Early Theories of Translation Part 16

"There is no ancient author," he declares, "more likely to betray an injudicious interpreter into meannesses than Homer.... But a skilful artist knows how to embellish the most ordinary subject; and what would be low and spiritless from a less masterly pencil, becomes pleasing and graceful when worked up by Mr. Pope."[449]

Melmoth's last comment suggests Matthew Arnold's remark, "Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it may be,"[450] but in intention the two criticisms are very different.

To the average eighteenth-century reader Homer was entirely acceptable "when worked up by Mr. Pope." Slas.h.i.+ng Bentley might declare that it "must not be called Homer," but he admitted that "it was a pretty poem."

Less competent critics, unhampered by Bentley's scholarly doubts, thought the work adequate both as a poem and as a translated poem.

Dennis, in his _Remarks upon Pope's Homer_, quotes from a recent review some characteristic phrases. "I know not which I should most admire,"

says the reviewer, "the justness of the original, or the force and beauty of the language, or the sounding variety of the numbers."[451]

Prior, with more honesty, refuses to bother his head over "the justness of the original," and gratefully welcomes the English version.

Hang Homer and Virgil; their meaning to seek, A man must have pok'd into Latin and Greek; Those who love their own tongue, we have reason to hope, Have read them translated by Dryden and Pope.[452]

In general, critics, whether men of letters or Grub Street reviewers, saw both Pope's _Iliad_ and Homer's _Iliad_ through the medium of eighteenth-century taste. Even Dennis's onslaught, which begins with a violent contradiction of the hackneyed tribute quoted above, leaves the impression that its vigor comes rather from personal animus than from distrust of existing literary standards or from any new and individual theory of translation.

With the romantic movement, however, comes criticism which presents to us Pope's _Iliad_ as seen in the light of common day instead of through the flattering illusions which had previously veiled it. New translators like Macpherson and Cowper, though too courteous to direct their attack specifically against the great Augustan, make it evident that they have adopted new standards of faithfulness and that they no longer admire either the diction or the versification which made Pope supreme among his contemporaries. Macpherson gives it as his opinion that, although Homer has been repeatedly translated into most of the languages of modern Europe, "these versions were rather paraphrases than faithful translations, attempts to give the spirit of Homer, without the character and peculiarities of his poetry and diction," and that translators have failed especially in reproducing "the magnificent simplicity, if the epithet may be used, of the original, which can never be characteristically expressed in the ant.i.thetical quaintness of modern fine writing."[453] Cowper's prefaces show that he has given serious consideration to all the opinions of the theorists of his century, and that his own views are fundamentally opposed to those generally professed. His own basic principle is that of fidelity to his author, and, like every sensible critic, he sees that the translator must preserve a mean between the free and the close methods. This approval of compromise is not, however, a mere formula; Cowper attempts to throw light upon it from various angles. The couplet he immediately repudiates as an enemy to fidelity. "I will venture to a.s.sert that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible," he declares.

"No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds h.o.m.otonous, expressing at the same time the full sense of his original. The translator's ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier he is at invention and expedient, the more likely he is to be betrayed into the wildest departures from the guide whom he professes to follow."[454] The popular idea that the translator should try to imagine to himself the style which his author would have used had he been writing in English is to Cowper "a direction which wants nothing but practicability to recommend it. For suppose six persons, equally qualified for the task, employed to translate the same Ancient into their own language, with this rule to guide them. In the event it would be found that each had fallen on a manner different from that of all the rest, and by probable inference it would follow that none had fallen on the right."[455]

Cowper's advocacy of Miltonic blank verse as a suitable vehicle for a translation of Homer need not concern us here, but another innovation on which he lays considerable stress in his prefaces helps to throw light on the practice and the standards of his immediate predecessors. With more veracity than Pope, he represents himself as having followed his author even in his "plainer" pa.s.sages. "The pa.s.sages which will be least noticed, and possibly not at all, except by those who shall wish to find me at a fault," he writes in the preface to the first edition, "are those which have cost me abundantly the most labor. It is difficult to kill a sheep with dignity in a modern language, to slay and prepare it for the table, detailing every circ.u.mstance in the process. Difficult also, without sinking below the level of poetry, to harness mules to a wagon, particularizing every article of their furniture, straps, rings, staples, and even the tying of the knots that kept all together. Homer, who writes always to the eye with all his sublimity and grandeur, has the minuteness of a Flemish painter." In the preface to his second edition he recurs to this problem and makes a significant comment on Pope's method of solving it. "There is no end of pa.s.sages in Homer," he repeats, "which must creep unless they be lifted; yet in all such, all embellishment is out of the question. The hero puts on his clothes, or refreshes himself with food and wine, or he yokes his steeds, takes a journey, and in the evening preparation is made for his repose. To give relief to subjects prosaic as these without seeming unseasonably tumid is extremely difficult. Mr. Pope abridges some of them, and others he omits; but neither of these liberties was compatible with the nature of my undertaking."[456]

That Cowper's reaction against Pope's ideals was not a thing of sudden growth is evident from a letter more outspoken than the prefaces. "Not much less than thirty years since," he writes in 1788, "Alston and I read Homer through together. The result was a discovery that there is hardly a thing in the world of which Pope is so entirely dest.i.tute as a taste for Homer.... I remembered how we had been disgusted; how often we had sought the simplicity and majesty of Homer in his English representative, and had found instead of them puerile conceits, extravagant metaphors, and the tinsel of modern embellishment in every possible position."[457]

Cowper's "discovery," startling, almost heretical at the time when it was made, is now little more than a commonplace. We have long recognized that Pope's Homer is not the real Homer; it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, as does Mr. Andrew Lang, "It is almost as if he had taken Homer's theme and written the poem himself."[458] Yet it is surprising to see how nearly the eighteenth-century ambition, "to write a poem that will live in the English language" has been answered in the case of Pope. Though the "tinsel" of his embellishment is no longer even "modern," his translation seems able to hold its own against later verse renderings based on sounder theories. The Augustan translator strove to give his work "elegance, energy, and fire," and despite the false elegance, we can still feel something of true energy and fire as we read the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

The truth is that, in translated as in original literature the permanent and the transitory elements are often oddly mingled. The fate of Pope's Homer helps us to reconcile two opposed views regarding the future history of verse translations. Our whole study of the varying standards set for translators makes us feel the truth of Mr. Lang's conclusion: "There can be then, it appears, no final English translation of Homer. In each there must be, in addition to what is Greek and eternal, the element of what is modern, personal, and fleeting."[459]

The translator, it is obvious, must speak in the dialect and move in the measures of his own day, thereby very often failing to attract the attention of a later day. Yet there must be some place in our scheme for the faith expressed by Matthew Arnold in his essays on translating Homer, that "the task of translating Homer into English verse both will be re-attempted, and may be re-attempted successfully."[460] For in translation there is involved enough of creation to supply the incalculable element which cheats the theorist. Possibly some day the miracle may be wrought, and, in spite of changing literary fas.h.i.+ons, we may have our English version of Homer in a form sufficient not only for an age but for all time.

It is this incalculable quality in creative work that has made theorizing on the methods of translation more than a mere academic exercise. Forced to adjust itself to the facts of actual production, theory has had to follow new paths as literature has followed new paths, and in the process it has acquired fresh vigor and flexibility. Even as we leave the period of Pope, we can see the dull inadequacy of a worn-out collection of rules giving way before the honest, individual approach of Cowper. "Many a fair precept in poetry," says Dryden apropos of Roscommon's rules for translation, "is like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation."[461] Confronted by such discrepancies, the theorist has again and again had to modify his "specious" rules, with the result that the theory of translation, though a small, is yet a living and growing element in human thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[365] _Preface to the Reader_, in _The Natural History of C. Plinius Secundus_, London, 1601.

[366] _Dedication_, in _Ovid's Metamorphosis, Englished by G. S._, London, 1640.

[367] _Dedication_, in _The Poems of Horace rendered into Verse by Several Persons_, London, 1666.

[368] _Juvenal and Persius_, translated by Barten Holyday, Oxford, 1673 (published posthumously).

[369] _Dedication of the Aeneis_, in _Essays of John Dryden_, ed. W. P.

Ker, v. 2, p. 235.

[370] _Postscript to the Reader_, _Essays_, v. 2, p. 243.

[371] _Rowe_, in _Lives of the Poets_, Dublin, 1804, p. 284.

[372] _The Argument_, in _The Pa.s.sion of Dido for Aeneas_, translated by Edmund Waller and Sidney G.o.dolphin, London, 1658.

[373] _Dedication_, in _Translations of Horace_. John Hanway, 1730.

[374] _Dedication_, dated 1728, reprinted in _The English Poets_, London, 1810, v. 20.

[375] _Preface_ to _The Destruction of Troy_, in Denham, _Poems and Translations_, London, 1709.

[376] _To the courteous not curious reader._

[377] Comment on Trapp's "blank version" of Virgil, in _Life of Dryden_.

[378] _Preface to Sylvae_, _Essays_, v. 1, p. 266.

[379] _Dedication of the Aeneis_, _Essays_, v. 2, p. 236.

[380] In _Du Bartas, His Divine Words and Works_, translated by Sylvester, London, 1641.

[381] Lines by E. G., same edition.

[382] Same edition, p. 322.

[383] _An Essay on Translated Verse._

[384] _Dedication of the Aeneis_, _Essays_, v. 2, p. 220.

[385] P. 222.

[386] _To the worthy reader._

[387] _To the courteous not curious reader_, in _The XII. Aeneids of Virgil_, 1632.

[388] Preface to _The Destruction of Troy_.

[389] Dedication of _The Poems of Horace_.

[390] _To the Reader_, in _The First Book of Virgil's Aeneis_, London, 1688.

[391] Reprinted in _G.o.dfrey of Bulloigne_, translated by Fairfax, New York, 1849.

[392] _Essays_, v. 2, p. 249.

[393] _Essays_, v. 2, p. 14.

[394] Sprat, _Life of Cowley_, in _Prose Works of Abraham Cowley_, London, 1826.

[395] _Preface to the Translation of Ovid's Epistles_, _Essays_, v. 1, p.

237.

[396] _Dedication of Examen Poetic.u.m_, _Essays_, v. 2, p. 10. Johnson, writing of the latter part of the seventeenth century, says, "The authority of Jonson, Sandys, and Holiday had fixed the judgment of the nation" (_The Idler_, 69), and Tytler, in his _Essay on the Principles of Translation_, 1791, says, "In poetical translation the English writers of the sixteenth, and the greatest part of the seventeenth century, seem to have had no other care than (in Denham's phrase) to translate language into language, and to have placed their whole merit in presenting a literal and servile transcript of their original."

[397] In Lucan's _Pharsalia_, translated May, 1659.

[398] _To the Reader_, in Ovid's _Metamorphosis_, translated Sandys, London, 1640.

[399] _Preface_ to _Pindaric Odes_, reprinted in _Essays and other Prose Writings_, Oxford, 1915.