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) 8e /cat a~v p atVetret? ii 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\vdvopopcov 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-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 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 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.66f)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 otov e^a* /royov ffb 3' fitocrs??' yaAaffrjvui Idds'i doopart x vuxri dlafjixei xuavlui TS 8vbdlr(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, 0iaei ae TO . 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&evrj, 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 ' liev oiiSev a.v KO.K.OV, fx>} wa.6elv &' ev\davT' a.v icrcu?, TOUTOVS fnev ef aira.Tai> atpcurdat jioAAof ^ irpoAeyovTO j3tdev\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 lSe 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 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 eapoveiv 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 &>eo-TWTa, ovre [ie\\ovra, ovre 8iwa/ieiatpa Tpe\ovTO va 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 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?7/iue, a. 337 ; & 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 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.). ,!??. U .I H . ERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY I W*' O*W%/0.