“Traduire Horace, et surtout le traduire en vers, est même devenu, depuis soixante ou quatre-vingts ans, et chez nous et en d’autres pays, une sorte de légère infirmité morale, et de douce maladie qui prend régulièrement un certain nombre d’hommes instruits au retour d’âge; c’est une envie de redevenir enfant, adolescent, de se reporter au temps des études qui nous étaient chères.” To translate Horace, says Sainte-Beuve, above all to translate him in verse, has become within the last sixty or eighty years, both in France and abroad, a kind of venial moral infirmity, a sort of mild fever, which periodically seizes a certain number of educated men as they find themselves growing old; and it has its source in the longing to renew our youth, to live over again the time of studies we were fond of.
Like all the sayings of that most delicate and spirituel of critics, this is so far true that most translations of Horace will be found, we think, to be the work of men advancing in life, and, in the majority of cases, to have grown up insensibly through a number of years. One does not sit down to a version of the Odes as to a version of the Æneid, beginning at the first line and going religiously through in order to the end. No; but we pick out an ode here and there, as the mood takes us and that fits the mood—some gay Ad Amphoram or Ad Asterien when we are young and sprightly, calidus juventâ; a nobler Ad Augustum or Ad Calliopen when we are older and graver, in the time of whitening locks—riding in the cars, it may be, walking in the street, smoking the after-dinner cigar; everywhere, in fact, that solitude gives us a chance to entertain the best of all good company. We turn it into such English as we can muster, and print it perhaps, or, better still, put it away in our portfolio; Horace must have had a prophetic eye on his coming translator when he gave that soundest of poetic counsels—unless Punch’s “Don’t” be sounder still:
we put it away to be taken up again and again, lingered over fondly, touched up and polished, until the exact word is found for every elusive epithet, the precise equivalent for every tantalizing phrase, and the entire ode lies before us, its foreign garb bagging, indeed, a little here and there, but fitting as snugly as our art can make it, and we are content. That is a moment of such supreme satisfaction, of such tranquil triumph, as life but rarely yields. Less than any other that dabbles in ink has your true Horatian the fever of the type. His virtue is really—what virtue, alas! so seldom is in this perverse world—its own reward. Like Joubert, il s’inquiète de perfection bien plus que de gloire; to have hit upon what he feels to be a happy rendering is glory enough; enough that he and Horace should share his exultation; a felicitous adjective will put him in good-humor for a week. And so, before he well knows it, his portfolio is nearly full, and the notion first dawns upon him—the duty it almost seems—of sharing his good fortune with his fellows. “Rather would I have written the Quem tu Melpomene semel or the Donec gratus eram tibi,” cried Scaliger, “than to be king of Aragon.” Rather would I make a perfect translation of these or any other of the Odes, cries our Horatian, than to be king of all Spain, with all Cuba libre to boot—
Somewhat in this wise, we fancy, have most versions of Horace come to be and to be printed; certainly, we incline to think, all the best versions. Thus, too, partly for the reason M. Sainte-Beuve gives, partly from the poet’s universality and the charm which lies in the very difficulty of the task—an impossibility Johnson called it, but it is one of those “sweet impossibilities” which ennoble failure—do we count so many renderings of single odes by famous men. There are few names eminent in English letters or statesmanship that are not thus allied to the genial Venusian—names, too, of the most diverse order. Not only poets like Cowper and Montgomery, Chatterton and Byron,[75] essayists like Addison, or dramatists like Congreve, Rowe, and Otway, but grave historians such as Mitford and Merivale, judges like Lord Thurlow and Sir Jeffrey Gilbert, philosophers like Atterbury and Sir William Temple, bitter satirists like Swift, tender sentimentalists like “Namby Pamby” Phillips, professors and prime ministers, doctors and divines, lords and lawyers, archdeacons and archtraitors, have joined in paying court to the freedman’s son. In his ante-room, or atrium, prim John Evelyn is jostled by tipsy Porson humming somewhat huskily one of the bacchanalian lyrics to a tune of his own (perhaps the Ad Sodales, i. 27, which that learned Theban has rendered with true Porsonian zest—a little too much so to quote); Warren Hastings there meets Edmund Burke in friendlier contest than at the bar of the House of Commons; Dr. Bentley takes issue with Archdeacon Wrangham over a doubtful reading; Mr. Gladstone leads a poetic opposition to Lord Derby in Englishing the Carmen Amabœum. In that modest cœnaculum we can greet these great men all on a familiar and equal footing, made one of them for the nonce by the fellowship of a common taste—nay, may even flatter ourselves that here, at least, we are at their level; that our poet’s door may even be opened to us sooner than to the tallest and wisest among them. It is true greatness has no prerogative in Horace; the meanest may win to his intimacy, be admitted to his penetralia, sooner than the mightiest. Of all the distinguished names we have quoted, few would have had much distinction as translators alone, though Bishop Atterbury’s versions, especially that of the Ad Melpomenen, iv. 2, are deservedly famous. Hastings’ translation of the Ad Grosphum, written during his passage from Bengal to England in 1785 (he was going home to the famous trial), merits notice for its curious adaptation to his Indian experiences:
Another verse had perhaps a still more personal application; there is but a trace of it in the Latin:
The fashion of fitting Horace to contemporary persons and events was much in vogue in Hastings’ time and earlier. Creech tells us in his preface that he was advised “to turn the Satyrs to his own times.” It was carried out to the fullest extent in the well-known Horace in London of Horace and James Smith.
Within the past twenty-five or thirty years many complete versions of the Odes have been put forth, including those of H. G. Robinson, the Rev. W. Sewell (printed in Bohn’s Library), Lord Ravensworth, Mr. Whyte Melville, Mr. Theodore Martin, the late Prof. Conington, and the late Lord Lytton. Of these, Mr. Martin’s, which we should feel inclined to pronounce upon the whole the best, and the most notable Lord Lytton’s, have alone been reprinted here. In giving this pre-eminence to Mr. Martin’s work we are perhaps influenced by a strong individual liking, amounting even to a prepossession, in its favor, dating from that very potent time Sainte-Beuve speaks of—“le temps des études qui nous étaient chères.” When it first fell into our hands it was the only version we had yet seen which at all reproduced, even to a limited degree, for us its original’s charm. By many Prof. Conington’s translation, easy, fluent, and in the main faithful—just what, from his Æneid, one might expect it to be—will be preferred to Mr. Martin’s, which it certainly surpasses in single odes. As to the worst there need be no such doubt. The Rev. Mr. Sewell’s is not, perhaps, the worst possible version of the Odes, as one is half tempted to believe who remembers how it was recommended to the readers of the Dublin University Magazine long ago—how we relished that literary execution with all boyhood’s artless delight in slaughter! Time, alas! soon sobers that youthful vivacity of temper, and, better than Æsop, teaches us to respect the frogs whom it loves to revenge in kind. No; the possibilities and varieties of badness in this direction are unhappily too great for that; but it is as bad as need be—as need be, let us say, for admission to Bohn’s Library.[76] Great indulgence is certainly to be extended to translators of Horace; much is to be forgiven them; but one must finally draw the line, and probably most Horatians would feel like drawing the line at the Rev. Mr. Sewell.
It was in the process of pointing out this fact to that gentleman, in a review of his book in the magazine mentioned, that Mr. Martin some twenty years ago put forth, we believe, the first specimens of his own translation, which was completed and published some years later. Its success was immediate and deserved; for its positive no less than its comparative merits were great. Mr. Martin was one of the first to discern, or at least to put in acceptable practice, the true theory of translating the lighter odes—“a point of great difficulty,” as he truly says. “They are,” he adds, “mere vers de société invested by the language, for us, with a certain stateliness, but which were probably regarded with a very different feeling by the small contemporary circle to whom they were addressed. To catch the tone of these, to be light without being flippant, to be playful without being vulgar, demands a delicacy of touch which it is given to few to acquire, even in original composition, and which in translation is all but unattainable.” The graver odes have their own difficulties; but the skilful translator handles them more easily, we fancy, than the gay fluttering swarm of laughing Lydias and Neæras that flash athwart their statelier pomp like golden butterflies through the Gothic glooms of summer woods—butterflies whose glossy wings, alas! lose something of their down and brilliance at every, even the lightest and most loving, touch. The thought of a poem is always easier to transplant into other speech than its form. Ideas are essentially the same, whatever tongue interprets them—Homer’s Greek or Shakspeare’s English; but the infinite delicate shades of beauty or significance added to them by the subtle differences of words, by that beauty of their own and intrinsic value which, as Théophile Gautier puts it—himself a master of language—words have in the poet’s eyes apart from their meaning, like uncut and unset jewels, the deftest, most patient art of the translator toils in vain to catch. They vanish in his grasp like the bubble whose frail glories dazzle the eyes and mock the longing, chubby fingers of babyhood; to render them is like trying to paint the perfume of a flower.
Now, it is true enough, whatever iconoclasts like Stendhal may pretend, that in poetry thought cannot be divorced from form; it is the indissoluble union of both that makes the poem. Try to fancy any really great passage of verse expressed in other words, even of the same speech, and you see at once how important form is. Take once more Shakspeare’s
and try to change or misplace a single word. One feels instantly that any change would be fatal; it almost seems, with such passages, as though noble thought and perfect word had been waiting for each other from all time until the high-priest of Apollo should come to wed them. To quote Sainte-Beuve again—the critic who wishes to instruct his readers can scarcely quote him too often: “Je conçois qu’on ne mette pas toute la poesie dans le métier, mais je ne conçois pas du tout que quand il s’agit d’un art on ne tienne nui compte de l’art lui-même et qu’on déprécie les parfaits ouvriers qui y excellent.”[77] Yet it is none the less true that a poem in which the idea is paramount is more susceptible of translation than one whose form is the chief element of its charm. One can imagine Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on Milton, “Milton, thou shouldst be with us at this hour,” being turned into Latin with comparatively little loss; indeed it has been so turned by one of the most accomplished of English scholars—Dr. Kennedy—into Alcaics of which the purity and finish make a fitting casket for that gem of poetry; though even here one feels the wide difference between the original of that immortal line,
and the Latin
missing, as we do, the “lovely marriage of pure words,” that in the English is itself a poem. But take such a bit of verbal daintiness as George Darley’s “Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,” with its peculiar and saisissant rhythm, the perfection of verbal music; or Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” where the poetry—and undeniable poetry it is—lies in a certain faint aroma of suggestion that seems to breathe from the very words, and try to reproduce the effect of them in other speech. As well try with earthly tools to rebuild Titania’s palace of leaf shadows and the gossamer, to weave her mantle on any mortal loom out of moonbeams and the mist.
Much the same is it to attempt to transfer to an English translation aught of the peculiar grace which invests Horace’s lightest lyrics with a charm we feel but cannot analyze, which resides in the choice of epithets, the arrangement of words, the cadence of the rhythm, the metrical form, and which yet is something more than any or all of these. The noble thought which lies embodied in the Justum et tenacem propositi virum we may not despair of rehabilitating, with somewhat of its proper majesty, in our own vernacular; but the shy, fugitive loveliness of that wildwood picnic to which the poet bids us, to forget the cares of life,
—what art can coax away from its native soil? Do we find it in Francis?—
or in Creech—though Creech is here luckier than usual?—
or in Prout?—
or in Lord Lytton?—
Even Mr. Martin gives it up, and presents us, instead of a translation, with a couplet which is very pretty English verse, but about as far from Horace as can be:
It is passages such as this especially which have caused Horace to be called the untranslatable.
To come from theory to practice, it is in the lighter odes, and in those parts of all the odes the beauty of which in the original lies chiefly in expression, that all Horace’s translators have most conspicuously failed. Take Milton’s Ad Pyrrham, for example (Ode v.). The Ad Pyrrham is not only one of the most charming but also one of the most difficult of the minor odes, and for that reason among the oftenest translated. It is one of the many mitten-pieces wherein the inconstant bard seems to have taken a somewhat ostentatious delight in celebrating the numerous snubbings he had to put up with from the no less inconstant fair who were the objects of his brief and fitful homage. In it, as in the Ad Neæram (Epod. xv.) and the Ad Barinen (Carm. ii. 8), reproaches to the lady for her perfidy are mingled with self-gratulations on the poet’s own lucky escape and sinister warnings to his rival—the time-old strategy and solace of the discarded lover the world over. He has been shipwrecked, he says, on that treacherous sea of love; but having, the gods be praised! made shift to scramble ashore in safety, and got on some dry duds, sits in gleeful expectation of seeing his successor get a like ducking. The poem is simply a piece of mock heroics, for the counterpart of which we must look to such minglings of cynicism and sentiment as we find in the poetry of Praed and Thackeray and Locker, or, to a less degree, in many of Béranger’s lighter songs. The difference between the modern poets and the ancient is that in the former the sentiment is real, veiled under an affectation of cynicism: in the latter it is precisely the reverse. But, bearing that difference in mind, the translator may find in the methods of the poets named some hints for the handling of such odes as the Ad Pyrrham.
But how do the translators treat it? Take Milton’s famous version, which everybody knows:
—’tis as solemn as a Quaker conventicle. Nor, with reverence be it said en passant, is it altogether free from graver faults; undeniably elegant as it is, this translation has had quite as much praise as it deserved. It is full of those Latin constructions Milton loved—“on faith and changed gods complain” for fidem mutatosque deos flebit, “always vacant” for semper vacuam, “unwonted shall admire” for emirabitur insolens, etc.—which are nowhere more out of place than in a translation from the Latin. Some, indeed, claim that they carry with them and impart a certain flavor of the original to those unacquainted with it; but this seems to us a view at once fallacious and superficial. The office of translation into any language is surely to reproduce the original in the idiom of that language as nearly as may be; and though the theory, like all theories, may be pressed to an excess—as we think Mr. Morris has pressed it, for example, in his translation of the Æneid—better that than such deformities as
It is the suggestion not of Horace but of Milton here that is pleasant; it is because Milton’s natural English style is a highly Latinized and involved style that these oddities of his translation strike us less than in another. Sometimes, too, oddly enough for so good a scholar, he falls short of the full sense of his original. Potenti maris deo, the commentators tell us, means, not “the stern god of sea,” but “the god potent over the sea”; and “plain in thy neatness” for simplex munditiis misses the entire significance of the latter word, which implies something of grace and beauty. “Plain in thy neatness” suggests rather “Priscilla the Puritan maiden” than Pyrrha of the dull-gold hair. Ben Jonson’s
hits Horace’s meaning exactly, and certainly far more poetically. Indeed, we often find in original English poetry much apter renderings than the translators give us. Prof. Conington knew this when he went to Shakspeare for “fancy free” as an equivalent for this very word vacuam we have been talking of—a perfect equivalent of its association did not make it a little un-Horatian—and to Matthew Arnold’s “salt, unplumbed, estranging sea” for the very best version we have seen of that most puzzling phrase (i. 3), “oceano dissociabili.”
This is, perhaps, a digression; but as we set out for a ramble, we have no apologies to make. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Milton’s, only rhyming the alternate lines, is not all so good as “fancy free,” though it gains from its rhyme a certain lightness lacking in that of Milton’s:
So true, so simple! We are not much nearer to simplex munditiis than before. Martin is not here at his best, and Francis is unusually successful: “dress’d with careless art” and “consecrate the pictured storm” are felicities he does not always attain. Prout is chiefly noticeable for yielding to the almost irresistible temptation of a false beacon in intentata nites:
and Leigh Hunt’s, though but a paraphrase, is surely a very happy one:
and
admirably elude, if they do not meet, the difficulties of the Latin. But in none of these, nor in any other rendering we have seen, is there any trace of that nuance of sarcasm or polite banter we seem to taste in the original. The only American version we remember to have met with is not in this respect more successful:
It may be said that this sly spirit of badinage which lurks, or to us, at least, seems to lurk, in the shadows of the lighter odes, like some tricksy Faun peering and disappearing through the thickets of Lucretilis, it is impossible to seize; that when we try it “the stateliness of the language” interposes itself like a wall, and we find ourselves becoming vulgar where Horace is playful, flippant where Horace is light. Doubtless this is so; what then? Because it is an impossibility, shall any loyal Horatian balk at it? It is just because of these impossibilities that translations are always in order, and will, to a certain extent, always be in demand. Translations of other poets pall; it is conceivable that a version of Virgil might be produced which human skill could not better. But no such thing being conceivable of Horace, every fresh version is a whet to curiosity and emulation; each separate ode hides its own agreeable secret, every epithet has its own individual surprise. Let there be no talk, then, of impossibilities; for our own part, to paraphrase what Hallam says of Lycidas, we look upon the ability to translate such odes as the Ad Pyrrham, so as to demonstrate their impossibility, a good test of a man’s capacity to translate Horace at all.
Another nice consideration for the translator of Horace is in respect of metre. Undoubtedly the translator who can retain the metrical movement of his original has gained so much towards reproducing his general effect. But with Horace this attempt may as well be abandoned at once. The Alcaic and the Sapphic stanza, much less the Asclepiad or the Archilochian, have never yet been, and for obvious reasons never will be, naturalized in our English verse, though poor Percival thought differently, and added one more to a life of failures. Tennyson, in his ode to Milton,
gives us, perhaps, as good Alcaics as we have any right to look for in English (though “gōrgĕoŭs” is not a very gorgeous dactyl); yet how different from the Horatian cadence:
As for Sapphics, whether we take Canning’s Knife Grinder for our model or Mr. Swinburne’s
we are not much nearer to Horace’s melody:
But, at least, following that rule of compensation with which all good translators are familiar, some attempt may be made to suggest the metrical variety and richness of the Odes by a corresponding variety and grace in the English measures of the translation. It is here that the modern translators excel; indeed, it may be said that only within the last hundred years have translators had this adjunct at their command, for it is only during that period that English poets have begun to comprehend and master fully the resources and possibilities of English metre. Not that the earlier poets were at all deficient in the metrical sense; that their ears were not quick to catch the finest delicacies of verbal harmony. Not to mention a host of minor bards who knew how to marry “perfect music unto noble words,” Milton’s lyrics are melody itself. There is scarcely a more tunable couplet in the language than his
The open vowels and liquid consonants fairly sing themselves. Nor was it for lack of experiment that they failed of
in words, as Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne learned to do later. The attempt to naturalize the classical metres, for example, began at a very early period of our literary history, and many learned treatises were written to prove them your only proper vehicle for English poetry. Perhaps it was the ill-success of these efforts that made our poets so long shy of wandering in their metres away from the beaten track and the simplest forms. Up to the time of Campbell we may say that the iambus and the trochee reigned supreme in English verse; the anapest and the dactyl, of which such effective use has been made by the later poets, were either unknown or contemned. Suckling’s Session of the Poets, the metrical intention of which appears to be anapestic, shows what desperate work even the best lyrists could make when they strayed after strange metrical gods.[80]
It may be said, then, that until within a comparatively recent period Horace could not be properly translated into English verse at all. English verse was not yet ready to receive so noble a guest. Compare Martin’s or Conington’s versions with one of the earlier translations, and the truth of this, we think, will be apparent at once. Creech, indeed, seems to have had a dim notion of the truth, and his version shows a perceptible striving for metrical effect, at least in the arrangement of his stanza; but Creech had too little of the poetical faculty to make the effort with taste or success. Francis for the most part is content with the orthodox measures, and Father Prout was perhaps first to bring to the work this essential accomplishment of the Horatian translator. Prout’s metrical inventions are bold, and often elegant; and his versions, though free, are always spirited, and often singularly felicitous. Among the most striking of his metres is the one he employs for the Solvitur acris hiems (Carm. i. iv.):