where whether 30, 32 or even 40 syllables be taken for the stanza the last line with its incompressible 'Lacedaemonium' must reduce the translator to despair. Few expedients are at his disposal. Such shortenings as' Aphrodite' with mute e (Shelley), 'Telegon' (Conington), 'Merion' (Gladstone) are desperate devices. So 'Ascan' for 'Ascanius' (Bowen) is rightly called a 'dangerous experiment' Tyrrell p. 313. The substitution of a synonym, not permissible in a prose translation, as 'Dis' for 'Pluto' in II xiv. 6, may sometimes be excused, and since we cannot sacrifice the doubled address in II xiv. I the proper name may go into the title. In Prospective Translation also the carrying capacity of metres must be sedulously regarded, and commensurateness will point sometimes to one metre and sometimes to another; compare what was said above p. 69. In its carrying capacity Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' stanza exceeds the four-lined Alcaic and Asclepiad strophes but falls short of two elegiac couplets. As a literary mode it lies between lyric and elegiac verse. Hence a translator who is not tied to a single metre (p. 99 below) may render into lyrics or elegiacs as the contents and the tone of the poem may suggest, see nos. 52, 54. In the choice of metres Prospective Translation has always claimed great freedom. But few translators will emulate the marvellous dexterity with which the close' (below, p. 98), and his protest against R. L. Stevenson's description of it as 'these thundering verses.' "What?"thundering " ?— Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. No: I will swear, not thundering; or if thundering but as a storm rolling away southward beyond distant hills and muted into calm.' The Horatian Model in English Verse, 'Studies in Literature,' p. 66. late Master of Trinity turned Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' into 21 different Greek and Latin metres1. Commensurateness by itself must sometimes determine the choice of a Metre. In sepulchral verse the elegiac measure is more usual than the hendecasyllabic, though this also is found, as in Buecheler's 'Latin Anthology' nos. 1508 sqq. But, to represent Professor A. E. Housman's 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,' seven hendecasyllables seemed to me more adequate than four elegiac couplets which was the form used in translations in the prize competition of the Westminster Gazette, two lines from one of which I subjoin, italicising what is superfluous, to show how the use of a metre which provides more room than is needed leads to amplifications that impair the directness and clearness of an original: Desuper in gentes cum mundi tota ruebant Moenia, cum tellus se dabat ipsa fugae2. Commensurateness must of course not be pursued at the expense of truth. Where therefore intelligibility or emphasis demand, the original must be expanded without compunction. These expansions however should be borne in mind by the expander and, if possible, the balance redressed by retrenchment elsewhere. This is a special application of the principle of 1 H. M. Butler, 'Some Leisure Hours of a Long Life,' pp. 311 sqq. The versatility of Arthur Sidgwick was hardly less remarkable; see a letter of J. M. Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement of Sept. 30, 1919. 2 As the probuerunt of my version has proved a stumbling-block to certain critics, I would here repeat that this form was deliberately chosen to give the Lucretian colour which is clearly indicated in the Epitaph. See Lucretius I 977 and III 864, and the American Journal of Philology, vol. 39, pp. 109 sq. Compensation. In such cases a translator is not bound to take the nearest idiomatic correspondent to the original. Suppose this presents some peculiarity of form, say an antithesis, which cannot be reproduced because its members are not such as would occur in contrast in the translating language, then, if antithesis is an indispensable part of the impression to be conveyed by the original, the translation may be made antithetical in some other way. When reading Charles Lamb's 'Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis' I came upon a translation of the Epitaphium Canis by Vincent Bourne, 'most classical and at the same time most English of the Latinists,' which seems to be an example of unconscious compensation. Bourne had written Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite finxit, quod memoret fidumque canem dominumque benignum, in which the fourfold que of the last line and a half at once arrests attention. Lamb renders This slender tomb of turf hath Irus rear'd, The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog. Here in the first part the rendering is not unreasonably free; but at the end, where the Latin is more obstinate, it lapses into paraphrase, in which however the effect of the quadruple que seems to be traceable in the otherwise motiveless doubling of the phrase 'to attest.' In rendering Lucan's Dream of Pompey' VII 9 (no. 7) I had to sacrifice the impressive poly syllable Pompeiani; but I hope the reader will feel I have given him some compensation in the following line1. Great caution undoubtedly should be exercised in Compensation. To adopt part of a phrase of Tytler op. cit. p. 22 'the superadded idea shall have the most necessary connection with the original thought,' and nothing must be introduced which the author, were he his own translator, might not be expected to approve. But I think Sir George Young is too absolute when he says (Preface to his Sophocles, 1888), 'I heartily repudiate the doctrine of compensation whereby, when beauty has been missed, other ornament is imported to make up the general effect.' For the principle underlying compensation is that the translator should deliver full weight. The metaphor is well illustrated by a striking passage of Cicero de optimo genere dicendi 14 'non uerbum pro uerbo necesse habui reddere sed genus omne uimque uerborum seruaui. non enim ea adnumerare lectori putaui oportere sed tamquam appendere. 1 The shift here is stylistic. It must be distinguished from shifts required by some difference of idiom. As where tu, σúye, ¿yú do not convey a contrast of persons but mark emphasis such as is expressed by Eng. do, did, or by stress on a particular word as in Ter. Hec. 153 'reddi patri autem cui tu nil dicas uiti | superbumst,' not with whom you can find no fault' but 'with whom no fault can be found,' Hor. Od. 19. 16 'neque tu choreas,' ' nor dances.' So oúye Plato, Gorg. 527 D, ¿y-μol, Demosth. Phil. III § 17, where English would stress the verbs. Mr Tolman (p. 56), forgetting that printed English now refuses to indicate the emphasis of speech even where it can, gives for 'l'état c'est moi' the cumbrous rendering' The state-it is I' instead of 'I am the state,' not the same as 'I am the state' with which he confuses it. CHAPTER III TRANSLATION OF VERSE Up till now we have been considering Translation in its general aspects. We now consider it in relation to special forms. Notwithstanding some uncertainty as to the exact lines of demarcation, the world of literature is still parted into two great continents, Prose and Verse, and our cardinal principle would seem to require that prose should be translated by prose and verse, if possible, by verse. On the first half of this proposition there is no controversy. About the second, though at first sight equally self-evident, there has been no little disagreement. Verse in itself is a more powerful engine than prose; it has a further range and its impact is heavier. Hence the sacrifice entailed by rendering verse into prose is a very real one, and one which we are not surprised to hear from Mr Archer the author of 'Peer Gynt' refused to allow. His decision, which is that also of most translators of modern poems and of many translators of ancient ones, accords with the considered judgment of the accomplished scholar who has translated the Aeneid into both, that the metrical form of the original is a feature which a translator is bound to preserve. Long before Abraham Cowley, in the Preface to his Pindarique Odes, pertinently asked—' I would gladly know what applause our best pieces of English Poesie could expect from a Frenchman or Italian, if converted faithfully, and word for word |