The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus | Page 2

and seventies on
Tree-alphabets, the Ogham Runes and El Mushajjar, the Arabic
Tree-alphabet,--and had theories and opinions as to its origin; but he
did not, I know, connect them in any way, however remote, with
Catullus. I therefore venture to think you will quite agree with me, that
they have no business here, but should appear in connection with my
future work, "Labours and Wisdom of Sir Richard Burton."
All these three and a half years, I have hesitated what to do, but after
seeing other men's translations, his _incomplete_ work is, in my
humble estimation, too good to be consigned to oblivion, so that I will
no longer defer to send you a type-written copy, and to ask you to bring
it through the press, supplying the Latin text, and adding thereto your
own prose, which we never saw.
Yours truly,
ISABEL BURTON.
_July 11th, 1894._

FOREWORD
A scholar lively, remembered to me, that _Catullus_ translated word
for word, is an anachronism, and that a literal English rendering in the
nineteenth century could be true to the poet's letter, but false to his
spirit. I was compelled to admit that something of this is true; but it is
not the whole truth. "Consulting modern taste" means really a mere
imitation, a re-cast of the ancient past in modern material. It is
presenting the toga'd citizen, rough, haughty, and careless of any
approbation not his own, in the costume of to-day,--boiled shirt,
dove-tailed coat, black-cloth clothes, white pocket-handkerchief, and
diamond ring. Moreover, of these transmogrifications we have already

enough and to spare. But we have not, as far as I know, any version of
Catullus which can transport the English reader from the teachings of
our century to that preceding the Christian Era. As discovery is mostly
my mania, I have hit upon a bastard-urging to indulge it, by a
presenting to the public of certain classics in the nude Roman poetry,
like the Arab, and of the same date....
RICHARD F. BURTON.
_Trieste, 1890._
[The Foreword just given is an unfinished pencilling on the margin of
Sir Richard's Latin text of Catullus. I reproduce below, a portion of his
Foreword to a previous translation from the Latin on which we
collaborated and which was issued in the summer of 1890.--L. C. S.]
A 'cute French publisher lately remarked to me that, as a rule, versions
in verse are as enjoyable to the writer as they are unenjoyed by the
reader, who vehemently doubts their truth and trustworthiness. These
pages hold in view one object sole and simple, namely, to prove that a
translation, metrical and literal, may be true and may be trustworthy.
As I told the public (Camoens: Life and Lusiads ii. 185-198), it has
ever been my ambition to reverse the late Mr. Matthew Arnold's
peremptory dictum:--"In a verse translation no original work is any
longer recognisable." And here I may be allowed to borrow from my
Supplemental Arabian Nights (Vol. vi., Appendix pp. 411-412, a book
known to few and never to be reprinted) my vision of the ideal
translation which should not be relegated to the Limbus of Intentions.
"My estimate of a translator's office has never been of the low level
generally assigned to it even in the days when Englishmen were in the
habit of translating every work, interesting or important, published out
of England, and of thus giving a continental and cosmopolitan flavour
to their literature. We cannot at this period expect much from a 'man of
letters' who must produce a monthly volume for a pittance of £20: of
him we need not speak. But the translator at his best, works, when
reproducing the matter and the manner of his original, upon two

distinct lines. His prime and primary object is to please his reader,
edifying him and gratifying his taste; the second is to produce an honest
and faithful copy, adding naught to the sense or abating aught of its
especial _cachet_. He has, however, or should have, another aim
wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art. Every language can
profitably lend something to and take somewhat from its
neighbours--an epithet, a metaphor, a naïf idiom, a turn of phrase. And
the translator of original mind who notes the innumerable shades of
tone, manner and complexion will not neglect the frequent
opportunities of enriching his mother-tongue with novel and alien
ornaments which shall justly be accounted barbarisms until formally
naturalized and adopted. Nor will any modern versionist relegate to a
foot-note, as is the malpractice of his banal brotherhood, the striking
and often startling phases of the foreign author's phraseology and dull
the text with well-worn and commonplace English equivalents, thus
doing the clean reverse of what he should do. It was this _beau idéal_
of a translator's success which