A TRANSLATION OF CATIiLLUS.

Catullus. Translated by Sir William Marris. With the Latin Text. (Oxford : Clarendon Press. 58. net.) Tim Governor of the United Provinces, who twelve years ago gave us a delightful version of Horace, has occupied what must have been the very scanty leisure of his recent years in trans- lating Catullus. The Roman poet has been to him what the Greek Anthology was to Lord Cromer, a hobby to be taken up at an odd moment, and the result is a volume of remarkable charm and accomplishment and a gallant attempt at one of the most intricate of tasks. For Catullus—the best of him—is untranslatable. Even when the quality is accu- rately understood there is no exact equivalent in English for the perfection of the Latin ; the different genius of the tongue is a final barrier. Robinson Ellis, who missed no subtlety, tried it, but the poetry evaded him ; Sir Theodore Martin was too facile ; Sir Richard Burton was rather an anthropologist than a poet. Mr. Warre Cornish's sound prose in the Loeb series is satisfying enough, but no prose can reproduce the effect of song. Sir William Marris gives us poetry, which in itself is an achievement ; he is, scrupulously faithful to his text, and labours to catch its exact flavour ; with many of the pieces he really succeeds, . and if he fails in the very greatest it is because the task is impossible. It may fairly be said that no verse translation of a Greek or Roman poet in recent years has come so near success.

It was the merest accident that the work of the poet who died at thirty and was acclaimed a classic from the start did not utterly disappear in the Dark Ages. The one hundred and sixteen pieces which have survived rank him as the greatest Roman lyric poet—perhaps the greatest of antiquity. In that small body of verse there is much pure gold and little base metal, for even his exercises in the more frigid Alexandrian modes are saved by their amazing metrical skill. Like Burns he combined passionate love poetry with biting satire, and conjugated all the moods and tenses of the verbs to love and to hate. The lyric love of youth for the flagrantes oculos of Lesbia, the cruelty of disillusion, are there ; but so, too, is the squalid crowd of panders and parasites and bad poets condemned in burning verse to an immortality of contempt. And often he attains to a purged

simplicity of passion which is beyond praise, since it is the ultimate perfection possible for human speech.

The difficulty of Catullus for the translator is his subtlety. To his contemporaries he was pre-eminently doclus, a student of all the Greek metres and the inventor of new harmonies, as' learned in prosody as Mr. Robert Bridges. To criticize him adequately on this side it. is necessary to be a master of the technicalities of his verse, like Robinson Ellis or Monro. The metre is cunningly suited to the matter —the melting hendecasyllables in moods of tenderness and pity, the lilting glyconics of the great wedding-songs, the lingering beauty of the seazon iambics, the strength of the hexameters, the exotic strangeness of the galliambics of the Attis. His elegiacs have not the perfection of Ovid's, and in his sapphics and choriambics he was surpassed by Horace, but in his own favourite metres he has no rival. He is subtle, too, in other things than tune. Take the change of gender in the sixth line of the Allis, which comes with a startling shock upon the reader. Sir William Marris, unlike Grant Allen, perceives it and reproduces it boldly :- " Then, as the changeling felt the effect in hor every limb."

But this method—the only way in English—has a far cruder effect than the quiet change of the terminal letter in the Latin. Take again the fourteenth poem, where Catullus complains that a friend has spoilt his Saturnalia by a gift of bad poets. The penultimate line, as Verrall has shown, is probably a parody of the way these bad poets handled his own hendecasyllables :- " Blue unde mahun podem attulistis.".

But how is the sudden effect of this doggerel to be given

In English ? There is,- too, , subtlety of hii diction. It is as pure as that of Lucretius, but in place of his noble-

bareness it has a wooing simplicity. Little phrases out of everyday life are always appearing, colloquialisms are inter- woven, the diminutives of friendly conversation are not wanting. For all the studied art and the metrical connoisseur- ship the result is a model cf spontaneity. Words and rhythms are so cunningly and magisterially used as to produce some- thing as natural as a flower.

Sir William Marris is happiest, it seems to me, when he is dealing with the metres which are less peculiarly Catullus's own, for I do not believe that the English tongue can render adequately the best of the hendccasyllables and the scazons.

But he comes very near success. " Passer, deliciac meae pucliae " has, in his hands, much of the grace of the original, and his version of " Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus " is poetry, though not quite, to my mind, the poetry of Catullus, and it has the merit of complete fidelity to the original. The iambic trimeters of the famous fourth poem, " Phaselus ille " are skilfully rendered ; so, too, are the

scazons of the eighth, " Miser Catulle,'2 that tragical piece

of lovers' philosophy, and of " Paene insularum," the song to Sirmio :-

" My pearl of all peninsulas and isles,

That Neptune nurses in the lucent mere Or on the waste of ocean, Sirmio dear !

To thee again I come, all joy and smilos, Hardly believing 1 have left awhiles Those Asian plains, and see thee nestling hero.

What joy is like it ? to be quit of care And drop my load, and after weary miles Come home, and sink upon the bed that so I used to dream of : this one thing is worth All that long service. Hail, sweet Sirmio !

Welcome thy lord with laughter, and give back Your laughter, waters of the Lydian lake : Laugh, home of mine, with all your maddest mirth."

The Allis is excellent, the best version I know, and the one

great elegiac piece, No. 76, en the disenchantment of love, is reproduced with the proper austerity of the Latin :—

" Not now I ask, she love me once again

Nor (since it cannot be) that chaste she be, But make me whole and rid me of this band ; Gods, grant me this thing for my piety."

These pieces I have selected as the translator's hardest

test, and Sir William Marris comes as well out of it, as could i easonably 132 expected. But he is at his best in the glyconicS and the hexameters, for the reason, I think, that their quality is less idiomatic and more ecmmunicable. He makes a delightful thing of " Dianae sumus in fide " and of the great wedding song for Manlius and Junia. His version of the latter, indeed, is a notable achievement in its mingling of ceremonial grace and homely merriment :—

" Haunter of Mount Helicon,

Who each tender maid To her bridegroom bearest on, Hear us now, Urania's son, Hymen, lend thy aid !

Bind with marjoram thy brows ;

How its breath is sweet !

Don the veil, and come to us Bringing joy, with saffron shoes On thy snow-white feet."

But if I had to choose I would rate highest the version of the 64th poem on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. That has always seemed to me the high-water mark of the Latin hexameter, and the hexameter goes better into cur tongue than other classic metres. Sir William Marris gives us a stately poem, and only now-and then do we feel that English is a clumsy medium for Catullus in his perfection. Such

a case is the passage beginning with line 339 :— " Your son shall be Achilles void of fear ; Foes know his dauntless front but not his rear ;

Oft victor in the race shall he out-run The fiery footsteps of the flying deer ;

Run on and draw the woof, ye spindles, run."

it is vigorous and faithful, but it is not—it could not be- _

" Nascetnr !obis expers terror*. Achilles,

us Hostib hand tergo, sod forti pectore notais."

JOnN BircnAN,