The Poems and Fragments of Catullus Part 1

The Poems and Fragments of Catullus.

by Catullus.

PREFACE.

The idea of translating Catullus in the original metres adopted by the poet himself was suggested to me many years ago by the admirable, though, in England, insufficiently known, version of Theodor Heyse (Berlin, 1855). My first attempts were modelled upon him, and were so unsuccessful that I dropt the idea for some time altogether. In 1868, the year following the publication of my larger critical edition[A] of Catullus, I again took up the experiment, and translated into English glyconics the first Hymenaeal, _Collis o Heliconici_. Tennyson's Alcaics and Hendecasyllables had appeared in the interval, and had suggested to me the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was not sufficient to reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient quant.i.ty was reproduced also. Almost all the modern writers of cla.s.sical metre had contented themselves with making an accented syllable long, an unaccented short; the most familiar specimens of hexameter, Longfellow's _Evangeline_ and Clough's _Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_ and _Amours de Voyage_ were written on this principle, and, as a rule, stopped there. They almost invariably disregarded position, perhaps the most important element of quant.i.ty. In the first line of _Evangeline_--

_This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,_

there are no less than five violations of position, to say nothing of the shortening of a syllable so distinctly long as the _i_ in _primeval_. Mr. Swinburne, in his Sapphics and Hendecasyllables, while writing on a manifestly artistic conception of those metres, and, in my judgment, proving their possibility for modern purposes by the superior rhythmical effect which a cla.s.sically trained ear enabled him to make in handling them, neglects position as a rule, though his nice sense of metre leads him at times to observe it, and uniformly rejects any approach to the harsh combinations indulged in by other writers. The nearest approach to quant.i.tative hexameters with which I am acquainted in modern English writers is the _Andromeda_ of Mr. Kingsley, a poem which has produced little effect, but is interesting as a step to what may fairly be called a new development of the metre. For the experiments of the Elizabethan writers, Sir Philip Sidney and others, by that strange perversity which so often dominates literature, were as decidedly unsuccessful from an accentual, as the modern experiments from a quant.i.tative point of view. Sir Philip Sidney has given in his _Arcadia_ specimens of hexameters, elegiacs, sapphics, asclepiads, anacreontics, hendecasyllables. The following elegiacs will serve as a sample.

_Unto a caitif wretch, whom long affliction holdeth, And now fully believ's help to bee quite perished; Grant yet, grant yet a look, to the last moment of his anguish, O you (alas so I finde) caus of his onely ruine: Dread not awhit (O goodly cruel) that pitie may enter Into thy heart by the sight of this Epistle I send: And so refuse to behold of these strange wounds the recitall, Lest it might m' allure home to thyself to return._

In these the cla.s.sical laws of position are most carefully observed; every dactyl ending in a consonant is followed by a word beginning with a vowel or _h_--_affliction holdeth_, _moment of his anguish_, _cause of his onely_; _affliction wasteth_, _moment of his dolour_, _cause of his dreary_, would have been as impossible to Sir Philip Sidney as _moeror tenebat_, _momenta per curae_, _causa vel sola_ in a Latin writer of hexameters. Similarly where the dactyl is incided after the second syllable, the third syllable beginning a new word, the utmost care is taken that that word shall begin not only with a syllable essentially short, but, when the second syllable ends in a consonant, with a vowel: _of this epistle_, but not _of this disaster_, still less _of this direction._ The other element of quant.i.ty is less rigidly defined; for (1) syllables strictly long, as _I_, _thy_, _so_, are allowed to be short; (2) syllables made long by the accent falling upon them are in some cases shortened, as _ruine_, _perished_, _cruel_; (3) syllables which the absence of the accent only allows to be long _in thesi_, are, in virtue of the cla.s.sical laws of position, permitted to rank as long elsewhere--_moment of his_, _of this epistle_. It needs little reflection to see that it is to one or other of these three peculiarities that the failure of the Elizabethan writers of cla.s.sical metres must be ascribed. Pentameters like

_Gratefulness, sweetness, holy love, hearty regard, That the delights of life shall be to him dolorous, And even in that love shall I reserve him a spite;_

sapphics like

_Are then humane mindes privileg'd so meanly As that hateful death can abridg them of power With the vow of truth to record to all worlds That we bee her spoils?_

hexameters like

_Fire no liquor can cool: Neptune's realm would not avail us.

Nurs inward maladies, which have not scope to bee breath'd out.

Oh no no, worthie shepherd, worth can never enter a t.i.tle;_

are too alien from ordinary p.r.o.nunciation to please either an average reader or a cla.s.sically trained student. The same may be said of the translation into English hexameters of the two first Eclogues of Virgil, appended by William Webbe to his _Discourse of English Poetrie_ (1586, recently reprinted by Mr. Arber). Here is his version of Ecl. I., 1-10.

MELIBAEUS.

_t.i.tyrus, happilie then lyste tumbling under a beech tree, All in a fine oate pipe these sweete songs l.u.s.tilie chaunting: We, poore soules goe to wracke, and from these coastes be remoued, And fro our pastures sweete: thou t.i.tyr, at ease in a shade plott Makst thicke groues to resound with songes of brave Amarillis._

t.i.tYRUS.

_O Melibaeus, he was no man, but a G.o.d who releeude me: Euer he shalbe my G.o.d: from this same Sheepcot his alters Neuer, a tender lambe shall want, with blood to bedew them.

This good gift did he giue, to my steeres thus freelie to wander, And to my selfe (thou seest) on pipe to resound what I listed._

_ib._ 50-56.

_Here no unwoonted foode shall grieue young theaues who be laded, Nor the infections foule of neighbours flocke shall annoie them.

Happie olde man. In shaddowy bankes and coole prettie places, Heere by the quainted floodes and springs most holie remaining.

Here, these quicksets fresh which lands seuer out fro thy neighbors And greene willow rowes which Hiblae bees doo rejoice in, Oft fine whistring noise, shall bring sweete sleepe to thy sences._

The following stanzas are from a Sapphic ode into which Webbe translated, or as we should say, transposed the fourth Eclogue of Spenser's _Sheepheardes Calendar_.

_Say, behold did ye euer her Angelike face, Like to Phoebe fayre? or her heauenly hauour And the princelike grace that in her remaineth?

haue yee the like seene?_

_Vnto that place Caliope dooth high her, Where my G.o.ddesse s.h.i.+nes: to the same the Muser After her with sweete Violines about them cheerefully tracing._

_All ye Sheepheardes maides that about the greene dwell, Speede ye there to her grace, but among ye take heede All be Virgins pure that aproche to deck her, dutie requireth._

_When ye shall present ye before her in place, See ye not your selues doo demeane too rudely: Bynd the fillets: and to be fine the waste gyrt fast with a tawdryne._

_Bring the Pinckes therewith many Gelliflowres sweete, And the Cullambynes: let vs haue the Wynesops, With the Coronation that among the loue laddes wontes to be worne much._

_Daffadowndillies all a long the ground strowe, And the Cowslyppe with a prety paunce let heere lye.

Kyngcuppe and Lillies so beloude of all men and the deluce flowre._

There are many faults in these verses; over quaintnesses of language, constructions impossible in English, quant.i.ties of doubtful correctness, harsh elisions, for Webbe has tried even elisions. Yet, if I may trust my judgment, all of them can still be read with pleasure; the sapphics may almost be called a success. This is even more true of metres, where these faults are less perceptible or more easily avoided, for instance, Asclepiads. Take the verses on solitariness, Arcadia, B.

II. fin.

_O sweet woods, the delight of solitariness!

O how much I do like your solitariness!

Where man's mind hath a freed consideration Of goodness to receive lovely direction._

or the hendecasyllables immediately preceding,

_Reason tell me thy minde, if here be reason, In this strange violence, to make resistance, Where sweet graces erect the stately banner._

It is obvious that a very little more trouble would have converted these into very perfect and very pleasing poems. Had Sir Philip Sidney written every asclepiad on the model of _Where man's mind hath a freed consideration_, every hendecasyllable like _Where sweet graces erect the stately banner_, the adjustment of accent and quant.i.ty thus attained might, I think, have induced greater poets than he to make the experiment on a larger scale. But neither he nor his contemporaries were permitted to grasp as a principle a regularity which they sometimes secured by chance; nor, so far as I am aware, have the various revivals of ancient metre in this country or Germany in any case consistently carried out the _whole_ theory, without which the reproduction is partial, and cannot look for a more than partial success. Even the four specimens given in the posthumous edition of Clough's poems, two of them elegiac, one alcaic, one in hexameters, though professedly constructed on a quant.i.tative basis, and, in one instance (_Trunks the forest yielded, with gums ambrosial oozing, &c._) combining legitimate quant.i.ty (in which accent and position are alike observed) with illegitimate (in which position is observed, but accent disregarded) into a not unpleasing rhythm, cannot be considered as more than imperfect realizations of the true positional principle. Tennyson's three specimens are, at least in English, still unique. It is to be hoped that he will not suffer them to remain so. Systems of Glyconics and Asclepiads are, if I mistake not, easily manageable, and are only thought foreign to the genius of our language because they have never been written on strict principles of art by a really great master.

What, then, are the rules on which such rhythms become possible? They are, briefly, these:--(1) accented syllables, _as a general rule_, are long, though some syllables which count as long need not be accented, as in

_All that on earth's leas blooms, what blossoms Thessaly nursing,_

_blossoms_, though only accented on the first syllable, counts for a spondee, the shortness of the second _o_ being partly helped out by the two consonants which follow it; partly by the fact that the syllable is _in thesi_; (2) the laws of position are to be observed, according to the general rules of cla.s.sical prosody: (_a_) dactyls terminating in a consonant like _beautiful_, _bounteous_, or ending in a double vowel or a diphthong like _all of you, surely may, come to thee_, must be followed by a word beginning with a vowel or _y_ or _h_; dactyls terminating in a vowel or _y_, like _slippery_, should be followed, except in rare cases, by words beginning with a consonant; trochees, whether composed of one word or more, should, if ending in a consonant, be followed by a vowel, if ending in the vowel _a_, by a consonant, thus, _planted around_ not _planted beneath_, _Aurora the sun's_ not _Aurora a sun's_ (see however, lxiv. 253), but _unto a wood, any again, sorry at all, you be amused_. (_b_) Syllables made up of a vowel followed by two or more consonants, each of which is distinctly heard in p.r.o.nunciation, as _long_, _sins_, _part_, _band_, _waits_, _souls_, _ears_, _must_, _heart_, _bright_, _strength_, _end_, _and_, _rapt_, _hers_, _dealt_, mo_ment_, bo_soms_, _answers_, moun_tains_, bear_est_, tum_bling_, gi_ving_, com_ing_, harbour_ing_, diffi_cult_, immi_nent_, strata_gems_, utter_ance_, happi_est_, trem_bling_ly, can never rank as short, even if unaccented and followed by a vowel, _h_ or _y_. Thus, to go back to Longfellow's line,

_This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,_

_forest_, _murmuring_, _pines and the_, are all inadmissible. But where a vowel is followed by two consonants, one of which is unheard or only heard slightly, as in _acc_use, sh_all_, _a.s.s_emble, _diss_emble, kind_ness_, com_pa.s.s_, _aff_ect, _app_ear, _ann_oy, or when the second or third consonant is a liquid, as in _betray_, _beslime_, _besmear_, _depress_, _dethrone_, _agree_, the vowel preceding is so much more short than long as to be regularly admissible as short, rarely admissible as long. On this principle I have allowed _disorderly?_, _tenantless_, _heavenly?_, to rank as dactyls.

These rules are after all only an outline, and perhaps can never be made more. It will be observed that they are more negative than positive. The reason of this is not far to seek. The main difference between my verses and those of other contemporary writers--the one point on which I claim for myself the merit of novelty--is the strict observance throughout of the rules of position. But the strict observance of position is in effect the strict avoidance of uncla.s.sical collocations of syllables: it is almost wholly negative. To ill.u.s.trate my meaning I will instance the poems written in pure iambics, the _Phaselus ille_ and _Quis hoc potest uidere_. Heyse translates the first line of the former of these poems by

_Die Galeotte, die ihr schauet, liebe Herrn,_

and this would be a fair representation of a pure iambic line, according to the views of most German and most English writers. Yet not only is _Die_ no short syllable, but _ihr_, itself long, is made more hopelessly long by preceding three consonants in _schauet_, just as the last syllable of _schauet_, although in itself short, loses its right to stand for a true short in being followed by the first consonant of _liebe_. My own translation,

_The puny pinnace yonder you, my friends, discern,_

whatever its defects, is at least a pretty exact representation of a pure iambic line. xxix. 6-8, are thus translated by Heyse:--

_Und jener soll in Uebermuthes Ueberfluss Von einem Bett zum andern in die Runde gehn?_

by me thus,