Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry | Page 4

representing Horace's persiflage is, as I have intimated
already, not an easy thing to determine. The translators of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the most part made their
author either vulgar or flat, sometimes both. Probably no better rule can
be laid down for the translator of the present day, than that he should
try to follow the ordinary language of good society, wavering and
uncertain as that standard is. I do not mean so much the language of the
better sort of light literature as the language of conversation and of
familiar letter-writing. Even some of the idiomatic blemishes of
conversation may perhaps, in such a work, be venial, if not laudable. I
have not always sought to be a minute purist even on points of
grammar. Cowper, rather singularly, appears from his practice to
proscribe colloquial abbreviations in poetry, though they were, I
suppose, at least as usual in his time as in ours, and are used by Pope in
his lighter works with little scruple. I have adopted them freely through
nearly the whole of my version, though of course there are some

passages where they could not be properly employed. Gifford says in
the Essay on the Roman Satirists prefixed to his Juvenal that the
general character of his translation will be found to be plainness: and if
I do not
misunderstand what he means by the term, it exactly
represents the quality which I have endeavoured to attain myself. As a
general rule, where a rendering presented itself to me which in dealing
with another author I should welcome as poetical, I hare deliberately
rejected it, and cast about instead for something which, without being
feeble or slipshod, should have an idiomatic prosaic ring. Where
Horace evidently means to rise, I have attempted to rise too: but
through the greater part of this work I have been anxious, to use his
own expression, to creep along the ground. No doubt there is danger in
all this, the danger of triviality, pertness, and occasional vulgarity.
Gifford's own work was attacked on its first appearance by a reviewer
of the day precisely on those grounds: and though he seems to have
made a vehement reply to his assailant, the changes which he made in
his second edition showed that the censure was not without its effect.
Still, where it is almost impossible to walk quite straight, the walker
will reconcile himself to incidental deviations, and will even consider,
where a slip is inevitable, on which side of the line it is better that the
slip should take place.
A patent difficulty of course is to know what to do with local and
temporary customs, allusions, proverbs, &c., which enter, I need not
say, far more largely into satire or comedy than into any other form of
writing. Here it is that the imitator has the advantage of the translator: a
certain parallelism between his own time and the time of the author he
imitates is postulated in the fact of his imitating at all, and if he is a
dexterous writer, like Pope or Johnson, he is sure to be able to
introduce a number of small equivalents, some of them perhaps actual
improvements on the original, while he is at liberty to throw into the
shade those points of which he despairs of being able to make anything.
A translator has three courses open to him, to translate more or less
verbally, so as to run the risk of being unintelligible to a reader
unacquainted with the original, to generalize what is special, and to
borrow something of the
imitator's licence, introducing a modern
speciality in place of an ancient. Here, as I have found on other

occasions of the kind, to be allowed a choice of evils is itself a matter
for selfcongratulation.
To be shut up entirely to one or other of these

resources would be a serious misfortune: to be able to employ them
(should it seem advisable) successively is no inconsiderable relief. The
last of the three no doubt requires to be used very sparingly indeed, or
one great object of translating a classic, the laying open of ancient life
and thought to a modern reader, will be wantonly sacrificed. No one
now-a-days would dream of going as far in this direction as Dryden and
some of the translators of his period, talking e.g. about "the new Lord
Mayor" and "the Louvre of the sky." But there are occasionally minor
points--very minor ones, I admit--where a modern equivalent is
allowable, if not absolutely necessary. Without transforming bodily a
Roman caena into an English dinner, one may sometimes effect with
advantage a trifling change in the less important dishes: a boar must not
appear as a baron of beef, but a scarus may perhaps be turned, as I