "form," "stature," "look" (Grestalt, 
 Wuchs, Ausseheri). So the translator should differen- 
 tiate ius and/as in Persius' striking lines : 
 
 Quin damus id Superis, de magna quod dare lance 
 Non possit magni Messallae lippa propago : 
 Compositum ius fasque animo, sanctosque recessus 
 Mentis, et incoctum generoso pectus honesto. 
 
 Give we to the gods such offerings as great Messalla's 
 blear-e} r ed son cannot give, be his dish never so ample, 
 duty to God and man well blended in the mind, purity in 
 the heart's shrine, and a bosom full of the inbred nobility 
 of goodness. Tyrrell. 
 
 Right here I wish to apply the words of Cauer 
 respecting Homeric phraseology : 
 
 "A certain uniformity of expression is essential 
 not to the thought, but to the style. It may seem to 
 us strange, and many times tedious, that the same 
 turns of expression so constantly recur ; that morn- 
 ing and evening, eating and drinking, question and 
 answer, wound and death, are always found with the 
 same delineations ; that the day is always designated 
 'divine,' the sea always ' gray,' the ships always 'swift,' 
 even though they lie in the harbor, the sky always
 
 SYNONYMS. 49 
 
 'starry,' even in the bright day; that Zeus calls 
 Clytaeinnestra's seducer 'a [hero] without blemish' 
 at the very moment when he is speaking of his crime. 
 
 " But such outgrowth belongs to the very body of 
 the old epic, and the translator who strips it off mars 
 it. Two German translators have done this. Her- 
 mann Grimm expressly boasts that he has omitted the 
 customary high-sounding epithets. Wilhelm Jordan, 
 on the other hand, has sought to keep alive the 
 standing epithets by translating them differently in dif- 
 ferent places. He has for TroSwfcea HrjXet'owa six ex- 
 pressions, 'the swift Achilles,' 'the swift Pelides,' 
 * the swift son of Peleus,' ' the swift-rushing Achil- 
 les,' ' Pelides, master in the race ' ; and finally, omit- 
 ting the epithet as Grimm has done, he translates 
 simply 'Pelides.' Both scholars have injured where 
 they intended to help, especially Jordan, since he not 
 only ignores an element of epic style, but puts a 
 false one in its place. A charm of Homer's recital 
 lies in this, that it lets us share for a moment in that 
 higher world-vision in which all things appear bathed 
 in a golden luster, a vision whose reality the Greek 
 people so clearly recognized and so charmingly set 
 forth in the belief that it could have lived only in 
 the memory of a blind old bard." l 
 
 The translator ignores the author's use of syno- 
 nyms when he renders rfav tacov as r&v avr&v 
 (" GEdipus Tyrannus " of Sophocles, 1. 1498, KOLK T>V 
 1 Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, pp. 48-50.
 
 50 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 wvrrep auro? ee0v), "from the 
 same source whence he sprang " ; rather let him trans- 
 late with Jebb, "from a source which was even as that 
 whence he sprang." The frequent empty English 
 translation of such Greek words as epyov, Trpay/jia, 
 /ca/co? is slovenly in the extreme. How we should 
 render epyov depends largely on the point of view. 
 If we look forward, epyov becomes a " duty " or 
 " task " ; if we look backward, it becomes a " deed " 
 (cf. Cauer, p. 50). How often does discrimination 
 suffer in the rendering of Trpa^^a. The context 
 alone must determine the exact English word to be 
 employed ; for example, " Seven against Thebes " of 
 jJEschylus, 1. 689, eVel TO Trpa^iia icdpr eTriaTrep^ei 
 0eo9, "since God mightily urges on the crisis." 
 
 The remarks of Cauer respecting the Latin res are 
 significant and contain a broad application to the 
 class of words we are discussing. " The reason for 
 the multiplicity of meanings in such a word lies, not 
 in the rich content of the Latin conception, but in 
 its emptiness. The word is like a vessel into which 
 is thrown the idea that is gained from the surround- 
 ing clauses. The simple and concise Roman method 
 of thought made it possible for such an implied idea 
 to depend upon the context ; our more complex, but 
 at the same time more loosely joined, lines of thought 
 demand an outward help to grasp correctly the idea. 
 When the Roman read Tiaee res or eius rei or quam 
 rem t he knew of himself whether it was a deed or a
 
 SYNONYMS. 51 
 
 thought, a demand or a concession, a theory or a fact, 
 a purpose or an action, a hope or a fear, a design or 
 a result, an object or a relation ; whereas an (English) 
 author is forced continuously to remind his reader of 
 what he is treating. Translations, as those here in- 
 dicated, must not be avoided in the belief that they 
 do not correspond closely enough to the original ; it- 
 is not the words but the thought that we must trans- 
 late. The distinction lies only in this, that to the 
 foreign author it did not seem necessary, as in the 
 case of res, or it was not practicable, as in many 
 Homeric conceptions, Avhere we must differentiate to 
 show in language that which to the author stood 
 clearly enough before his mind." l 
 
 1 Cauer, Die Kunst cles Uebersetzens, pp. 53, 54.
 
 52 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 ETYMOLOGY. 
 
 What part should etymology play in the work of 
 translation ? I believe it is very easy for one inter- 
 ested in philology to import too much of this into a 
 realm which lies quite distinct from it. As a general 
 thing the etymology of a word is of little service to 
 the translator. The province of the philologist is one ; 
 that of the translator is another. 1 Cauer suggests 
 that the translator should not concern himself with 
 etymologies which were not apparent to the authors 
 themselves. 
 
 On the other hand, all etymologies, whether real 
 
 1 1 have often been asked how far the teacher should make use of 
 etymology. There are some cases, I believe, when it may be made 
 the instrument of fixing in the mind the root meaning of the word. 
 But when once introduced, it should be made as plain as is practicable. 
 The teacher may assert that the Latin fingo, for example, is the same 
 word as our English dough. The pupil will believe the assertion, but 
 at the same time he will wonder at such a seemingly strange connec- 
 tion. On the other hand, if the teacher should lead him to the primitive 
 DHEIGH, and explain how initial dh, through an intervening stage of 
 a sound like our th in thin, became /in Latin, the student will begin to 
 see that there have been at work great phonetic laws, and that what 
 seems strange is after all very regular. This treatment when used with 
 discretion is stimulating, while the result will be that the pupil, with 
 the English cognate before him, can never fail to associate Jingo 
 with the idea of " work in plastic material." But philological matter, 
 for the mere sake of philology, should have no place in the younger 
 classes. To immature students the subject can only be distracting and 
 confusing.
 
 ETYMOLOGY. 53 
 
 or fanciful, of which the writer was conscious, should 
 not only be recognized, but carefully reproduced, 
 since these have to do with the translator's art. No 
 translation, for example, preserves the spirit of the 
 original which does not render the etymological play 
 on words : Av/cet ava%, \viceios yevov (" Seven against 
 Thebes," 145), "Wolf-lord, prove thy wolfish power" 
 (Verrall). The sense of many a passage in Dante 
 rests on just such a turn of the sentence ; for example, 
 Qui vive la pietd quancTe ben morta, " Here can live 
 piety [pietd~] when pity [pietd~\ is dead." The trans- 
 lator can easily observe etymology in such words as 
 <rvvTop(i)<t, "concisely," eV^e'Sco?, "constantly"; or, 
 better still, to use an Anglo-Saxon word, "stead- 
 fastly." Etymology demands the rendering of all 
 negative ideas by negative ideas. It is a frequent 
 sin of the translator to substitute a positive for the 
 negative. He often translates, for example, cm/Ao?, 
 " shameful," where he ought to give the negative 
 " unhonored " ; again he translates immemor, " for- 
 getful," instead of "unmindful." 
 
 The figurae etymologicae are characteristic of an 
 author's style; they strike the reader or hearer as 
 two similar sounds strike the ear : it is unpardonable 
 in the translator if he ignores them. We should not 
 render pr) drja-avpi^ere vplv Orjcravpovs 7rl TT)? 777? 
 OTTOV K\e7rrai KXCTTTOVO-LV (Matt. 6:19), "Do not 
 lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth . . . 
 where thieves , , , steal." In such a translation the
 
 54 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 effect of the repetition of similar sounds through 
 the recurrence of the same root is entirely lost. Ety- 
 mology requires, " Do not treasure for yourselves 
 treasures upon earth . . . where robbers . . . rob." 
 The etymological figure, important as it is, has been 
 so frequently slighted in translation that there is need 
 of a word of caution against its neglect. How effec- 
 tive is it in the familiar passage, Ad senem senex de 
 senectute scripsi, " I wrote to an old man, being an 
 old man myself, about old age " I Again we see its 
 power in the equally well-known words of Ennius' 
 tragedy : 
 
 Ego deum genus esse dixi et dicam caelitum : 
 Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus 
 Nam si curant bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc 
 abest. 
 
 "I maintain and always shall maintain that there is a 
 race of gods up in heaven, but they don't bother, I guess, 
 about what men do here, for if they did, it would go justly 
 with the just and badly with the bad, which is now fai 
 from the case."
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS. 55 
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS. 
 
 If translation were the rendering of the foreign 
 words or the foreign constructions into the corre- 
 sponding English, then literalness would have to be 
 insisted upon. But since translation is nothing less 
 than the reproduction of the impressions, the feelings, 
 and the emotions that were aroused in the native mind 
 as the thought of the sentence first came to it, the trans- 
 lator, as far as his art and the idiom of his language 
 will allow, must unfold the idea in his English just 
 as the original sentence unfolded it ; 1 for example, 
 
 1 Christ, in commenting on the word-order (raft?) of Demosthenes, 
 
 Cites Olynthiac, iii, 13 : fir' ole<rO' O.VTOV, oi e7ronj<ra>' liev oiiSev a.v KO.K.OV, fx>} 
 wa.6elv &' e<j>v\davT' a.v icrcu?, TOUTOVS fnev ef aira.Tai> atpcurdat jioAAof ^ irpoAeyovTO 
 j3tde<r0at, Vfj.lv S'fK irpopprjaftas TroAe/a.ijrrtii' Kal rav9' tiu? a.v fKOvrts efajraTa<70e. 
 
 His observations on the above passage are very fine. " Wir haben 
 hier ein konditionales Sachverhaltnis, aber das bringt der Rednernicht 
 in der langweiligen Form der Logik mit Vorder und Nachsatz vor 
 (weun. . . . so),sondern in kraftvoller Nebeneinanderstellung der 
 Gegensatze und mit wirksamstem Appell an das eigene Urteil der 
 Zuho'rer (oW0' ainov iroAM r,<reiv) . Gestellt sind die Worte so, dass nicht 
 ein nichtssagendes Pronomen dem Relativsatz vorangeht, soudern das 
 Relativum ol mit dem Demonstrativum TOU'TOUS wirkungsvoll aufgenom- 
 men wird, dass ferner die entgegengesetzten Pronomina TOUTOVS und 
 vii.lv an der Spitze stehen und dass die Gegensatze ef an-arii/ und ^tafflrffat 
 die nichtsbedeutenden Worte alpfltrdeu vpoXeyovra in die Mitte nehmen. 
 Um dem Zweifel, ob die Duodezstaaten sich tiberhaupt zur Wehr 
 setzen wiirden, kraftigeren Ausdruck zu geben, ist von der gewOhn- 
 lichen Stellung lo-w? av i<t>v\dfavro Umgang genommen und das z weif elnde
 
 56 THE AST OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 Samnitium caesi tria milia duoenti (Livy, x, 34, 3), 
 " The Samnites were slain to the number of three 
 thousand two hundred." The vigor of the famous 
 expression of Louis XIV, L'etat c'est moi, " The 
 state it is I," is altogether lost in the customary 
 but tame rendering, " I am the state." I recall how 
 this inversion of order, a thing seemingly so trivial, 
 has become a grievous fault in the translation of 
 several Sanskrit philosophical treatises by a dis- 
 tinguished German scholar. Professor Whitney's 
 criticism concerning it applies equally well to all 
 translation : " The difference in order, it may be said, 
 is very small, like that between a = b and b = a ; yet 
 there is a real difference whether one starts from 
 the one point or from the other in making the com- 
 parison ; this is evidenced by the care which is taken 
 almost everywhere (not quite without exception) 
 by the translator to cast the predication into this 
 form, inverting, as I think, the true relation, and 
 sometimes against very distinct evidence to the 
 contrary" (Review of Bohtlingk's " Upanishads"). 
 In the normal order the writer or speaker starts 
 with the known, or, as Weil puts it, the "initial 
 notion," and proceeds to the unknown, or "goal of 
 discourse." It is not always the emphatic word 
 
 l<rw? mit nachdruck an den Schluss gesetzt; um endlich den anstossigen 
 Hiatus <uper<r0<u jj irpoAeyovra zu vermeiden, erlaubt sich der Eedner ein 
 tiberfliissiges oder doch nicht notwendiges na\\ov zwischen die klaffen- 
 den Vokale zu schieben." Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur, 
 p. 345.
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS. 57 
 
 which stands first. Precision demands that the 
 speaker begin with the word most intimately con- 
 nected with the thought of the preceding sentence. 
 Take the common example, Romulus Romam condidit, 
 and note the following comments : " The order of 
 words in this proposition will depend on the context, 
 on the thread of the discourse. If the subject under 
 discussion is the founding of cities, the * initial 
 notion ' or ' psychological subject ' will be the found- 
 ing, and the order will be, condidit Romam Romulus, 
 'the founder of Rome was Romulus.' If, on the 
 contrary, the subject in hand is the founder, the 
 order will be, idem Romulus Romam condidit, ' the 
 same Romulus founded Rome.' If the subject is 
 the city's founding, the order will be, Jianc urbem 
 condidit Romulus, ' this city was founded by Romu- 
 lus.' In each instance the principle of connection 
 operates ; the idea connecting with what precedes, 
 comes first the new idea comes last. In other 
 words, the progression is from the known to the 
 unknown. Or, expressed in still different terms, 
 the 'psychological subject' comes first in each in- 
 stance ; the ' psychological predicate ' last." 1 
 
 We need to note the differentiation of principal 
 and subordinate sentences. In the principal sentence, 
 as Wunderlich (" Der deutsche Satzbau ") shows, 
 thought and speech cooperate at the same time, the 
 
 1 McKnight, Primitive Teutonic Order of Words. The Journal of 
 Germanic Philology, Vol. I.
 
 58 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 sentence consisting of individual parts treated as a 
 unity. But in the subordinate sentence, language 
 follows thought, and deals with a finished concept. 
 
 Emphasis of course changes the word-order, but 
 how it shall be changed rests entirely upon the nature 
 of the sentence and the character of the language. 
 This has been well expressed by McKnight : 
 
 " To form a more accurate notion of the influence 
 of emphasis in determining word-order, you must bear 
 in mind that this influence is an indirect one. The 
 desire to emphasize first influences the accentuation, 
 and only indirectly, through the accentuation, influ- 
 ences the order of words. The principle of empha- 
 sis, then, influences word-order only in this way, that 
 a writer or speaker always endeavors to place the 
 word to be emphasized in the position that naturally 
 has the stress, the next most important word in the 
 position that naturally has the secondary stress, and 
 so on, thus placing the ideas in perspective. 
 
 " To determine the principles of accentuation, 
 then, is necessary before one can understand the in- 
 fluence of the principle of emphasis on word-order. 
 This has not yet been satisfactorily done. In making 
 such a determination, the unit of language con- 
 sidered must be, not the logical unit, the sentence, 
 but the spoken unit, the breath group. At present 
 we know only that the accentuation is different in 
 different kinds of clauses, the interrogative clause 
 differing in this respect from the affirmative clause,
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS. 59 
 
 and that different languages have peculiar modes of 
 accentuation. For example, in French the accent 
 seems to fall naturally at the end of the breath 
 group ; in Irish it seems to fall naturally at the be- 
 ginning. Note the peculiar influence of the different 
 national modes of accentuation on the word-order 
 in the following sentences : ' At such a time as this I 
 would n't tell you a lie ' ; 'It 's not a lie that I 'd be 
 tellin' you now.' ' 
 
 We see that the translator must so arrange his 
 words as to preserve emphasis even at the sacri- 
 fice, if needs be, of grammatical construction; for 
 example, Persuasit nox, amor, vinum adulescentia 
 (Terence, "Adelphoe," 470), "The witchery was 
 night, flirtation, wine and youth" (Lane); o>Se yap 
 Kparel yvvaiicbs av8pd/3ov\ov \TTIOV fceap (JEschylus, 
 "Agamemnon," 10), "For such power has a woman's 
 fancying heart." The English emphatic order is en- 
 tirely at variance with that of the language we are 
 translating in the case of " Lucretius," ii, 145 : Et 
 variae volucres nemora avia pervolitantes | aera per 
 tenerum liquidis loca vocibus opplent. The strong 
 emphasis that falls on liquidis is brought over into 
 English only through the postposition of the adjec- 
 tive. " And motley birds, in pathless woods, that 
 flit through lither sky, fill space with carols clear" 
 (Lane). In the same way the emphasis on the last two 
 words in Nulla placer e diu nee vivere carmina pos- 
 sunt, i quae scribuntur aquae potoribus (Horace, Epis-
 
 60 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 ties, i, 19, 2) is brought out by the English order, " No 
 verse can take or be long-lived that by teetotalers is 
 writ " (Lane). The emphatic genitive preceding its 
 noun, for example, Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui 
 primus ab oris Italiam . . . venit, is brought out in 
 the translation, " Arms and the man I sing from Troy's 
 shores the first to come to Italy " (Lane). In jEs- 
 chylus, " Seven against Thebes," 338, 339, TroAXa yap, 
 VT TTTO'XI? 8afJ,acrdr) ', er;, Svarv^rj re Trpdcrcrei, don't 
 translate, "When a city is taken, it has great and 
 hapless sufferings," since the clause evre TTTO'TU? 
 Sapaady is comparatively unemphatic and simply 
 describes the situation. The emphasis is on TroXXa and 
 Svarrvxfj. Render " Many and hapless are the woes 
 a city suffers when once it is captured." In Thu- 
 cydides, i, 1, the force of the original order tcivrja-LS 
 avrrj fjieyia-rrj can be reproduced by the English, " Of 
 all movements this was the greatest." The awful 
 situation pictured in the " (Edipus Tyrannus " of 
 Sophocles, 456, is intensified by the position of the 
 words which Symonds has well imitated : 
 
 de i:atff\ T<>7? aoroo 
 ros xai xaTijp, xd;- rj 
 dz ulo~ xai 7TO(Tt9, xai TOU 
 6fi6ffxop6t; re xa} yovetx;. 
 
 He shall be shown to be with his own children 
 Brother and sire in one, of her who bore him 
 Husband at once and offspring, of his father 
 Bedmate and murderer.
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS. 61 
 
 The following points must be observed in the effort 
 to imitate the original order of words or to preserve 
 emphasis. 
 
 Change in Construction. The translator should 
 never hesitate to vary the construction, if by so do- 
 ing he can bring out the thought more nearly in the 
 order in which the foreign sentence presented it ; for 
 example, ^Eschylus, "Agamemnon," 255: b<? Be\ei 
 e/9/co9, "as is the wish of this defense." A most 
 frequent variation is the conversion of the active 
 voice into the English passive, and vice versa; for 
 example, Uon me dit tant de mal de cet homme, et j'y 
 en vois si peu, que je commence a soupconner qu'il n'ait 
 un me'rite si importun, qui Steigne celui des autres (La 
 Bruyere), "I am told so much evil of that man and 
 I see so little of it in him, that I begin to suspect 
 that he has some inconvenient merit which extin- 
 guishes that of others." 
 
 So in the translation of Goethe's vivid lines : 
 
 Harrend auf des Morgens Wonne, 
 
 Oestlich spahend ihren Lauf, 
 Ging auf einmal mir die Sonne 
 
 Wunderbar un Stiden auf. 
 
 Zog den Blick nach jener Seite, 
 
 Statt der Schluchten, statt der Hoh'n, 
 
 Statt der Erd und Himmelsweite, 
 Sie, die Einzige, zu spahn.
 
 62 THE AKT OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 Eastward was my glance directed, 
 
 Watching for the sun's first rays ; 
 In the south oh, sight of wonder ! 
 
 Rose the bright orb's sudden blaze. 
 
 Thither was my eye attracted ; 
 
 Vanished bay and mountain height, 
 Earth and heaven unseen and all things, 
 
 All but that enchanted light. 
 
 Anster. 
 
 This conversion of voice is often demanded in the 
 translation of Latin and Greek. If we should desire 
 to put even into modern Greek the ordinary English 
 sentence, " A new, attractive edition of the Anabasis 
 has recently been issued by an American publishing 
 house," we should say, NeW eXi/cm/e^y etcboanv rfjs 
 'Avafidcrecos eSrj/jLCxrievcrev ecr^arco? ' ' K^epiKaviKrj 
 eraipia 777309 eKTinroxriv (Tvyypa^/jLdTQ)v. 
 
 Antithesis. Antithesis in language is the same 
 principle as that in the painter's art which brings out 
 a white object with greater intensity when placed be- 
 fore a dark background ; for example, Ben Jonson's 
 " All concord 's born of contraries." Note the Ger- 
 man proverb, Kleine Diebe lidngt man, grosse Id'sst 
 man laufen, "The petty thief we hang, the great 
 we let go free." Splendid are the antitheses of Si- 
 monides, in his eulogy on Sparta's dead : 
 
 rwv iv 0epfj.oxrjJ.ats Oavovratv 
 
 [j.kv d T'j^a, xaAo? <J' 6 -077109, 
 5' 6 Td<po$, itpb yowv 5e [ivaaris, 6 6"
 
 THE OKDKB OF WORDS. 63 
 
 ivrd<ftov 8s TOIOUTOV our' 
 ou0' 6 
 
 "Of those who at Thermopylae have fallen, glorious 
 their fate and fair their lot. An altar is their tomb, in- 
 stead of tears undying memory, their requiem a hymn of 
 praise. Such sepulchre nor rust nor all-subduing time 
 shaU dim." 
 
 Contrast makes more dismal the gloomy picture of 
 Catullus : 
 
 Soles occidere et redire possunt : 
 Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux 
 Nox est perpetua una dormienda. 
 
 v, 4-6. 
 
 Suns will rise and set again : 
 But for us, when once doth wane 
 This poor pageant's little light, 
 We must sleep in endless night. 
 
 Tyrrell. 
 
 The grouping of the antitheses ought to be as close 
 in English as in the original ; for example, Euripides, 
 "Alcestis," 635, Tra/aei? a\\a> davelv | veo) yepauk, 
 " permitting another to die, one who was young, 
 though thou wert old " ; .^Eschylus, " Seven against 
 Thebes," 740, TTOVOI SO/MOW veot 7ra\aioi(ri cru/u/u7et9 
 /ca/coi?, " sorrows of the home mingled with woes, 
 the new with the old." " To extirpate antithesis from 
 literature altogether would be to destroy at one stroke 
 about eight tenths of all the wit, ancient and modern, 
 now existing in the world" (author of "Lacon'').
 
 64 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 Collocation. The placing together of words of 
 similar sound or etymology must be made as effective 
 in a translation as it was in the foreign text; for ex- 
 ample, JEschylus, "Agamemnon," 641, TroXXow 8e TTO\- 
 \(t)v ea<yi<r0VTa<; SO/AWV, " many from many homes " ; 
 Euripides, "Alcestis," 799, 6Vra? 8e OVTJTOW Ovrjra /cat 
 <f>poveiv xptvv, "for a mortal mortal thoughts are be- 
 coming"; Lucretius, "De Rerum Natura," i, 272, 
 casta inceste, " a stainless maid with stain of blood " 
 (Munro). Collocation becomes very forceful in the 
 despairing words of Cassandra : 
 
 xai vuv 6 [j.dvTt$ fidvTiv IxnpdS-a? ifie 
 $ roidads ffavafftfiouy 
 
 Now he who made me prophetess, the prophet, 
 Himself hath brought me to these straits of death. 
 
 Symonds. 
 
 Chiasmus. It is just as much demanded of the 
 translator that he should conserve such a figure in 
 the style of the original as that the artist should 
 faithfully portray the alternation of shades in the 
 landscape ; for example, Sophocles, " CEdipus Tyran- 
 nus," 1250, e av8po<; avSpa /cal TGKV etc TCKVODV re/coi, 
 " from a husband a husband, and children from chil- 
 dren." 
 
 Hyperbaton. The bold hyperbata of many classic 
 writers for example, Pindar, TO> jiev elire- <$>i\t,a Swpa
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS. 65 
 
 Kf7T/3ta9 ay' ei ri e? ^dpiv I reXXerat (Ol., i, 75) 
 cannot be imitated in English without making the sen- 
 tence ridiculously awkward and obscure. Yet we 
 are obliged to confess that such transposition of 
 words gave to the original a power and variety of 
 which we feel something in our English sentence, 
 " He wanders earth around." 
 
 Tmesis. As is weH known, there was no tmesis in 
 Homer, since the preposition had simply its historic 
 adverbial force. Later writers, however, felt that 
 there was a real "cutting asunder" of words, and 
 through false imitations introduced this so-called 
 figure of etymology. Ennius' famous line, cere saxo 
 comminuit brum, gives us a vocal picture of the rock 
 crushing the skull which baffles reproduction. The 
 impression conveyed by tmesis on the mind of Greek 
 or Roman is similar to that made upon us in our 
 rendering of Horace's quo me cunque rapit tempestas, 
 " what way soever the storm drives me." 
 
 Alliteration. Since translation is the effort to 
 reproduce impressions corresponding to those of the 
 original, it is the translator's duty to imitate inten- 
 tional alliteration wherever the English vocabulary 
 may allow it without affectation; for example, ^Es- 
 chylus, " Agamemnon," 295, fypvicrov </>&><?, " beacon's 
 blaze " ; so in the rather tasteless lines of Ennius : 
 
 Septingenti sunt paulo plus aut minus anni 
 Augusto augurio postquam inclita condita Roma est.
 
 66 THE AKT OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 Years seven hundred, more or less, have passed 
 Since Rome with auguries august arose. 
 
 Tyrrell. 
 
 Every one is familiar with his notoriously alliterative 
 verse : 
 
 Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tyranne tulisti. 
 
 In fact, so great is the influence of alliteration that 
 we ought not to hesitate to change lacrimis decoret of 
 Cicero's transmission so that the epitaph of the poet 
 may read : 
 
 Nemo me dacrumis decoret, nee funera fletu 
 Faxit. 
 
 Asyndeton. - - The lively succession of events 
 pictured in the original by the omission of the con- 
 junction must be reproduced with corresponding ab- 
 ruptness ; for example, Le Bramin me dit un jour : je 
 voudrais n'etre jamais ne. Je lui demandai pourquoi. 
 11 me repondit; fetudie depuis quarante ans ; ce sont 
 quarante annees de perdues ; j'enseigne les autres, et 
 f ignore tout (Voltaire, " Histoire d'un bon Bra- 
 min "), " The Brahmin said to me one day : ' I could 
 wish that I never had been born ' ; I asked him why. 
 He answered me : 4 1 have studied for forty years ; 
 they are forty years lost ; I teach others and I am 
 ignorant of everything.' " Chassez les prejuges par la 
 porte, Us rentreront par la fenetre (Frederick to Vol- 
 taire), " Drive prejudices out the door, they come
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS. 67 
 
 back by the window." There is no place for super- 
 fluous words in the following : Caesari omnia uno tern- 
 pore erant agenda : vexillum proponendum, signum tuba 
 dandum, ab opere revocandi milites, acies instruenda 
 milites cohortandi, signum dandum (Caesar, Gallic 
 War, ii, 20), " Caesar was obliged to attend to every- 
 thing at the same moment; the flag had to be dis- 
 played, the bugle sounded, the soldiers called in from 
 work, the battle line formed, the soldiers encouraged, 
 the signal given." Note Cicero, "Pro Roscio Amer- 
 ino," 60 : Peroravit aliquando, adsedit. Surrexi ego. 
 Respirare visus est, quod non aKus potius diceret. 
 Coepi dicere. Usque eo animadverti, indices, eum alias 
 res agere, antequam Chrysogonum nominavi; quern simul 
 atque attigi, statim homo se erexit, mirari visus est. In- 
 tellexi quid eum pupugisset. " After a while he wound 
 up, took his seat ; up rose your humble servant. He 
 seemed to take courage from the fact it was nobody 
 else. I began to speak. I noticed, gentlemen, that 
 he was inattentive all along till I named Chrysogo- 
 nus ; but the moment I touched on him, the creature 
 perked up at once, seemed to be surprised. I knew 
 what the rub was" (Lane). Beautiful is Sappho's 
 picture of the rest of evening : 
 
 Hesper, thou bringest back again 
 All that the gaudy day- beams part,
 
 68 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 The sheep, the goat, back to their pen, 
 The child home to his mother's heart. 
 
 Frederick Tennyson, 
 
 Polysyndeton. When the foreign text avoids 
 swift transition through the repetition of conjunc- 
 tions, thus enabling the mind to linger at will on 
 each thought as a unity, the translator is compelled 
 to do the same. Well is this illustrated in the 
 strong and familiar passage: TreTreia-pai yap ori ovre 
 ddvaros, ovre far), ovre ayyeXoi, ovre ap^al, ovre 
 ei>eo-TWTa, ovre [ie\\ovra, ovre 8iwa/iei<?, ovre v^to^a, 
 ovre /3a#o9, ovre ns KTIO-IS erepa Swrjaerai r)fj.a<; 
 Xwpio-ai cnro -n}9 a^dir^ rov eov (Rom. 8 : 38, 39), 
 "I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor 
 angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor 
 things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, 
 nor any other creature shall be able to separate us 
 from the love of God." 
 
 It often happens, on the other hand, that the idiom 
 of the foreign tongue joins sentences in chainlike 
 fashion, while the English rather avoids such connec- 
 tion. Cumbersome, indeed, would it be to render 
 the conjunction in Sappho's stanza, 
 
 fiiv a 
 
 dk ;j.6va xareudta.
 
 THE ORDER OF WORDS. 69 
 
 The silver moon is set ; 
 The Pleiades are gone ; 
 Half the long night is spent, and yet 
 
 I lie alone. 
 
 Merivale. 
 
 The moon hath left the sky : 
 
 Lost is the Pleiad's light ; 
 
 It is midnight 
 
 And time slips by; 
 
 But on my couch alone I lie. 
 
 Symonds.
 
 70 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 FIGURES OF SPEECH. 
 
 Do not strip off any figurative ornament from the 
 style of a foreign author. In avoiding this the skill 
 of a translator is brought to its severest test. It often 
 happens that a metaphor in one language becomes 
 unbearable in another. The translator, it is true, 
 may be forced to change the figure, yet he is faith- 
 less to his task if he destroys it altogether. The 
 metaphor in K\v0t /j,ev, apyvporo^', 65 Xpv<njv a/ji<f)i~ 
 Pefyxa? | Kt\\av re &8&iv (II., A, 37, 38) is that of 
 one bestriding another to shield him from harm, a 
 wonderfully expressive figure, yet one which becomes 
 gross when brought over into English. Should we 
 translate "protect," the strength, the boldness, as 
 well as the tenderness of the original are gone. Let 
 us turn the tables and note how the modern Greek 
 translators of Shakespeare have struggled with one or 
 two of our own metaphors : " Aye, there 's the rub " 
 Damirale l renders, 'A ! I8ov 6 TbpSios Seo-/i09 ; again, 
 " The time is out of joint, O cursed spite that ever 
 
 1 Damirale remarks, " There 's the rub " = 'iSoir TO Trpdo-KOMMa. " To 
 
 mb," At'yei 6 (Wright) elve b'pos Te\V{.nos, crrjjuaiVui' -rrfv vvyKpovaiv i) TO 
 ifjivoSioVf oirep trvvavra ri <rcf>atpa Tpe\ov<TOL. 'Epo/uVa/uci' on ajroStSonev TO Trvivfta 
 rov TTott/Tou epHTivevovTfs Sia TOV : TopSioi Seo-/ids. " To rub," Says Wright, 
 
 " is a technical term signifying the friction or the resistance which a 
 rolling ball encounters. I believe that I render the spirit of the poet 
 by translating ' Gordian knot.' "
 
 FIGURES OF SPEECH. 71 
 
 I was born to set it right," one attempts, 'O xpovos 
 rfi<f o8ov avrov e^eVecre. 'A.\\otfj,ovov (JLOL OTL r)\6ov 
 et<? rr]v ^rfv Iva opicro) rovrov TrdXiv (Pervanoglos) ; 
 another, O I Katpol e^rjpBptaBija-av. KarrjpafMevij fiolpal 
 'E7re7r/)a>TO va <yevvrj0S) eycu, ei? rd^iv va TOW <f>e'pa> 
 (Damirale) ; a third, 
 
 6 xuff/jLoy jraef ffra ffrpafid. Q\ Aev dnefjiSt'S akko 
 xapd tya) va. fzvvj]Qib ffrd \aia vd ruv ^dXu>\ 
 
 Vikelas. 
 And a fourth, 
 
 xatpo*;- rr t <s fj.otpay neifffjia at 
 vd Y^vvrjOw vd rov dtopO<t)ff(u. 
 
 Polylas. 
 
 There is a beautiful metaphor, avasdna, in one of 
 the Hindu burial hymns which we spoil when we 
 translate, as is so often done, " resting place." The 
 Sanskrit word means literally "an unyoking," the 
 yoke is taken from the neck and the weary cattle are 
 turned into the pasture land. So the dead has 
 reached the "bound of life where he lays his bur- 
 dens down." 
 
 Again, the translator too frequently ignores that 
 rhetorical device (synecdoche) which singles out a 
 leading part or characteristic (pars pro toto, materia 
 pro re, etc.). It is not required that the specific part 
 mentioned be thrust into the translation. The usage 
 of our language may have settled on stereotyped 
 phrases differing from those of the foreign tongue. 
 It is the effect of the figure, and not the literal ren-
 
 72 THE ART OP TRANSLATING. 
 
 dering of a word, that should be the translator's pur- 
 pose. We should not hesitate, for example, to render 
 in jEschylus, "Agamemnon," 116, <az/eWe9 iicrap 
 /j,\d0pci)v, " seen near the palace walls," regardless 
 as to what part of the building pekdOpwv techni- 
 cally referred. 
 
 Frequently a modest and restricted form of state- 
 ment (diminutio~) carries with it far greater force 
 than a positive, bold expression of fact. The trans- 
 lator should be very careful to bring this over into 
 English; for example, Pindar, OL, i, 53, atcepSeia 
 \e\oy %ev Oafjuva KaKaydpovs. " Little gain comes to 
 those who tell bad tales." When cause is expressed 
 in the guise of a condition, the English sentence 
 should be true to the original; for example, II., A. 
 3942, 4 Trore TOL %apivr' eVt vqov epei/ra, | ria-eiav 
 Amo! efjia Sdicpva aolffi /3e\e<ra-iv. "If I have 
 roofed for thee a pleasing shrine may the Danai 
 atone for my tears by thy shafts." Here the reason 
 for the answer to the prayer is shifted to the respon- 
 sibility of the god. It is as if the old priest had 
 said, " Look over the past, Apollo ; see if I have 
 been faithful in my office." Apollo draws the con- 
 clusion. Such rhetorical device makes the hearer do 
 his own reasoning. How much more emphatic than 
 if Chryses had said, " Since I have roofed a shrine 
 for thee, thou must hear my prayer." So in Latin, 
 the translator should avoid rendering si qmdem by a 
 causal conjunction. The condition " if in fact "
 
 FIGURES OF SPEECH. 73 
 
 shows that cause was clearly in the mind of the 
 writer, but the responsibility of the conclusion is put 
 upon the reader. 
 
 Often a word takes its coloring from the context. 
 Exactness requires that the English word be in itself 
 equally colorless. It is the same principle that re- 
 quires the painter to give to objects, themselves clear 
 and colorless like the surface of a lake for example, 
 the light and shadows imparted by their environment. 
 In Euripides, " Alcestis," 771, 772, icaicayv yap pvpfov 
 eppvero, opyas /j,a\d(rcrov(T' avBpds, the Greek 0/37015 
 does not mean " anger " ; such a notion enters it only 
 by association. So our English temper takes its 
 shade of meaning from the surrounding thought. 
 Translate : " She rescued me from a thousand ills by 
 softening her lord's temper." It is true that words, 
 like individuals, can receive a character, more or less 
 fixed, from the company they keep. 
 
 A figurative meaning often displaces the primitive 
 signification. As Cauer remarks : " A frequent meta- 
 phorical expression loses its figure. This process is 
 like the transition from the crude metal to the 
 stamped bars, from them to the stamped coin, and 
 finally to the paper currency. The ancients were 
 richer in concrete, but poorer in abstract, expres- 
 sions than we are ; or, to put it better, there was in 
 their abstract ideas a concrete element more strongly 
 felt than in ours." l 
 
 1 Cauer, Die Kimst des Uebersetzens, pp. 31, 32.
 
 74 THE ART OF TRANSLATING. 
 
 The taking of words from foreign languages into our 
 vocabulary has helped to make the English abstract. 
 For example, comprehend carries to the mind, indif- 
 ferent to its etymology, simply the abstract idea, 
 while the Anglo-Saxon grasp forces its metaphor upon 
 us. In Latin and Greek, as well as German, the words 
 are formed from native roots, and consequently carry 
 on their face the origin of the metaphor ; 1 for ex- 
 ample, German antJieil as contrasted with English 
 sympathy. The effort of translation being to make 
 the same impression upon the English as was made 
 upon the native mind, a careful choice of words of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin will often preserve the figure with 
 the clearness of the original. 2 For example, rogo 
 atque oro te colligas virumque praebeas (Cicero, Fam., 
 5, 18, 1), "I beg and entreat you, pull yourself to- 
 gether and quit you like a man " (Lane). 
 
 The preposition in Greek and Latin frequently 
 holds within itself a figurative meaning, which we 
 cannot bring out except by using a much fuller ex- 
 pression. For example, e/c davdrov should not be 
 rendered " from death," but " out of the grasp of 
 death." So Cauer suggests that we can easily pre- 
 serve the figure in Vergil's sub nocte silenti by trans- 
 lating " under the mantle of the silent night " (unter 
 
 * Cf. Thomas, Zur Historischen Entwickelung der Metapher im 
 Griechischen, Erlangen, 1891. 
 
 2 The authorized translation of the Bible contains the largest per 
 cent, of Saxon words, the estimate being that only about one third of 
 its vocabulary is derired from other languages.
 
 FIGURES OF SPEECH. 75 
 
 dem Mantel der schweigenden Nachf) ; also the figure 
 in sub casu (potes hoc sub casu ducere somnos? Ver- 
 gil, ^Eneid, iv, 560) by rendering, "Canst thou sleep 
 in peace while this fate hangs over thee ? " (Kami du 
 ruliig schlafen, wahrend dieses Schicksal iiber dir 
 schwebt?). 
 
 " In the course of time," says Cauer, " it must 
 often result that individual expressions always occur 
 in definite relation, and by association and use take 
 into themselves an idea which was foreign to them. 
 So f acinus became (mis) deed, potestas became (offi- 
 cial) power. How often xa>pa or %ip is omitted ! 
 For 8e|ia we have a correspondingly short (English) 
 expression, the right; but we are forced to render 
 afjufroTeprjaiv ' with both hands.' 
 
 " The greater maturity of our modern thought in 
 the province of abstract nouns often makes our (Eng- 
 lish) expression shorter than the foreign ; for ex- 
 ample, de rebus bonis et malis (TuscuL, v, 4, 10), 
 ' concerning good and bad ' ; quae tamen omnia dul- 
 ciora fiunt et moribus bonis et artibus (Cato Maior, 
 xviii, 65), ' through character and culture.' On the 
 other hand, such abstract substantives as satietates 
 (Lselius, xix, 67), 'moments of satiety,' and excel- 
 lentiae (69), ' prominent personal characteristics,' 
 require in (English) the circumlocutions given 
 above." : 
 
 1 Cauer, Die Kunst des Uebersetzens, pp. 70-73.
 
 76 THE ART OP TRANSLATING. 
 
 THE GREEK PARTICLES. 
 
 Just a few hints for the rendering of Greejs par- 
 ticles will not be out of place. In this the translator 
 has a task as delicate as that of the artist in his en- 
 deavor to reproduce the exact light and shade in the 
 scene before him. In no case should he think of the 
 literal meaning of the particle. The first and only 
 question which the translator must ask is, "What 
 coloring does it give to the idea ? " Then, by any 
 word or words in his power, he should endeavor to 
 transfuse this coloring into his English sentence. 
 
 I translate in abridged form the comments of 
 Cauer : l 
 
 " The particles have nothing but empty meaning. 
 Into them is forced a fullness of ideas which accom- 
 pany the thoughts of the speaker, and which form in 
 his mind the framework for his successive sentences. 
 These from time to time show their influence in the 
 significant gesture or in a pair of correlated expres- 
 sions. Of special importance are those little words 
 which serve to join sentences. A well chosen con- 
 junction achieves something similar to that which a 
 
 1 Cauer appropriately selects as the superscription of his chapter 
 " Partikeln" the words of Schiller: " Im kleinsten Punkte die hOchste 
 Kraft."
 
 THE GREEK PARTICLES. 77 
 
 fortunate turn of the passage achieves on a higher 
 scale ; in both there enters an inner relation of pre- 
 ceding and following thoughts ; both are disjunctive, 
 while at the same time they connect; they are the 
 joints in the body of the language. 
 
 " It often happens that a particle cannot be trans- 
 lated except by a word which is much stronger than 
 the original. When this is so, we had better omit it 
 entirely and preserve the force by the tone of the 
 voice. Such is frequently the case in regard to the 
 Greek ye. 
 
 " Of the Homeric expletives, apa is especially un- 
 translatable by any single word. It expresses a har- 
 mony between thought and fact, so that either the 
 result corresponds to one's expectations or, on the 
 contrary, the thought is made to fit the reality. 
 These ideas are expressed in our two short sentences, 
 ' As one might think,' As one must admit.' 
 
 " How can the same sentence contain antithesis 
 and confirmation ? Yet how often we meet a\\d 
 yap; for example, Od., K. 202, aX\' ov yap ri<t Trprjgis 
 eyiyvero pvpopevoia-iv. In this passage it requires no 
 imagination to hear and see Odysseus as he pauses 
 after the ' but ' and with resignation shrugs his shoul- 
 ders or raises his hands, indicating with half sad, half 
 scornful look, that the lamentation did not last long, 
 for it was no use for them to weep. As we read, we 
 can feel this force, although we mar the sentence if 
 we attempt to express it in words. As in the case
 
 78 THE ART OP TRANSLATING. 
 
 of the strongly adversative a\\a, so address (for 
 example, 'Ar/aet'Sr;, *P. 156 ; 4>?7/iue, a. 337 ; & <iA.ot, 
 K. 174) is often attended by a gesture, which is con- 
 firmed in what follows. 
 
 " Of another class are those cases in which the 
 sentence with yap is inserted as a parenthesis; for 
 example, a\V ov ydp afav e</>aiWro icepSiov elvai | 
 fiaiecrdat Trporepco rol peis trdXiv avris e/Baivov. Here 
 there is clearly before the mind of the narrator when 
 he begins with a\\d the statement he is going to 
 make, that is, rot fiev ird\LV avris efiaivov, but he 
 breaks off the sentence in order to confirm it. 
 
 " Jacob Wackernagel 1 made the discovery that the 
 enclitics and other words of light signification (ai>, 
 dpa, 8e, pev, ovv, TOIVVV^) tend to occupy the second 
 place in the sentence. Although irep and ye ought 
 generally to follow the emphatic word, yet they come 
 under this influence ; for example, in II., F. 3, rjvre irep 
 K\ayyrj yepdvwv Tre'Xei ovpavodi Trpo, the irep goes, not 
 with the preceding rjvre nor the following tcXayyij, but 
 with yepdvav. The position of ye presents greater 
 difficulty where ' at least,' ' at any rate,' belongs to 
 the whole thought. Oftentimes it is convenient for 
 the poet to join the ye to a single word which may 
 serve for its natural support; for example, II., H. 
 91, 92, [AvOov, ov ov' KCV avrip ye 8ia crro'/ia trd^Trav 
 dyoiro, | 05 rt? eTTwrratTO ytri <j>pecrlv dpna ftd^eiv. 
 
 1 Jacob Wackernagel, Ueber ein Gesetz der indo-germanischen 
 Wortstellung, Indogerm. Forschungen, i (1891-92), pp. 333 fg.).
 
 THE GREEK PARTICLES. 79 
 
 The meaning is ' at least if he understood ' ; 
 formally, however, ye is joined to the logically unem- 
 phatic avrjp.* 
 
 " Where it is impossible to understand apa, ye\ vv 
 in Homer, we can suppose that they were inserted by 
 later bards who recited the epic speech as a half for- 
 eign dialect and carelessly used monosyllabic particles 
 to fill out the meter, as text critics in ancient and 
 modern times are fond of doing. The essentially 
 meaningless combination av KCV furnishes an abundant 
 example of this." 2 
 
 H refer the reader to Gloeckner's Homerische Partikeln, which, 
 when completed, will certainly prove a valuable contribution. 
 
 2 Cauer, Die Kuust des Uebersetzens, pp. 53-68. For a conven- 
 ient grouping and discussion of the Greek particles, c/. Brugmann's 
 Griechische Grammatik (1900), pp. 525-550, published in Iwan 
 Miiller's Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenshaft; also 
 Riemann et Goelzer, Grammaire comparee du Grec et du Latin, 
 Syntaxe (1897), pp. 341 fg. Among the many works of a more special 
 nature may be mentioned Baumlein, Untersuchungen iiber grlech. 
 Partikeln; Hubner, Grundr. griech. Synt. ; Eberling, Lexicon Homeri- 
 cum; Monro, Homeric Grammar; Nagelsbach, Anmerkungen zur 
 Ilias; Mutzbauer, Der homerische Gebrauch dor Partikel ^eV; Van 
 Leeuwen, De particularum *eV et av apud Homerum usu; Delbriich, 
 Vergliechende Syntax der indo-germanischen Sprachen (pp. 497 fg.).
 
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