Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845

'Et quaDesperes tractata nitescere posse, relinquas.'

"Thus I have ventured to give my opinion on this subject against the authority of two great men, but, I hope, without offence to either of their memories; for I both loved them living, and reverence them now they are dead. But if, after what I have urged, it be thought by better judges that the praise of a translation consists in adding new beauties to the piece, thereby to recompense the loss which it sustains by change of language, I shall be willing to be taught better, and recant. In the meantime, it seems to me that the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable, is not from the too close pursuing of the author's sense, but because that there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise, and so small encouragement, for so considerable a part of learning."

We could write a useful commentary on each paragraph of that lively dissertation. The positions laid down are not, in all their extent, tenable; and Dryden himself, in other places, advocates principles of Translation altogether different from these, and violates them in his practice by a thousand beauties as well as faults. We confine ourselves to one or two remarks.

Dryden, in assigning the qualifications of a poetical Translator, seems to speak with due caution – "He must have a genius to the art." How much, then, of the powers are asked in him which go to making the original poet? Not the great creative genius. In order effectively to translating the Song of Achilles, he need not have been able to invent the character of Achilles, or to delineate it, if he found it, as Homer might largely, invented in tradition to his hands. But he must be the adequate critic of the Song full and whole. He must feel the Achilles whom Homer has given him, through chilling blood, and thrilling nerve, and almost through shivering, shuddering bone. Neither need he be, inverse and word possibly, the creator for thoughts of his own. That Homer is. He is not called upon to be, in his own strength, an audacious, impetuous, majestic, and magnanimous thinker. It is enough if he have the sensibility, the simplicity, the sincerity, the sympathy, and the intellectual capacity, to become all this, on the strength of another. But if he could not create the thoughts, neither could he, upon his own behalf, create the verbal and metrical expression of the thoughts; for in these last is the inspiration that brings into the light of existence both words and music. Yet nothing seems to hinder, but that if endowed for perfectly accepting and appropriating the thoughts, he may then become in secondary place inspired, and a creator for the "new utterance." In all our observation of the various constitutions bestowed, in different men, upon the common human mind, nothing appears to forbid that an exquisite and mastering faculty of language, such as shall place the wealth of a mother-tongue at command, and an exquisite ear and talent for melodious and significant numbers, may be lodged in a spirit that is not gifted with original invention. Much rather, the recognition of the compensating and separable way in which faculties are dealt, would lead us to look from time to time, for children of the Muse gifted for supereminent Translators. Do we not see engravers, not themselves exalted and accomplished masters, who yet absorb into their transcript the soul of the master? Dryden's phrase, "have a genius," seems to express this qualified gifting – the enthusiasm, and the narrower creative faculty excellently given, and kept alive and active by cultivation and exercise.

Hoole's Orlando Furioso, and Jerusalem Delivered, are among the world's duller achievements in the art of Translation. They have obtained some favour of public opinion by the interest which will break through them, and which they in their unambitious way singularly attest – the interest of the matter. What is the native deficiency which extinguishes in them every glimmer of the original Style? The clerk at the India-House, or some other house, had not, in the moulding of heart or brain, any touch of the romantic. And Ariosto and Tasso are the two poets of Romance. Take a translator of no higher intellectual endowment than Mr Hoole – perform some unknown adjuration to the goddess Nature, which shall move her to infuse into him the species of sensibility which grounds the two poems, and which we have said that we desiderate in the bold Accountant, – read the poems through with him, taking care that he understands them – as far as a matter of the sort may be seen to, teach him, which is all fair, a trick or two of our English verse to relieve the terrible couplet monotony – run an eye over the MS. on its way to the printer, and he shall have enriched the literature of his country with, if not two rightly representative, yet too justifiable Translations.

Dryden's defence of the manner in which Pindar has been made to speak English by Cowley, cannot be sustained. A translator must give the meaning of his author so as that they who are scholars in the vernacular only – for to the unread and uncultivated he does not address himself – may be as nearly as possible so impressed and affected as scholars in the original tongue are by the author; or, soaring a little more ambitiously, as nearly as may be as they were affected to whom the original work was native. To Anglicize Pindar is not the adventure. It is to Hellenize an English reader. Homer is not dyed in Grecism as Pindar is. The profound, universal, overpowering humanity of Homer makes him of the soil everywhere. The boundaries of nations, and of races, fade out and vanish. He and we are of the family – of the brotherhood – Man. That is all that we feel and know. The manners are a little gone by. That is all the difference. We read an ancestral chronicle, rather than the diary of to-day. But Pindar is all Greek – Greek to the backbone. There the stately and splendid mythology stands in its own power – not allied to us by infused human blood – but estranged from us in a dazling, divine glory. The great theological poet of Greece, the hymnist of her deities, remembers, in celebrating athlete and charioteer, his grave and superior function. To hear Pindar in English, you must open your wings, and away to the field of Elis, or the Isthmian strand. Under the canopying smoke of London or Edinburgh, even amongst the beautiful fields of England or Scotland, there is nothing to be made of him. You must be a Greek among Greeks.

Therefore, in the Translator, no condescension to our ignorance at least. And no ignoble dread of our ignorant prejudices. The difficult connexion of the thoughts which Dryden duly allows to the foreign and ancient poet, a commentary might clear, where it does as much for the reader of the Greek; or sometimes, possibly, a word interpolated might help. But the difficulty of translating Pindar is quite distinct from his obscurity. For it is his light. It is the super-terrestrial splendour of the lyrical phraseology which satisfied the Greek imagination, lifted into transport by the ardour, joy, and triumph, of those Panhellenic Games. It is the simple, yet dignified strength of the short, pithy, sage Sentences. It is the rendering of the now bold and abrupt, now enchained sequences of expressive sound, in those measures which we hardly yet know how to scan. It is not the track but the wing of the Theban eagle that is the desperation.

It is always delightful to hear Dryden speaking of Cowley. He was indeed a man made to be loved. But to students in the divine art, his poetry will for ever remain the great puzzle. His "Pindarque Odes, written in imitation of the style and manner of the Odes of Pindar," are unique. Cowley was a scholar. In Latin verse he is one of the greatest among the modern masters; and he had much Greek. There can be no doubt that he could construe Pindar – none that he could have understood him – had he tried to do so. "If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another." Instead, therefore, of translating him word for word, "the ingenious Cowley" set about imitating his style and manner, and that he thought might best be effected by changing his measures, and discarding almost all his words, except the proper names, to which he added many others of person or place, illustrious at the time, or in tradition. Events and exploits brought vividly back by Pindar to the memory of listeners, to whom a word sufficed, are descanted on by Cowley in explanatory strains, often unintelligible to all living men. The two opening lies of his first Imitation characterize his muse.

"Queen of all harmonious things,Dancing words, and speaking things."

The words do dance indeed; and "Cowley's Medley" combines the Polka and the Gallopade.

Yet throughout these Two Odes (the Second Olympic and the First Nemæan) may be detected flowing the poetry of Pindar. Compare Cowley with him – book in hand – and ever and anon you behold Pindar. Cowley all along had him in his mind – but Cowley's mind played him queer tricks – his heart never; yet had he a soul capable of taking flight with the Theban eagle. There are many fine lines, sentimental and descriptive, in these extraordinary performances. There is sometimes "a golden ferment" on the page, which, for the moment, pleases more than the cold correctness of Carey. For example – The Isle of the Blest.

"Far other lot befalls the good;A life from trouble free;Nor with laborious handsTo vex the stubborn lands,Nor beat the billowy seaFor a scanty livelihood.But with the honour'd of the gods,Who love the faithful, their abodes;By day or night the sun quits not their sphere,Living a dateless age without a tear.The others urge meanwhile,Loathsome to light their endless toil.But whoso thrice on either sideWith firm endurance have been tried,Keeping the soul exempted stillThrough every change from taint of ill,To the tower of Saturn theyTravel Jove's eternal way.On that blest Isle's enchanted ground,Airs from ocean breathe around;Burn the bright immortal flowers,Some on beds, and some on bowers,From the branches hanging high;Some fed by waters where they lie;Of whose blossoms these do braidArmlets, and crowns their brows to shade.Such bliss is their's, assured by just decreeOf Rhadamanth, who doth the judgment shareWith father Saturn, spouse of Rhea, sheWho hath o'er all in heav'n the highest chair.With them are Peleus, Cadmus number'd,And he, whom as in trance he slumber'd,His mother Thetis wafted there,Softening the heart of Jove with prayer,Her own Achilles, that o'erthrewHector, gigantic column of old Troy,And valiant Cycnus slew,And Morning's Æthiop boy."Carey"Whilst in the lands of unexhausted lightO'er which the godlike sun's unwearied light,Ne'er winks in clouds, nor sleeps in night,An endless spring of age the good enjoy,Where neither want does pinch, nor plenty cloy.There neither earth nor sea they plow,Nor ought to labour oweFor food, that whilst it nourishes does decay,And in the lamp of life consumes away.Thrice had these men through mortal bodies past,Did thrice the tryal undergo,Till all their little dross was purged at last,The furnace had no more to do.There in rich Saturn's peaceful stateWere they for sacred treasures placed —The Muse-discovered world of Islands Fortunate.Soft-footed winds with tuneful voyces thereDance through the perfumed air.There silver rivers through enamell'd meadows glide,And golden trees enrich their side.Th' illustrious leaves no dropping autumn fear,And jewels for their fruit they bear,Which by the blest are gatheredFor bracelets to the arm, and garlands to the head.Here all the heroes and their poets live,Wise Radamanthus did the sentence give,Who for his justice was thought fitWith sovereign Saturn on the bench to sit.Peleus here, and Cadmus reign.Here great Achilles, wrathful now no more,Since his blest mother (who beforeHad try'd it on his body in vain)Dipt now his soul in Stygian lake,Which did from thence a divine hardness take,That does from passion and from vice invulnerable make."

Carey's commencement is dull – his close is good – but the whole will never, on this earth, be gotten by heart. Cowley's conceits are cruel in Pindar's case – yet, in spite of them, there is a strange sublimity in the strain – at the end moral grandeur. Reginald Heber and Abraham Moore – especially Reginald – excel Carey; but Pindar in English is reserved for another age.

Dryden dashed at every poet – Theocritus, Lucretius, Persius, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Virgil, Homer – each in his turn unhesitatingly doth he take into his translating hands. In his Essay on Satire, he compares with one another the three Roman Satirists; but though he draws their characters with his usual force and freedom of touch, they are not finely distinctive – if coloured con amore, yet without due consideration. In the Preface to the Second Miscellany, he says of Horace's Satires, that they "are incomparably beyond Juvenal's, if to laugh and rally is to be preferred to raillery and declaiming." In his Essay, he says, "In my particular opinion, Juvenal is the more delightful writer." And again – "Juvenal is of a more vigorous and masculine wit; he gives me as much pleasure as I can bear; he fully satisfies my expectation; he treats his subject home; his spleen is raised, and he raises mine. I have the pleasure of concernment in all he says; he drives his reader along with him. * * * His thoughts are sharper; his indignation against vice more vehement; his spirit has more of the commonwealth genius; he treats tyranny and all the vices attending it, as they deserve, with the utmost rigour; and consequently a noble soul is better pleased with a zealous vindicator of Roman liberty, than with a temporizing poet, a well-manner'd court-slave, and a man who is often afraid of laughing in the right place, who is ever decent because he is naturally servile." Is this Quintus Horatius Flaccus!

In Dryden and Juvenal are met peer and peer. Indignant scorn and moral disgust instigated the nervous hand of Juvenal, moulded to wield the scourge of satire. He is an orator in verse, speaking with power and command, skilled in the strength of the Roman speech, and practised in the weapons of rhetoric. But he is nevertheless a poet. Seized with impressions, you see his sail caught with driving gusts, if his eye be on the card. He snatches images right and left on his impetuous way, and flings them forth suddenly and vividly, so that they always tell. Perhaps he is more apt at binding a weighty thought in fewer words than his Translator, who felt himself as this disadvantage when he expressively portrayed the Latin as "a severe and compendious language." The Roman satirist has more care of himself; he maintains a prouder step; and the justifying incentive to this kind of poetry, hate with disdain of the vices and miseries to be lashed, more possesses his bosom. And what a wild insurrection of crimes and vices! What a challenge to hate and disdain in the minds in which the tradition of the antique virtues, the old mores, those edifiers of the sublime Republic, had yet life! Rome under Nero and Domitian! Pedants have presumed to question the sincerity of his indignation, and have more than hinted that his power of picturing those enormous profligacies was inspired by the pleasure of a depraved imagination. Never was there falser charge. The times and the topics were not for delicate handling, – they were to be looked at boldly in the face, – and if spoken of at all, at full, and with unmistakable words.

There is no gloating in his eyes when fixed in fire on guilt. Antipathy and abhorrence load with more revolting colours the hideous visage, from which, but for that moral purpose, they would recoil. But what, it may be asked, is the worth and use of a satire that drags out vices from their hiding-holes to flay them in sunshine? They had no hiding-holes. They affronted the daylight. But the question must be answered more comprehensively. The things told are– the corruption of our own spirit has engendered them – and every great city, in one age or another, is a Rome. Consult Cowper. To know such things is one bitter and offending lesson in the knowledge of our nature. For the pure and simple such records are not written. It is a galling disclosure, a frightful warning for the anomalous race of the proud-impure. Gifford finely said of this greatest of satirists, that, "disregarding the claims of a vain urbanity, and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions of moral good and evil, he laboured with a magnificence of language peculiar to himself to set forth the loveliness of virtue, and the deformity and horror of vice, in full and perfect display." The loveliness of virtue! Ay, in many a picture of the innocence and simplicity of the olden time – unelaborate but truthful – ever and anon presented for a few moments to show how happy humanity is in its goodness, and how its wickedness is degradation and misery. And there are many prolonged lofty strains sounding the praise of victorious virtue. They are for all time – and they, too, that magnify and glorify the spirit of liberty, then exiled from the city it had built, and never more to have dominion there, but regnant now in nations that know how to prize the genius it still continued to inspire when public virtue was dead.

Yet Dryden has not been altogether successful with Juvenal. In many places he is most slovenly – in many elaborately coarse beyond the coarseness ready-made to his hand – in some of the great passages, he leaves out what he feared to equal, and, in the face of all the principles in his own creed on Translation, he often paraphrases with all possible effrontery, and lets himself loose to what is called imitation, till the original evanishes, to return, however, on a sudden, apparition-like, and with a voice of power, giving assurance of the real Juvenal.

His criticism on Lucretius is characteristic of them both. See how rashly, we had almost said foolishly, he rates the Epicurean for his belief in the mortality of the soul. Were there no better reason afforded by the light of nature, for a belief in its immortality than what Dryden throws out, human nature would not so earnestly have embraced, and so profoundly felt, and so clearly seen, the truth of the Christian dispensation.

"If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an easy task to Virgil; who as he succeeded him in time, so he copied his excellences; for the method of the Georgics is plainly derived from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he, therefore, adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see Virgil has imitated with great success in those four books, which, in my opinion, are more perfect in their kind than even his divine Æneid. The turn of his verses he has likewise followed in those places where Lucretius has most laboured, and some of his very lines he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius, (I mean of his soul and genius,) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him; and using a magisterial authority while he instructs him. From his time to ours, I know none so like him as our poet and philosopher of Malmesbury. This is that perpetual dictatorship which is exercised by Lucretius, who, though often in the wrong, yet seems to deal bona fide with his reader and tells him nothing but what he thinks; in which plain sincerity, I believe, he differs from our Hobbes, who could not but be convinced, or at least doubt of some eternal truths, which he has opposed. But for Lucretius, he seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been every where as poetical as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight. But he was bent on making Memmius a materialist, and teaching him to defy an invisible power; in short, he was so much an atheist, that he forgot sometimes to be a poet. These are the considerations which I had of that author, before I attempted to translate some parts of him. And, accordingly, I laid by my natural diffidence and scepticism for a while, to take up that dogmatical way of his, which, as I said, is so much his character as to make him that individual poet. As for his opinions concerning the mortality of the soul, they are so absurd, that I cannot if I would, believe them. I think a future state demonstrable even by natural arguments; at least, to take away rewards and punishments, is only a pleasing prospect to a man who resolves before hand not to live morally. But, on the other side, the thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man, even though a heathen. We naturally aim at happiness, and cannot bear to have it confined to the shortness of our present being; especially when we consider that virtue is generally unhappy in this world, and vice fortunate; so that it is hope of futurity alone, that makes this life tolerable in expectation of a better. Who would not commit all the excesses to which he is prompted by his natural inclinations, if he may do them with security while he is alive, and be incapable of punishment after he is dead? If he be cunning and secret enough to avoid the laws, there is no band of morality to restrain him; for fame and reputation are weak ties; many men have not the least sense of them. Powerful men are only awed by them, as they conduce to their interest, and that not always, when a passion is predominant; and no man will be contained within the bounds of duty when he may safely transgress them. These are my thoughts abstractedly, and without entering into the notions of our Christian faith, which is the proper business of divines.

"But there are other arguments in this poem (which I have turned into English) not belonging to the mortality of the soul, which are strong enough to a reasonable man, to make him less in love with life, and consequently in less apprehension of death. Such are the natural satiety proceeding from a perpetual enjoyment of the same things; the inconveniences of old age, which make him incapable of corporeal pleasures, the decay of understanding and memory, which render him contemptible, and useless to others. These, and many other reasons, so pathetically urged, so beautifully expressed, so adorned with examples, and so admirably raised by the prosopopeia of nature, who is brought in speaking to her children with so much authority and vigour, deserve the pains I have taken with them, which, I hope, have not been unsuccessful or unworthy of my author; at least, I must take the liberty to own, that I was pleased with my own endeavours, which but rarely happens to me; and that I am not dissatisfied upon the review of any thing I have done in this author."

Lucretius is a poet of a sublimer order than Dryden. Yet have they psychical affinities. The rush of poetical composition characterizes both – a ready pomp and splendour – more prodigality than economy – bold felicity rather than finish, though neither is that wanting – mastery of language and measure – touches from the natural world, that fall in more as a colouring of style, than the utterances of a heart imbued with a deep love of nature. Indeed, if the genial belongs to the physiognomy of Dryden's writing, the cordial is hardly a constituent in the character of either poet, although at need both can find eloquent expression even for the pathetic. In both, if in different measure, a sceptical vein is inherent; but in Lucretius this arms itself in logic, and he appears in his cosmogony as a philosophical atheist. In Dryden it might seem rather a humour leaned to, because on that side lies the pleasure of mockery and scoffing. Lucretius pleads his philosophy like a man who is incredulous in earnest. But you can seldom say what it is that Dryden embraces with seriousness, unless it be, in his better and happier undertakings, his own part in executing the work. The subject-matter might seem almost always rather accidentally brought to him, than affectionately sought by him; once out of his hands, it is dismissed from his heart; he often seems utterly to have forgotten opinions and persons in whom, not long before, he had taken the liveliest interest – careless of inconsistencies even in the same essay, assuredly one of the most self-contradicting of mortals. No man, some say, has a right to question another's religious faith, but all men have a right to judge of the professed principles on which it has been adopted, when those principles have been triumphantly propounded to the public in controversial treatises of elaborate verse. To reason powerfully not only in verse but rhyme, is no common achievement, and such fame is justly Dryden's; but how would the same reasoning have looked in prose? His controversy with Stillingfleet shows – but so so. Does Lucretius write from a strong heart and a seduced understanding? Or, is it now to be quoted as a blameable unbelief that ridded itself of the Greek and Roman Heaven and Hell? There is one great and essential difference on the side of the Epicurean. An original poet, he seems to speak from a sweeping contemplation of the universe. We grudge that the boundless exuberance of painting should go to decorate the argumentation of an unfruitful system of doctrine. We want the sympathy with the purpose of the poet, that should for us harmonize the poem. He often strikes singularly high tones. Witness, among many other great passages, his argument on death, and his thunderstorm. And had the description of the heifer bemoaning and seeking her lost calf been Virgil's, we should have thought it had sprung from the heart of rural simplicity and love. Dryden and Lucretius agree in the negligent indifference which they show, when mere argumentation is in hand, to smoothness and ornament, and also in the wonderful facility with which they compel logical forms to obey the measure. There they are indeed truly great.