that a faithful translator is in duty bound to be faithful in absurdity. The doctrine of the Pleasure of the Reader is closely connected with another doctrine: that a translation should be such as to pass itself off as an Original. Sir T. H. Warren (op. cit. p. 105) plays with this idea: A good translation should read like an original. Why? Because the original reads like an original.' To which it might be rejoined that the French original of say a translation into English from French does not and indeed cannot read like an English original, and that, if it could, this would mean that, where the subject-matter told no tales, it would be beyond a reader to discern whether the so-called 'translation' was from Arabic, Russian, Greek, or Choctaw. Have the advocates of the theory ever faced this conclusion? The same conception of a translator's function and liberties is often cloked in metaphors, a favourite one being Transfusion. Sir John Denham, a translator of the Second Aeneid, of whom Dryden, who quotes him with approval, says 'he advised more liberty than he took,' remarks that 'Poetry is of so subtle a spirit that in passing out of one language into another it will all evaporate, and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum.' Professor Wilamowitz (op. cit. p. 7) maintains that a translator 'must not translate either words or sentences but take up and reproduce thoughts and feelings. The covering must be something new; the content what it was....The X soul remains, but the body is changed. True translation is a metempsychosis.' The notion that a translation is a sort of Original and its maker in a sense its Proprietor takes sometimes a rather curious form. Mr Warren H. Cudworth in the preface to his translation of the Odes and Secular Hymn of Horace, Norwood, Mass., U. S. A. 1917, p. xiii, finds it necessary to offer some apology to his readers for having not infrequently used rimes that were not new and in at least three cases lines that were precise duplicates of those of predecessors, and Dr B. B. Rogers in the Introduction to his edition of the Acharnians of Aristophanes (p. li) observes that when he translated the ἀπεψωλημένοις of line 161 he had not the slightest recollection that Frere had translated it in the same way,,' and I did not discover, until it was too late to alter it, that I had been an unconscious plagiarist.' Now the work of a translator should certainly be in the first instance his own, and while making his translation he should think always of his author, and never of his predecessors. But when it is done, may he not improve it by reference to theirs? Mr Cudworth and Dr Rogers would seemingly answer No. Dr Rogers would go further and eliminate from his translation even the undesigned coincidences.. Yet a translator we must hold is not a sun but a satellite. His refulgence is borrowed; and his first duty is to make the reflexion as true and as bright as he can. If for this he must incur undue obligations to his predecessors, let him leave the work to them. But if having made for himself some rendering that seems to him adequate, he finds that a predecessor has the same, that is no reason for discarding it; it is one more reason for retaining it1. 1 I am glad to note that a recent translator of Lucretius, W. G. Leonard, The issue we are dealing with may be raised in a concrete form. Thus proceeds Mr Phillimore in his pamphlet entitled 'Some Remarks on Translations and Translators' 1919, p. 17, where he brings to his bar two translators of the Agamemnon, Robert Browning and Edward FitzGerald, of whom the former thus states his contention : If because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language, and the latter thus his : I suppose very few People have ever taken such pains with Translation as I have though certainly not to be literal. But at all cost, a Thing must live with a transfusion of one's own worse life if one can't retain the Original's better. Better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle. And from the seat of an 'arbiter elegantiae' Mr Phillimore (p. 22) concludes with 'judgement for Fitzgerald.' The procedure is picturesque, but the method is defective. If having no Greek we desire to get as near as we can to the thoughts and diction of Agamemnon 255-258: Clytaemnestra. εὐάγγελος μέν, ὥσπερ ἡ παροιμία, Professor of English in the University of Wisconsin, has had the courage to avow that in the final revision he 'deliberately incorporated a few very apposite turns of expression' from Munro's and Bailey's prose translations, Preface, p. viii (1916). have we no choice between a rendering like this: Clytaemnestra. Oh, never yet did Night Night of all Good the Mother, as men say, Prepare your ear, Old Man, for tidings such Clytaemnestra. What if you be told— Oh mighty sum in one small figure cast!- or even one like this: FITZGERALD. Glad-voiced, the old saw telleth, comes this morn, Beyond all hope: the Greek hath taken Troy. GILBERT MURRAY 1920. and a 'transcription' like this: Good-news-announcer, may—as is the byword— BROWNING. Is the dilemma so desperate? Must we immolate the author on the altar of Browning or on the altar of FitzGerald? The version of W. G. Headlam may perhaps furnish a reply: With happy tidings, as the proverb runs, Come Dawn from Night his Mother! but here is joy Have taken Priam's town. FitzGerald's practice, not less than his frank avowal and the striking image by which it is set off, might be cited in excuse for every liberty that translators have taken or may choose to take with their originals-for Sir Edward Ridley's excisions in Lucan and Professor Platt's in Aeschylus, for Pope's additions to Homer and Dryden's to Vergil. Homer had written at the end of Iliad 24 Such was the burial of Hector, master of horses. Pope made this into Such honours Ilion to her hero paid (PURVES tr.) And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade. Vergil, Aen. I II, gave tantaene animis caelestibus irae? Dryden substituted Can heavenly minds such high resentment show For a judgment on these 'libertine' translations we may refer the translators to their own utterances, on the principles they profess. For Pope's see pp. 3, 6, and for Dryden's p. 60 inf., and in particular the outspoken utterance in the Preface to the Translation of Ovid's Epistles (Essays, I, p. 240 Ker): "Tis not always that a man will be contented to have a present made him, when he expects the payment of a debt.' To state it fairly: imitation (by which he means such translations as Cowley's Pindarique Odes) is the most advantageous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead. The Faithful Translator will give the letter where possible, but in any case the spirit. The Transfuser is only too prone to sacrifice the letter and the spirit as well. Which should we prefer, which would the ancient |