PREFACE
To put forth a translation of something which has already undergone translation at many hands is to provoke censure. For the undertaking (if not an ineptitude) is itself a censure of previous performances. It implies an opinion that they fall short, and an ambition to better them. Many perhaps will concur with the present translator in his opinion that English literature does not hitherto include any worthy rendering of the Prometheus of Aeschylus—the "most sublime poem in the world," Mr. Watts-Dunton has called it[1]—will concur in this opinion, and at the same time add his translation to the list of failures. There are, however, considerations which encourage a new attempt. If the former translations were unsatisfactory, it is (in appearance) largely due to the translators having no clear view of the effect to be produced. They would seem to have thought it enough, if they translated the Greek, as it came, into any form which gave the logical sense with a certain euphony of syllables. It is as if one should attempt to scale a mountain by making a rush at it, without looking for the path. By observing the path, a less powerful climber may perhaps arrive higher.
The effect of a foreign original can only be given by a style which suggests that which most nearly corresponds to it in our own literature. Now we have in English literature, as well as in Greek, a great age of poetic drama, the time of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, and the best of this drama is by theory part of the furniture of every educated Englishman's mind. Its vocabulary, characteristic phrases, turns of expression, come to him charged with the associations of poetic drama. Here, then, we have a model to guide us, a language to draw upon, in translating the plays of the Greeks. But we must also take account of the fact that, with all their analogies, Greek and Elizabethan tragedy do not absolutely correspond in spirit. The Greek tragedians, and especially Aeschylus, stood to their people in some ways as the Hebrew prophets stood to theirs. Again and again, in reading Aeschylus, do we seem to hear the voice of Job or Isaiah; again and again does the gnomic wisdom of the Bible suggest the gnomic wisdom of the Greek poets. But there is a style and language which, to an Englishman, is for ever bound up with these associations—the style and language of the English Bible, in its origin indeed largely Hebraic, not English, but entering the language, when it was still fluid, till it has become as much a part of English as its most original elements. Here, then, we have a second model to guide us. But thirdly, the blank verse and the style of diction, which had been developed by the Elizabethan drama, was taken up by Milton and subjected to modifications and refinements under the very influence of classical types, and the Bible: it became something less adapted for dramatic uses, but it gained in richness, in elaborate pomp, and in organic structure. Here, then, is our third model, the more obvious in the case of this particular play in that the influence of the Aeschylean Prometheus is very pronounced in the Satan of Milton.
It is to be observed that, taken by themselves, none of these models can be altogether followed. In the Elizabethan drama there is much that is deficient in universality, that calls up ruffled collars and pointed beards—verbal conceits, ephemeral mannerisms. The Hebraic language of the Bible is too primitive, to say nothing of its dearth of adjectives, to render the more complex and various language of Greek poetry. The classical constructions of Milton have never become part of English, and would be intolerable at second-hand: they would give exactly that cast of cold and conventional unreality, which vitiates what one may call the Eighteenth Century view of Greek antiquity, and which it is one of the main pre-occupations of a translator to avoid.
It follows that the style which best reproduces the effect of the Greek drama in English, would be one whose basis was that of the Elizabethan dramatists, but which was purged of Elizabethan eccentricities, with more of elemental breadth and simplicity by approximation to the language of the Bible, and in the specially sonorous and elaborate passages sounding of Milton. Sometimes one of these elements would predominate, sometimes another; the Hebraic and Miltonic would be more pronounced in Aeschylus than in Euripides, and in the same poet they would assert themselves in varying degrees. It is only by fusing these different elements that the effect of the Greek drama can be given. The fusion is made possible by the fact that the dramatists, the English Bible, and Milton have a great deal to start with in common. A single lifetime would cover the period, which saw at one extreme the activity of Shakespeare and at the other the production of Paradise Lost. The English of that period is the common source from which all three draw.
These principles will, I think, command the assent of any one who takes the trouble to think about them. And, if they are assented to, no exception can be taken to words and phrases in any translation simply on the score of archaism. A style which might justly be blamed as a pose in a modern poet, speaking in his own person, may be the very style required to represent the voice of another age. For us the spirit of Aeschylus can be expressed only in language of an archaic complexion. And, that being so, surely a translator should be allowed to use the speech of the Bible and Shakespeare in all its richness. If modernisms be forbidden him, how is he to enrich and invigorate his language except by opening freely its original springs, and letting into it even words and forms of speech, which have been dropped by the current poetical tradition?
But perhaps the objection will rather be that, with all this talk of archaism, the language of the present translation differs little from the ordinary language of poetry. Certainly the language most used in modern poetry is itself archaic. Tennyson especially restored to currency a great deal of Elizabethan English, and Swinburne has shown what power lies in the forms of speech and manner of the Bible. Naturally, such examples have made an archaistic language of a kind an ordinary dialect of serious verse. And it must be admitted that it is often of watery enough quality. We all know the sort of thing—it would be invidious to single out examples among the crowd of ephemerals. Whether any one who aims at writing the English of the Elizabethan and Miltonic age succeeds in getting beyond this feeble reproduction and in really catching the manner of his models, only those acquainted with the models themselves can judge. A word, a phrase, a cadence will bring to one man an echo of the older literature: to another man, whose acquaintance with that literature is more distant, it will have no association, or perhaps strike him as a solecism.
Whatever verdict may be pronounced upon this attempt, it is to be hoped that we shall before long see the final and satisfying translation of the Greek poets into English. The hope seems warranted by the characteristics of our present literary activity. Whether it be great in creation or not, it certainly displays a variety of imitative manner greater than any other age can show. Arising mainly perhaps from that widening and suppling of the historic imagination, which makes it more possible for us to live in thought under all sorts of different conditions than it has been to the people of other times, an unprecedented power of eclectic reproduction belongs to modern literature. Skill in the composition of verse, discrimination in taste, were perhaps never so diffused. "They make me fancy," Symonds says of some lines of Tennyson, "that we moderns, with tamer fancy and feebler thought, have a better trick of versifying than Milton or Shelley."
Such an age may not be a great age for new discoveries in poetry: it ought to be a great age for translation. It might hand down a body of translation which should never be superseded. For if former translations, as Mr. Andrew Lang says in the case of Homer, became out-of-date, it was exactly because each age required and gave the peculiar colouring of its own thought. But we, whose thoughts have been so multiplied and who speak with so many tongues, are in a position, as our fathers were not, to realise to what elements in our own speech, to what stage of our own past, the language and thoughts of each epoch of antiquity correspond, and, realising this, to give the great works of antiquity a rendering which, if sometimes suffering from the defects of a compromise, is absolutely the best possible. It is inconceivable, for instance, that there will ever be an age of English literature to correspond more nearly with that of the Attic drama than the Elizabethan.
To hand down translations may seem too poor a mark for the ambition of the age. And yet the Book, which has been the most powerful force in English literature, is a translation. In the case of the Greek poets, how much of our intellectual heritage comes from them, even though all the while a strange tongue has had to be mastered in order to know them, no one needs to be reminded. Such mastery was possible to the few, and literature was mainly the concern of the few. But this is so less and less, and if democracy is destined to lay hold of literature, as of everything else, that generation will have made no mean contribution, which delivers to the people a standard rendering of the great works upon which our own literature has been nourished. If a new creative age supervenes, it would in such a rendering possess inestimable material.
The Bible has just been referred to, as the great example of the literary influence of a translation. But that translation was the work of no individual, it came stamped with no personal peculiarity. And if our age is to bring forth a translation of the Greek poets of permanent and universal authority, it would probably have to be by the co-operation of many minds, in which the idiosyncrasies of each would find correction. With so much ability at large, directed to the production of excellent verse and genuine poetry, which yet represents no new force in literature, would it be impossible to concentrate some of it on such a work as I have named? Should this suggestion find lodgment in any quarter, where it may bear fruit, the present translation, whether it succeeds or fails, will have accomplished all that I could desire.
It remains to acknowledge my obligations to Mr. W. Headlam, who was good enough to read the translation in MS. and allow me to profit by his exceptional knowledge both of Aeschylus and of English verse; also to Mr. Campbell Dodgson and Mr. Gerard Bevan, who read through the proofs and pointed out various improvements.
- ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica, art. "Poetry."