Odes and Carmen Saeculare | Page 7

matronal Juno,
And with
the bow to his shoulder faithful
He who with pure dew laveth of

Castaly
His flowing locks, who holdeth of Lycia
The oak forest and
the wood that bore him,
Delos' and Patara's own Apollo,"--
admirably finished as it is, and highly pleasing as a fragment, scarcely
persuades us that twenty stanzas of the same workmanship would be
read with adequate pleasure, still less that the same satisfaction would
be felt through six-and-thirty Odes. After all, however, a sober critic
will be disposed rather to pass judgment on the past than to predict the
future, knowing, as he must, how easily the "solvitur ambulando" of an
artist like Mr. Tennyson may disturb a whole chain of ingenious
reasoning on the possibilities of things.
The question of the language into which Horace should be translated is
not less important than that of the metre; but it involves far less
discussion of points of detail, and may, in fact, be very soon dismissed.
I believe that the chief danger which a translator has to avoid is that of
subjection to the influences of his own period. Whether or no Mr.
Merivale is right in supposing that an analogy exists between the
literature of the present day and that of post-Augustan Rome, it will not,
I think, be disputed that between our period and the Augustan period
the resemblances are very few, perhaps not more than must necessarily
exist between two periods of high cultivation. It is the fashion to say
that the characteristic of the literature of the last century was shallow
clearness, the expression of obvious thoughts in obvious, though highly
finished language; it is the fashion to retort upon our own generation
that its tendency is to over-thinking and over-expression, a constant
search for thoughts which shall not he ohvious and words which shall
be above the level of received conventionality. Accepting these as
descriptions, however imperfect, of two different types of literature, we
can have no doubt to which division to refer the literary remains of
Augustan Rome. The Odes of Horace, in particular, will, I think, strike
a reader who comes back to them after reading other books, as
distinguished by a simplicity, monotony, and almost poverty of
sentiment, and as depending for the charm of their external form not so
much on novel and ingenious images as on musical words aptly chosen
and aptly combined. We are always hearing of wine-jars and Thracian
convivialities, of parsley wreaths and Syrian nard; the graver topics,

which it is the poet's wisdom to forget, are constantly typified by the
terrors of quivered Medes and painted Gelonians; there is the perpetual
antithesis between youth and age, there is the ever-recurring image of
green and withered trees, and it is only the attractiveness of the Latin,
half real, half perhaps arising from association and the romance of a
language not one's own, that makes us feel this "lyrical commonplace"
more supportable than common-place is usually found to be. It is this,
indeed, which constitutes the grand difficulty of the translator, who
may well despair
when he undertakes to reproduce beautics
depending on expression by a process in which expression is sure to be
sacrificed. But it would, I think, be a mistake to attempt to get rid of
this monotony by calling in the aid of that variety of images and forms
of language which modern poetry presents. Here, as in the case of
metres, it seems to me that to exceed the bounds of what may be called
classical parsimony would be to abandon the one chance, faint as it
may be, of producing on the reader's mind something like the
impression produced by Horace. I do not say that I have always been as
abstinent as I think a translator ought to be; here, as in all matters
connected with this most difficult work, weakness may claim a licence
of which strength would disdain to avail itself; I only say that I have
not surrendered myself to the temptation habitually and without a
struggle. As a general rule, while not unfrequently compelled to vary
the precise image Horace has chosen, I have substituted one which he
has used elsewhere; where he has talked of triumphs, meaning no more
than victories, I have talked of bays; where he gives the picture of the
luxuriant harvests of Sardinia, I have spoken of the wheat on the
threshing-floors. On the whole I have tried, so far as my powers would
allow me, to give my translation something of the colour of our
eighteenth-century poetry, believing the poetry of that time to be the
nearest analogue of the poetry of Augustus' court that England has
produced, and feeling quite sure that a writer will bear traces enough of
the language and manner of his own time to redeem