Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry | Page 3

powers of managing the graver heroic, where so
many great masters have gone before me, I felt less diffidence in
attempting the lower and more colloquial form of the measure, as not
requiring the same command of rhythm, and not exposing a writer to
the same amount of invidious comparison with his predecessors.
In what I have said I have implied that Cowper is the right model for
the English heroic as applied to a translation of Horace: and this on the
whole I believe to be the case. Horace's
characteristics, as I remarked

just now, are ease and terseness, and both these Cowper possesses, ease
in metre, and ease and terseness in style. Pope, on the other hand, who
in some respects would seem the better representative of Horace, is less
easy both in style and metre, while his terseness is what Horace's
terseness is not, trimness and antithetical smartness. Still, while making
Cowper my pattern as a general rule, I have attempted from time to
time to borrow a grace from Pope, even, when the original gave me no
warrant for the appropriation. If Cowper's verse could be written by
Cowper, it would probably leave nothing to be desired in a translation
of this kind: handled by an inferior workman, it is in danger of
becoming flat, pointless, and insipid: and Horace has many passages
which, if not flat, pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully
liable to become so in the hands of a translator. I have accordingly on
various occasions aimed at epigram and pungency when there was
nothing epigrammatic or pungent in the Latin, in full confidence that
any trifling additions which may be made in this way to the general
sum of liveliness will be far more than compensated by the heavy
outgoings which must of necessity be the lot of every translator, and
more particularly of myself. [Footnote: Cowper himself has some
remarks bearing on this point: "That is
epigrammatic and witty in
Latin which would be perfectly insipid in English; and a translator of
Bourne would frequently find himself obliged to supply what is called
the turn, which is in fact the most difficult and the most expensive part
of the whole composition, and could not perhaps, in many instances, be
done with any tolerable success. If a Latin poem is neat, elegant and
musical, it is enough; but English readers are not so easily satisfied. To
quote myself, you will find, in comparing the Jackdaw with the original,
that I was obliged to sharpen a point which, though smart enough in the
Latin, would in English have appeared as plain and as blunt as the tag
of a lace." --Letter to Unwin, May 23, 1781 (Southey's Cowper, ed.
1836, vol. iv. p. 97).] All translation, as has been pointed out over and
over again, must proceed more or less on the principle of compensation;
a translator who is conscious of having lost ground in one place is not
to blame if he tries to recover it in another, so that he does not
consciously depart from what he believes to be the spirit of the original:
the question he has to ask himself is not so much whether he has
conformed to the requirements of this or that line, most important as

such conformity is where it can be realized without a sacrifice of higher
things, as whether he has conformed to the requirements of the whole
sentence, or even of the whole paragraph; whether the general effect
produced by all the combined elements in the English lines answers in
any degree to that produced by the Latin. Often and often, while
engaged on this translation, I have been reminded of Johnson's words in
his Life of Dryden: "It is not by comparing line with line that the merit
of works is to be estimated, but by their general effects and ultimate
result. It is easy to note a weak line and write one more vigorous in its
place, to find a happiness of expression in the original and transplant it
by force into the version; but what is given to the parts may be
subducted from the whole, and the reader may be weary, though the
critic may commend. That book is good in vain which the reader
throws away." [Footnote: Compare his parallel between Pitt's and
Dryden's Aeneid in his Life of Pitt.] I will only add that if these
remarks are true of translation in general, they apply with special force
to the translation of an original like the present, where the Latin is
nothing if it is not idiomatic, and the English in consequence, if it is to
be anything, must be idiomatic also.
There is yet something more to be said on the question of style. The
exact mode of