SATIRA E WITH A LITERAL ENGLISH PROSE TRANSLATION AND NOTES BY JOHN DELAWARE LEWIS, M.A. TRIN. COLL. CAMB. LONDON PREFACE. THE accompanying translation of Juvenal, originally made for my own amusement, and which has been lying by me in manuscript for some years, is not sent to press without a certain degree of hesitation. I have been induced to publish it, principally from the belief that there is not in the English language any literal prose translation of the great Satirist of a character to be entirely satisfactory to the scholar. Madan's is literal enough, but almost unintelligible to any one who is unable to read Latin. That of Mr Evans, in "Bohn's Classical Library," is an excellent and spirited rendering, well adapted to the series of which it forms a volume-that is to say, well qualified to convey the general meaning of Juvenal to the English reader. Perhaps a still higher character, from the scholar's point of view, might fairly be assigned to it. But, at any rate, I differ from Mr Evans so frequently that I do not think his performance any bar to my attempt. These two are the only prose versions in English, as far as I know, which have any pretensions to be called literal ones. * Whatever may be the shortcomings and faults of this version (and I am conscious that they may be many), I have endeavoured, throughout, to give, as nearly as possible, the exact sense of the original, as it was understood by me. Whenever the choice presented itself to me-as it necessarily did, at almost every line-between a literal, and, it may be * For example, in the first page (14) at which I open by chance-it is only a half-page, containing a version of twenty lines of the original, at the end of Satire ii-there are three considerable differences between Mr Evans and myself. He translates Sed tu vera puta, "but do thou believe them true;" Hic fiunt homines, "here they learn to be men;" Sic praetextatos referunt Artaxata mores, "thus it is the vices of our young nobles are aped even at Artaxata." Often, ex gr.,... iii 61 186 319, iv 57, vi 153 413 426 454 (450), &c. &c., he seems to me to commit serious errors in translating. |