Chapter 13

Denham, however, justifies the procedure for reasons which must have had their appeal for the translator who was conscious of real creative power. "Poesy," he says in the preface to his translation from the _Aeneid_, "is of so subtle a spirit that in the pouring out of one language into another it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in transfusion, there will remain nothing but a _caput mortuum_." The new method, which Cowley is willing to designate as _imitation_ if the critics refuse to it the name of translation, is described by Dryden with his usual clearness. "I take imitation of an author in their sense," he says, "to be an endeavor of a later poet to write like one who has written before him, on the same subject; that is, not to translate his words, or be confined to his sense, but only to set him as a pattern, and to write as he supposes that author would have done, had he lived in our age, and in our country."[400]

Yet, after all, the new fashion was far from revolutionizing either the theory or the practice of translation. Dryden says of Denham that "he advised more liberty than he took himself," and of both Denham and Cowley, "I dare not say that either of them have carried this libertine way of rendering authors (as Mr Cowley calls it) so far as my definition reaches; for in the _Pindaric Odes_ the customs and ceremonies of ancient Greece are still observed."[401] In the theory of the less distinguished translators of the second and third quarters of the century, the influence of Denham and Cowley shows itself, if at all, in the claim to have translated paraphrastically and the complacency with which translators describe their practice as "new," a condition of things which might have prevailed without the intervention of the method of imitation. About the year 1680 there comes a definite reaction against too great liberty in the treatment of foreign authors. Thomas Creech, defining what may justly be expected of the translator of Horace, says, "If the sense of the author is delivered, the variety of expression kept (which I must despair of after Quintillian hath assured us that he is most happily bold in his words) and his fancy not debauched (for I cannot think myself able to improve Horace) 'tis all that can be expected from a version."[402] After quoting with approval what Cowley has said of the inadequacy of any translation, he continues: "'Tis true he (Cowley) improves this consideration, and urges it as concluding against all strict and faithful versions, in which I must beg leave to dissent, thinking it better to convey down the learning of the ancients than their empty sound suited to the present times, and show the age their whole substance, rather than their ghost embodied in some light air of my own." An anonymous writer presents a group of critics who are disgusted with contemporary fashions in translation and wish to go back to those which prevailed in the early part of the century.[403]

Acer, incensed, exclaimed against the age, Said some of our new poets had of late Set up a lazy fashion to translate, Speak authors how they please, and if they call Stuff they make paraphrase, that answers all. Pedantic verse, effeminately smooth, Racked through all little rules of art to soothe, The soft'ned age industriously compile, Main wit and cripple fancy all the while. A license far beyond poetic use Not to translate old authors but abuse The wit of Romans; and their lofty sense Degrade into new poems made from thence, Disguise old Rome in our new eloquence.

Aesculape shares the opinion of Acer.

And thought it fit wits should be more confined To author's sense, and to their periods too, Must leave out nothing, every sense must do, And though they cannot render verse for verse, Yet every period's sense they must rehearse.

Finally Metellus, speaking for the group, orders Laelius, one of their number, to translate the Fourth Book of the _Aeneid_, keeping himself in due subordination to Virgil.

We all bid then translate it the old way Not a-la-mode, but like George Sandys or May; Show Virgil's every period, not steal sense To make up a new-fashioned poem thence.

Other translators, though not defending the literal method, do not advocate imitation. Roscommon, in the _Essay on Translated Verse_, demands fidelity to the substance of the original when he says,

The genuine sense, intelligibly told, Shows a translator both discreet and bold. Excursions are inexpiably bad, And 'tis much safer to leave out than add,

but, unlike Phaer, he forbids the omission of difficult passages:

Abstruse and mystic thoughts you must express, With painful care and seeming easiness.

Dryden considers the whole situation in detail.[404] He admires Cowley's _Pindaric Odes_ and admits that both Pindar and his translator do not come under ordinary rules, but he fears the effect of Cowley's example "when writers of unequal parts to him shall imitate so bold an undertaking," and believes that only a poet so "wild and ungovernable" as Pindar justifies the method of Cowley. "If Virgil, or Ovid, or any regular intelligible authors be thus used, 'tis no longer to be called their work, when neither the thoughts nor words are drawn from the original; but instead of them there is something new produced, which is almost the creation of another hand.... He who is inquisitive to know an author's thoughts will be disappointed in his expectation; and '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 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."

Though imitation was not generally accepted as a standard method of translation, certain elements in the theory of Denham and Cowley remained popular throughout the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century. A favorite comment in the complimentary verses attached to translations is the assertion that the translator has not only equaled but surpassed his original. An extreme example of this is Dryden's fatuous reference to the Earl of Mulgrave's translation of Ovid:

How will sweet Ovid's ghost be pleased to hear His fame augmented by an English peer, How he embellishes his Helen's loves, Outdoes his softness, and his sense improves.[405]

His earlier lines to Sir Robert Howard on the latter's translation of the _Achilleis_ of Statius are somewhat less bald:

To understand how much we owe to you, We must your numbers with your author's view; Then shall we see his work was lamely rough, Each figure stiff as if designed in buff; His colours laid so thick on every place, As only showed the paint, but hid the face; But as in perspective we beauties see Which in the glass, not in the picture be, So here our sight obligingly mistakes That wealth which his your bounty only makes. Thus vulgar dishes are by cooks disguised, More for their dressing than their substance prized.[406]

It was especially in cases where the original lacked smoothness and perspicuity, the qualities which appealed most strongly to the century, that the claim to improvement was made. Often, however, it was associated with notably accurate versions. Cartwright calls upon the readers of Holiday's _Persius_,

who when they shall view How truly with thine author thou dost pace, How hand in hand ye go, what equal grace Thou dost observe with him in every term, They cannot but, if just, justly affirm That did your times as do your lines agree, He might be thought to have translated thee, But that he's darker, not so strong; wherein Thy greater art more clearly may be seen, Which does thy Persius' cloudy storms display With lightning and with thunder; both which lay Couched perchance in him, but wanted force To break, or light from darkness to divorce, Till thine exhaled skill compressed it so, That forced the clouds to break, the light to show, The thunder to be heard. That now each child Can prattle what was meant; whilst thou art styled Of all, with titles of true dignity For lofty phrase and perspicuity.[407]

J. A. addresses Lucretius in lines prefixed to Creech's translation,

But Lord, how much you're changed, how much improv'd! Your native roughness all is left behind, But still the same good man tho' more refin'd,[408]

and Otway says to the translator:

For when the rich original we peruse, And by it try the metal you produce, Though there indeed the purest ore we find, Yet still by you it something is refined; Thus when the great Lucretius gives a loose And lashes to her speed his fiery Muse, Still with him you maintain an equal pace, And bear full stretch upon him all the race; But when in rugged way we find him rein His verse, and not so smooth a stroke maintain, There the advantage he receives is found, By you taught temper, and to choose his ground.[409]

So authoritative a critic as Roscommon, however, seems to oppose attempts at improvement when he writes,

Your author always will the best advise, Fall when he falls, and when he rises, rise,

a precept which Tytler, writing at the end of the next century, considers the one doubtful rule in _The Essay on Translated Verse_. "Far from adopting the former part of this maxim," he declares, "I consider it to be the duty of a poetical translator, never to suffer his original to fall. He must maintain with him a perpetual contest of genius; he must attend him in his highest flights, and soar, if he can, beyond him: and when he perceives, at any time a diminution of his powers, when he sees a drooping wing, he must raise him on his own pinions."[410]

The influence of Denham and Cowley is also seen in what is perhaps the most significant element in the seventeenth-century theory of translation. These men advocated freedom in translation, not because such freedom would give the translator a greater opportunity to display his own powers, but because it would enable him to reproduce more truly the spirit of the original. A good translator must, first of all, know his author intimately. Where Denham's expressions are fuller than Virgil's, they are, he says, "but the impressions which the often reading of him hath left upon my thoughts." Possessing this intimate acquaintance, the English writer must try to think and write as if he were identified with his author. Dryden, who, in spite of his general principles, sometimes practised something uncommonly like imitation, says in the preface to _Sylvae_: "I must acknowledge that I have many times exceeded my commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors as no Dutch commentator will forgive me.... Where I have enlarged them, I desire the false critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but either that they are secretly in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him; or at least, if both these considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he would probably have written."[411]

By a sort of irony the more faithful translator came in time to recognize this as one of the precepts of his art, and sometimes to use it as an argument against too much liberty. The Earl of Roscommon says in the preface to his translation of Horace's _Art of Poetry_, "I have kept as close as I could both to the meaning and the words of the author, and done nothing but what I believe he would forgive if he were alive; and I have often asked myself this question." Dryden follows his protest against imitation by saying: "Nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers. When we come thus far, 'tis time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his, to give his thought either the same turn, if our tongue will bear it, or if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance."[412] Such faithfulness, according to Dryden, involves the appreciation and the reproduction of the qualities in an author which distinguish him from others, or, to use his own words, "the maintaining the character of an author which distinguishes him from all others, and makes him appear that individual poet whom you would interpret."[413] Dryden thinks that English translators have not sufficiently recognized the necessity for this. "For example, not only the thoughts, but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid are very different: yet I see, even in our best poets who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents, and, by endeavoring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them so much alike that, if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies which was Virgil and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late noble painter that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happened because he always studied himself more than those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another."

But critics recognized that study and pains alone could not furnish the translator for his work. "To be a thorough translator," says Dryden, "he must be a thorough poet,"[414] or to put it, as does Roscommon, somewhat more mildly, he must by nature possess the more essential characteristics of his author. Admitting this, Creech writes with a slight air of apology, "I cannot choose but smile to think that I, who have ... too little ill nature (for that is commonly thought a necessary ingredient) to be a satirist, should venture upon Horace."[415] Dryden finds by experience that he can more easily translate a poet akin to himself. His translations of Ovid please him. "Whether it be the partiality of an old man to his youngest child I know not; but they appear to me the best of all my endeavors in this kind. Perhaps this poet is more easy to be translated than some others whom I have lately attempted; perhaps, too, he was more according to my genius."[416] He looks forward with pleasure to putting the whole of the _Iliad_ into English. "And this I dare assure the world beforehand, that I have found, by trial, Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil, though I say not the translation will be less laborious; for the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet."[417] The insistence on the necessity for kinship between the author and the translator is the principal idea in Roscommon's _Essay on Translated Verse_. According to Roscommon,

Each poet with a different talent writes, One praises, one instructs, another bites. Horace could ne'er aspire to epic bays, Nor lofty Maro stoop to lyric lays.

This, then, is his advice to the would-be translator:

Examine how your humour is inclined, And which the ruling passion of your mind; Then, seek a poet who your way does bend, And choose an author as you choose a friend. United by this sympathetic bond, You grow familiar, intimate, and fond; Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree, No longer his interpreter but he.

Though the plea of reproducing the spirit of the original was sometimes made a pretext for undue latitude, it is evident that there was here an important contribution to the theory of translation. In another respect, also, the consideration of metrical effects, the seventeenth century shows some advance,--an advance, however, which must be laid chiefly to the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no tendency towards innovation and experiment in the matter of verse forms. Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied with the couplet and kindred measures, did not consider, as the Elizabethans had done, the possibility of introducing classical metres. Creech says of Horace, "'Tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the poet,"[418] and leaves the matter there. Holiday says of his translation of the same poet: "But many, no doubt, will say Horace is by me forsaken, his lyric softness and emphatical Muse maimed; that there is a general defection from his genuine harmony. Those I must tell, I have in this translation rather sought his spirit than numbers; yet the music of verse not neglected neither, since the English ear better heareth the distich, and findeth that sweetness and air which the Latin affecteth and (questionless) attaineth in sapphics or iambic measures."[419] Dryden frequently complains of the difficulty of translation into English metre, especially when the poet to be translated is Virgil. The use of rhyme causes trouble. It "is certainly a constraint even to the best poets, and those who make it with most ease.... What it adds to sweetness, it takes away from sense; and he who loses the least by it may be called a gainer. It often makes us swerve from an author's meaning; as, if a mark be set up for an archer at a great distance, let him aim as exactly as he can, the least wind will take his arrow, and divert it from the white."[420] The line of the heroic couplet is not long enough to reproduce the hexameter, and Virgil is especially succinct. "To make him copious is to alter his character; and to translate him line for line is impossible, because the Latin is naturally a more succinct language than either the Italian, Spanish, French, or even than the English, which, by reason of its monosyllables, is far the most compendious of them. Virgil is much the closest of any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet than the English heroic."[421] Yet though Dryden admits that Caro, the Italian translator, who used blank verse, made his task easier thereby, he does not think of abandoning the couplet for any of the verse forms which earlier translators had tried. He finds Chapman's _Homer_ characterized by "harsh numbers ... and a monstrous length of verse," and thinks his own period "a much better age than was the last ... for versification and the art of numbers."[422] Roscommon, whose version of Horace's _Art of Poetry_ is in blank verse, says that Jonson's translation lacks clearness as a result not only of his literalness but of "the constraint of rhyme,"[423] but makes no further attack on the couplet as the regular vehicle for translation.

Dryden, however, is peculiarly interested in the general effect of his verse as compared with that of his originals. "I have attempted," he says in the _Examen Poeticum_, "to restore Ovid to his native sweetness, easiness, and smoothness, and to give my poetry a kind of cadence and, as we call it, a run of verse, as like the original as the English can come to the Latin."[424] In his study of Virgil previous to translating the _Aeneid_ he observed "above all, the elegance of his expressions and the harmony of his numbers."[425] Elsewhere he says of his author, "His verse is everywhere sounding the very thing in your ears whose sense it bears, yet the numbers are perpetually varied to increase the delight of the reader; so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together."[426] These metrical effects he has tried to reproduce in English. "The turns of his verse, his breakings, his numbers, and his gravity, I have as far imitated as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of my performance would allow," he says in the preface to _Sylvae_.[427] In his translation of the whole _Aeneid_ he was guided by the same considerations. "Virgil ... is everywhere elegant, sweet, and flowing in his hexameters. His words are not only chosen, but the places in which he ranks them for the sound. He who removes them from the station wherein their master set them spoils the harmony. What he says of the Sibyl's prophecies may be as properly applied to every word of his: they must be read in order as they lie; the least breath discomposes them and somewhat of their divinity is lost. I cannot boast that I have been thus exact in my verses; but I have endeavored to follow the example of my master, and am the first Englishman, perhaps, who made it his design to copy him in his numbers, his choice of words, and his placing them for the sweetness of the sound. On this last consideration I have shunned the _caesura_ as much as possibly I could: for, wherever that is used, it gives a roughness to the verse; of which we have little need in a language which is overstocked with consonants."[428] Views like these contribute much to an adequate conception of what faithfulness in translation demands.

From the lucid, intelligent comment of Dryden it is disappointing to turn to the body of doctrine produced by his successors. In spite of the widespread interest in translation during the eighteenth century, little progress was made in formulating the theory of the art, and many of the voluminous prefaces of translators deserve the criticism which Johnson applied to Garth, "his notions are half-formed." So far as concerns the general method of translation, the principles laid down by critics are often mere repetitions of the conclusions already reached in the preceding century. Most theorists were ready to adopt Dryden's view that the translator should strike a middle course between the very free and the very close method. Put into words by a recognized authority, so reasonable an opinion could hardly fail of acceptance. It appealed to the eighteenth-century mind as adequate, and more than one translator, professing to give rules for translation, merely repeated in his own words what Dryden had already said. Garth declares in the preface condemned by Johnson: "Translation is commonly either verbal, a paraphrase, or an imitation.... The manner that seems most suitable for this present undertaking is neither to follow the author too close out of a critical timorousness, nor abandon him too wantonly through a poetic boldness. The original should always be kept in mind, without too apparent a deviation from the sense. Where it is otherwise, it is not a version but an imitation."[429] Grainger says in the introduction to his _Tibullus_: "Verbal translations are always inelegant, because always destitute of beauty of idiom and language; for by their fidelity to an author's words, they become treacherous to his reputation; on the other hand, a too wanton departure from the letter often varies the sense and alters the manner. The translator chose the middle way, and meant neither to tread on the heels of Tibullus nor yet to lose sight of him."[430] The preface to Fawkes' _Theocritus_ harks back to Dryden: "A too faithful translation, Mr. Dryden says, must be a pedantic one.... And as I have not endeavored to give a verbal translation, so neither have I indulged myself in a rash paraphrase, which always loses the spirit of an ancient by degenerating into the modern manners of expression."[431]