BOOKS OF THE MOMENT.

A TORRENT OF TRANSLATION.

The Idylls of Theocritus. With the Fragments of Bion and Moschus. Translated by J. H. Mallard, M.A., Oxon. Fourth Edition. Broadway Translations. (London : George Routledge. New York : Dutton and Co. Is. 6d. net.) Anacreon. Done into the English out of the original Greek by Abraham Cowley and S. B., 1685. Newly embellished with copperplate engravings by Stephen Gooden. (The Nonesuch Press. ) Daphnis and Chloe. A most sweet and pleasant pastoral romance for young ladies, translated out of • the Greek. of Longus by Geo. Thornley, Gent. (The Golden Cockerel Press. 18s. 6d. net.)

Basil Blackwell. 7s. 6d. net.) •

WHEN I behold the charming heap of volumes now confronting me, there rises to my mind a Liberal election song of the

'eighties :—

" See the torrent of taxation Rising like a flood."

The torrent of translation is at present just as strong and irresistible,' and it appears to be rising every month. But how different from the fiscal inundation to which the electoral lyric refers 1 The rising tide of translation is beneficent and delightful, whether it be ancient or modern. Both kinds have their valuea, both their virtues. No doubt a general case may be made out against translations as against reprints and new editions of all sorts. Though they may be liked by the reader, they unquestionably dim the prospects of the

new 'writers if they are carried too far ; and such persons it is an imperative duty, to protect. In belles-lettres, one volume of good new poetry, good new fiction, good new criticism is worth a wilderness of the older beauties. The song is clearly most to the singer ; but next to him it is most to the men of his own generation. A fool or a dullard is a fool or a dullard in any and every age, but given equality in intellect and inspiration, who would not put his money

or his emotions upon the modern ?

I, at any rate, am all for the men of my own time. I like the hook whose " heart still beats against its side." The writers who feel what we feel about the 'woods and fields and the men and women that take their pleasure therein; the writers who hunger and thirst with us, who are of like mind with us in joy and sorrow, who look on life as we look on it, and not the distant voices .of even the mighty dead, are those who move us most deeply. If the grey ghosts of ancient singers, with their waving arms and sad echoing tones, charm me away from my own contemporaries, I have suffered a grievous loss.

But though those are my true, bed-rock feelings, and ought to be those of all our generation,1 acknowledge that I have :pent a delightful time with these noble phantoms. They are full of enchantment, .whether in their new garments or in their old, whether in the interpretations of some living scholar of keen insight and of a sympathy which partakes of the minuteness of our scientific age, or whether in the versions of those heroic Elizabethan translators, _ who rushed in and tore the heart out of the decadent Greek romances or out of some poet who sang wherithe Muses were yet young, and when Apollo's train still sped up the still valley of Thisbe,or listened to the plaint of the Maenads of the Thracian Highlands. The work of the Elizabethans, if it was not always accurate, was, at any rate; always glorious and great-hearted.

Verse shall have the first place and, taking Plutarch as my model, I shall group an ancient with a modern translator— Mr. Hallard's translation of Theocritus and Cowley's Anacreon. I am glad to say that fofpoetry quite as much as for scholarship Mr. Hallard's work easily carries the day. To me, at any rate, the first quality is far more important than the second. It TiAifie=ii ii qua tien. Unless a 'translation in verse has got the inspiration of good poetry in it, it might just as well be thrown behind the fire. It was dead before it was born: Mr. Mallard's volume is altogether delightful and entirely worthy of the Broadway Translations. I see it is marked " Fourth Edition," though somehow I. have missed any notification, if there is one, as to when the first edition appeared. Anyway, the edition before me has been carefully revised and reset, and the preface is dated January, 1924.

I had hitherto believed that Calverley said the last word in the translation of Theocritus: His verse is scholarly, flowing, full of fascination, and can be read with intense pleasure by the non-scholarly reader like myself. But it wants no very great experience in literature to realize at once that Mr. Mallard " has the advantage "—as the tailor said when in answer to a customer's question he declared that Mr. Brummel was better dressed than the Regent. Mr. Mallard has the advantage over Calverley because there is even more vitality in his verse, and there is just that touch of archaism which is demanded by the origins of rural poetry. I am not forgetting, of course, that Ptolemy's Poet Laureate, if we are to estimate him accurately, was a literary decadent ; but, after all, it was the sweet decadence of Lyly's "Cupid and Campaspe," or the "Euphues," not of Gay or Ambrose Phillips. Mr. Hallard manages his metres to perfection.

I am the last man to decry blank verse in any shape or form, but as a rule I feel that it is a bad vehicle for translation. The writing of poor blank verse is too easy, and one is always inclined to write poor verse when translating because there is always present the excuse of getting the poet's exact meaning—a matter of very much less 'importance than of getting something 'that will sing itself. Mr. Hallard, however, contrives to make melodious blank verse even when trans- lating. In spite of being caged 'his verse is full of vitality: I shall take as 'an example, not because it is really the best, but because it can be suitably torn ' from the context, the delightful description of the drinking-cup in the first Eclogue :—

" And thine shall be a drinking-cup, twy-eared, Well waxed, new-made, still •smelling of the chisel, Around whose lip there twines an ivy-wreath . With everlastinga pranked ; the spray below Winds happy in its own gold fruit. Between, Divinely wrought, a woman stands, adorned 1/1, ith robe and mood ; on either hand of her A man with fair long hair, who each with the other Wrangles in words, nor moves her heart at all ; But now she smiles and looks on one, now throws Her light heart to his rival. They, poor lads, Are heavy-eyed, and vex themselves in vain.

A little boy sits on a dry-stone wall

To watch and ward ; two foxes round him roam ;

One prowls among the vine-rows pillaging The riper clusters, while the other plots A raid on the lad's wallet, and has vowed To wreck his morning meal. But he the while Weaves for himself a pretty grasshopper-net With asphodel, fitting it on a rush, And heeds no whit his wallet or the vines, So happy in his ' plaiting.' "

I wish I could quote more, but I could only do that by robbing my other poets, and therefore the dozen exquisite pieces that I have marked I must resign, though with a heavy heart. It remains to be said that in the supreine test of the " Gorgo and Praxinoe " and in " The Forgiveness of Aphrodite " Mr. Hallard conies off with triumphant colours. In " The Forgiveness of Aphrodite " Calverley was quite at his best, and produced a poem which is as near Albano's pastorals at his best as verse can be to paint. When the Amorini, at the command of Aphrodite, seizes the boar, Calverley's Theocritus tells us how :—

" One dragged him at a rope's end, E'en like a captured foe,

One went behind and drave him, And smote him with his bow. On paced the creature feebly, He feared Cytherea so."

That is exquisite, but not quite Greek. Here is Mr. Mallard's setting :—

" One set a noose on his neck And haled him eaptiv4 along,

Another drove behind And shot him with shafts from his bow ; And dreading the goddess's wrath

The beast went full of woe."

The poor boar's' plea is also far more true to Theocritus in

Mr. Hallard's version than in Calverley's. Mr. Hallard tells us how Aphrodite :-

` . . bade the young Loves loosen

His trammels and set him free.

And ever from that day forth He followed her faithfully, And ne'er to the wild wood went, But would come at her beck and call

To fawn at the goddess's feet—

And the feet of the young Loves all."

Calverley's repentant boar is not so naively innocent. He tells us of the boar that he :-

" Never to the wild woods Attempted to return, But in the focus of desire

Continued still to bum."

Oite, as I said before, is a picture by Albano. The other is like the enthralling work of the unknown Florentine who drew the pictures in the " Hypnerotomachia Porphyrii." I like them both to distraction, but, once more, Mr. Ilallard " has the advantage."

My ancient translator is Cowley, who in 1683 published " Anacreon. Dow into English out of the original Greek." The Nonesuch Press has given us this in a charming volume bound in gold paper and embellished with accomplished copperplates engraved by Mr. Stephen Gooden. The print, paper and general get-up of the book are admirable, like all the publications of this firm. Whether it is the fault of the translator or whether it is the fault of Anacreon, I know not ; but neither in the case of Cowley nor in that of Tommy Moore can I get satisfaction out of any of Anacreon's poems. Even " Cupid or the Cunning Beggar," though it was so exquisitely paraphrased by Lyly, leaves me somewhat cold in Cowley's version. There is, of course, a great deal of charm in it, but somehow, and I think this is probably the fault of Anacreon himself, one cannot help returning the general verdict of " languid." This is true even of " Cupid Wounded," the story of how (to use Moore's words) :— " The bee awoke with anger wild.

The bee awoke and stung the child."

It is all very pretty, but somehow not in the least invincible in its appeal. But these literary " intagli " must be invincible or they will be intolerable. If you carve a head on a cherry- stone, it must be a very good head indeed, much better than a marble head full size.

I have on my table three translations of classical romances, all of them Elizabethan. Two of them are printed by the Cockerel Press. First must come The XI. Bookes of the Golden Asse of Apuleius. Here is Adlington's version in full, including the exquisite dedication " To the Right Honour- able and Mighty Lord, Thomas, Earle of Sussex, Justice of the Forrests and Chases from Trent Southward ; Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners of the House of the Qucene our Soveraigne Lady." Adlington's translation, which was pub- lished in 1566, is an exquisite piece of work, and all scholars and lovers of literature must be grateful for such a reprint. It is just'the kind of book which benefits by the Elizabethan dress.

Daphnis and Chloe is also given us in Elizabethan transla- tion, that of George Thornley. More attractive, to me, at any rate, than these two romances is "Heliodorus, an Aethiopian Romance," which was translated by Thomas Underdowne in in 1587 and is now returned to us, after a long sleep, in the Broadway Translations. Mr. Wright, of the Classical Depart- ment of Birkbeck College, is the editor, and in certain places the re-writer. I do not think that Mr. Wright says a bit too much in praise of the romance of Heliodorus in his short introduction. The Ethiopian adventure of Theagencs and Chariclea is a very delightful robber and pirate novel, full of curious and interesting sidelights on Greco-Roman life towards the end of the fourth century A.D. The book begins quite splendidly with the story of " the robbers of Egypt." I do not suppose Stevenson ever read it, but I am quite sure that if he had done so he would have been transported. Indeed, the opening words might very well have been written by Stevenson had he stooped to write a classical romance :- " At the first smile of day, when the sun was just beginning to shine on the summits of the hills,- men whose custom was to live

by rapine and violence ran to the top of a cliff that stretched toward that mouth of the Nile which is called Heracleot."

The story goes on almost as well as it begins, and is full of surprises. Blood flows in torrents, and we stumble over a corpse on every page. But in spite of the bloodshed, the pirates, the witches, the wicked princesses, the tyrants, the drums and the tramplings, the slaves, the horsemen, the daggers, and the torrents of tears, it is very interesting to note the human touch which goes hand in hand with the romantic. Chariclea, as Mr. Wright points out, is a thoroughly satisfactory heroine—" romantic, virtuous, beautiful, and in the recognition scene as skilful an advocate as Portia herself." After all, the story is the thing, and here I may again quote Mr. Wright as placing his author exactly : " You read Heliodorus for the story itself."

My bundle of translations shall end with two Latins and a Greek. Mr. Symons-Jeune's Some Poems of Catullus is a very scholarly work, and one or two of the translations may be said to be quite successful. The fact is, however, that Catullus has never yet been satisfactorily translated. Perhaps he never will be, any more than will be Ovid or indeed Virgil. The truth is Latin is infinitely more difficult to translate than Greek, or Persian, or Hebrew, or indeed any other language known to man. The explanation, no doubt, is that Latin literature was derivative, and derivative in a very special way. The Latin spirit was overwhelmed by the Greek spirit, yet it was intensely strong and original, and deserved and, indeed, required its own clothes, and not the garments of Hellas. The result was a compromise, which, though it produced fascinating poetry, also produced poetry that is amazingly difficult to interpret in a third tongue.

In his "Thirty-Two Passages from the Odyssey in English Rhymed Verse," Mr. Locock gives us some good reading. He has chosen for his medium, rightly as I think, the couplet. His metrical use thereof is something between Dryden and Chapman. The episode in " Nausicaa " of the palace wash- ing, and the discovery of Ulysses is very charmingly inter- preted. Excellent, too, is the account of the Palace of Alcinous. So also is the account of Agamemnon in Hades. Indeed, all these excerpts are justified as translations.

To this record of translations I should like to add by way of postscript a word in regard to Mr. Billson's new and revised edition of his fascinating translation of the Aeneid which appeared last autumn. Though it does not fit in with my theory of translation by substitution, and, again, is in blank verse, against which benign extreme I incline, I am bound to testify to its merits. The late Mr. Frederic Harrison did not say a bit too much about it when he wrote of the earlier edition that it was the best of all versions of the Aeneid that he knew, and that it was destined to supersede all others. This is high praise indeed, but I at any rate see