V.—The Translation
In translating the Bucolic Poets my aim has been briefly this: to translate not so much the words as their meaning, to observe not merely the obvious English idioms of syntax but the more evasive but equally important ones of stress, word-order, and balance, and to create an atmosphere of association in some sense akin to the atmosphere of the original. The present fashion, set by Mr. Myers in his Pindar, of translating classical verse into archaic prose, has much in its favour, and in rendering the songs of Theocritus’ shepherds into verse I have not discarded it without due consideration. In Theocritus’ day there was a convention which made it possible for him, without violating literary propriety, to represent the folk-song of a shepherd in the metre of the Epic. Some generations before, this would have been out of the question. A song in hexameters would have been a contradiction in terms. A somewhat similar convention nowadays makes prose the suitable literary vehicle of dialogue or narrative, but there is no firmly-established convention of using prose to represent song. A literary folk–song, if one may use the term, would now be impossible in blank verse, let alone prose.
So I have chosen to render the songs of Theocritus’ shepherds in rhyme, and used with only two exceptions the common ballad-metre written long, with seven, or where there is a medial pause, six, stresses
