DANTE'S " BANQUET."* NOTHING is more difficult to estimate than
the merit of a translation, for nothing is more relative, accordingly as the work translated is poetry or prose, ordinary fiction or a highly imaginative production. Such an instance as Baudelaire's translation of certain poems of Edgar Allen Poe—" The Haunted House," for example—is perhaps unique, for it is not the words, but the whole inspiration and poetic impulse that are transferred into another tongue. All sense of translation is lost, and any one reading the French and English version for the first time would be unable to decide which of the two Iliad received the original inspiration. Surely this is the only manner in which to attempt an adequate interpretation in a foreign tongue of a fantastic or imaginative work, unless a deliberate mutilation, or at least a complete effacement, of the half-expressed but wholly felt subtleties be contem- plated and carried out, as in the case of so many passages of Cary's English rendering of the Inferno. Of all Dante's works, this is certainly the most unsuited to translation, for so much of its impressiveness and grandeur is due to the picturesqueness and intensely dramatic qualities of the old Italian language. There are words which are complete images in themselves, and convey whole pictures, as a flash of lightning illuminates a whole landscape. A slavish word-for- -word translation, with the lines of the Italian text interposed. would, to our thinking, be the most satisfactory means of con- veying to the mind what Dante felt and expressed. In the case of those of his works in which poetry and prose are mingled translation becomes more possible. The Nuova Vita, in certain translations, preserves much of its original sweetness. The Convito, of which Miss Hillard has attempted (very success- fully) the translation, is a work much less known, but some- thing in the same style, consisting of canzones, followed by lengthy exposition and analysis of the same, in which each line is picked to pieces and commented upon. A curious method this, that Dante followed in some of his works,— perhaps arising from a kind of punctilious conscientiousness, which he carried into all his writings, and the anxiety that no misconception of any thought or fragment of a thought should be possible. And yet how much of his writings must be necessarily obscure to ordinary readers ! To arrive at the real understanding of all the intricacies of theology and science of which there is so much in the Paradiso, is almost an impossi- bility, for a modern mind at least. There is less of this in the Convito, in which certain passages are strangely modern in thought, if not in expression, and they show that doubt, which is the normal condition of so many nowadays, was not absent from the minds of great thinkers of every age. There is something touching in the vehemence of the following passage, the same spirit of protest that inspired Victor Hugo in L'Annee Terrible, where he speaks of threatening God with his own thunder if the Creator has not provided us with a future existence ; but there is more dignity and anxious investigation, and less egotism, in the protest of the thirteenth- century poet :— " By way of preface I say, that, of all idiocies, that is the most stupid, most vile, and most damnable which holds that, after this life, there is none other, because if we look through all the writings of the philosophers, as well as of the other wise authors, they all agree in this, that there is some part of us which is immortal. For that all deceived themselves were an impossibility, horrible even to mention. Every one is certain that human nature is the most perfect of all natures here below, and this is denied by none, and Aristotle asserts it, when he says, in the 12th Of the Animals, that man is the most perfect of all animals.
Tho Btequst Conaito). B - Dante Alighieri, Translated by Katherine
Ifillard. London: Regan Paul, Trench, and Co.
Therefore, whereas many living beings are entirely mortal, like the brutes, and are without this hope while they live (that is, of another life), if our hope were vain we should be worse off than any other animal. Whereas many have already existed who have given this life for the other ; and therefore it would follow that the most perfect animal—that is, man—were most imperfect (which is impossible), and that that part of him wherein lies his greatest perfection—that is, reason—would be to him the cause of his greatest defect, which would seem a wholly strange thing."
This extract will serve as a fair example of the way the book is translated, at least as regards the prose portions. It will be seen that the quaintness of style is preserved without the sacrifice of good English, which is greater praise to bestow than may at first appear. For the more one has studied a foreign work, and become imbued with the spirit of it and the particular form of expression, the more difficult it becomes to preserve a clear sense of just those liberties that may be taken with one's own tongue without contracting the foreign idiom.
In short, Miss Hillard's translation of the Convito will be welcomed by English students of Dante unacquainted with this work ; and even to those thoroughly familiar with Italian, it will help to elucidate those obscure passages which so frequently recur in Dante's works, and render the whole chapter containing them more or less incomprehensible.
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