MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IWAS lecturing on Monday night to the Jugoslav Club in London. When they asked me some months ago to accept this engagement, I had foreseen that it would be best to avoid all subjects connected either with the present war or the future peace. I promised, therefore, that I should talk to them upon " The Approach to English Literature." How optimistic one is in spring-time regarding these distant autumnal engagements, and how constantly one forgets that but a few hurried hours will pass before the peach-blossom rounds itself into wasp-infested fruits and the spider-webs glisten against the yews! The determined date rushes upon one suddenly as a railway-station upon a family un- aware of the imminence of their destination ; the outlying bungalows of Bognor Regis swing past the carriage windows, and in panic dismay the milk-bottle, the meccano set, the knitting and the P. G. Wodehouse are tumbled into the basket together ; one stands upon the platform breathless and disarrayed. That May afternoon when I accepted my engagement to the Jugoslays, and fixed my tactful
subject, it had all seemed so remote and easy. But when I realised that the last day of August was actually upon me, I also realised that the subject I had chosen was intricate in the extreme—and that most of my audience knew little English. Even before an English university audience it would be difficult to treat such a subject adequately within the space of fifty minutes. But to convey the substance of English lyricism to an audience who knew but little English, and whose whole tradition was an epic tradition, seemed to me, when the date was on me, as impossible as describing to a Baluchi warrior the colours of the Weald of Kent.
* * * * Such experiences are, however, valuable, in that they oblige us to consider English literature from a totally new angle. How, within so short a space of time, could I convey to a foreign audience, con- sisting to a large degree of soldiers and civil servants, an even approximate impression of anything so multiform and so vast? The literature of any country is composed not of content or form alone, but of other important elements, and notably those of association and suggestion. These other elements are almost totally lost in translation, nor do they evoke the correct emotional or aesthetic response in people trained in other habits of mind and language. And if this be true of all literature, it is doubly true of English literature, in which the associative and the suggestive play so im- portant a part. The greatest passages of English literature, as for instance those passages of " pure " poetry which provide the English reader with delighted moments of satisfaction and surprise, owe their effect not to content or even to form, but to highly inventive association. They do not make sense, but they make something far more important than sense, and to a foreigner they make nothing at all ; since it is upon the stout warp of common national tradition that the genius of a creative artist embroiders in silk and gold.
* * * * Some enlightenment can, I suppose, be given by adopting the metaphorical method. One can say, for instance, that French litera- ture is best approached as a magnificent piece of architecture ; that German literature should be regarded as a forest ; that English literature is a garden, and so on. One can say things of this sort, but I do not know that they are very true, and I doubt very much whether they convey any valuable meaning to a Jugoslav Colonel. I think I was right, therefore, in taking the severely practical line and in confining my talk within the following quite reasonable formulas: " You are here in England. You are likely to remain here some time. You will not, I hope, remain here long enough to be able to master the whole of English literature. But you will remain here long enough to know something about a few English books. If you begin by trying to read Shakespeare or Shelley you will at the outset become discouraged and confused. Your approach to English literature should, therefore, be a tentative approach from the facile to the complicated. I suggest to you the following ten books as stages in your progression." It would be an interesting competition, on the " desert-island" analogy, to work out a list of ten English books which one would recommend as an approach to English literature to an audience of
Jugoslav exiles. My own list was as follows: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Trollope's Dr. Thorne, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, Macaulay's Essays, Strachey's Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill's My Early Life, Trevelyan's History of England, Grey's Twenty-five Years, The Oxford Book of English Verse. I do not expect that any of my readers will agree with this list ; but I think they will agree that if a Jugoslav Colonel were to start by reading Conan Doyle he would find it easier to read Trollope, and that if he had mastered Vanity Fair, Bleak House would offer less difficulty ; and I think they would also agree that this list would, in form and content, give the Colonel some conception of how differently we feel at Luton or Ipswich from the way they feel at Karlovatz and Gostivar. Nor do I doubt that if the Colonel really read these books he would understand a little better why we enjoy The Prelude and why, for more than a century, we held the seven seas. I believed that this method of approach would be acceptable and useful, but I was disconcerted on leaving to be asked what trans- lations of the English classics into French or German I would recommend. I answered "None of them." Was that a hasty or a priggish rejoinder? , For had it not been for translations I should never have read Ibsen or War and Peace.
* * * * I contend, however, that of all modern literature, English loses most by translation. It is true that there are many translations of English, especially into German, which do preserve the content, and even the form, of the original. Nobody, for instances could have heard Shakespeare performed on the German stage in the translation of Tieck and Schlegel without being amazed by the fidelity with which the thought, the feeling and even the language of the original has been transposed. One of the most satisfactory translations which I know of in any language is Stefan George's rendering of The „Sonnets. Yet even in two languages as akin to each other as are the English and German languages, most of the artifices and many of the finer shades defy all transposition. I possess a German translation of In Memoriam, published by Jakob Feiss in i899. It is a scholarly and ingenious piece of work, nor have I anything but admiration for Dr. Feiss's sincerity and care. Yet Tennyson's skill in the handling of vowels and consonants, which constitutes so important an element in his poetry, is lost in transla- tion. I have glanced, for instance, at Dr. Feiss's rendering of section XIX of In Memoriam, and find that the astonishing inter-
change of alliteration between the consonants " s" and " h " com- pletely disappears in the German version ; nor could anyone reading
the line Alsdann verstummt rein leises Murmeln" have any con- ception that it is intended to reflect the beauty of "And hushes half the babbling Wye."
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In French, the transposition of the two languages is even more disastrous. Before the French language became " a piano without pedals " it was sometimes possible to suggest French poetry in English, as is proved by George Wyndham's charming renderings of the Pleiade. But after Malherbe communication between the two languages became sadly interrupted. I have among my books an anthology of English poetry published in a French translation in 1940. I find that some of our simplest lines and lyrics are completely untransferable. For instance, "This happy breed of men, this little world," is not really the same as "Cate race privilegiee, ce monde en raccourci" ; when I read "0 rive, rigre, efjrayant d'ardeur," I do not experience at all the same emotion as when I read " Tiger, tiger burning bright! " ; nor is " Thou still unravished bride of quietness " satisfactorily rendered by "0 toi, la fiancée secrete du silence." No, on the whole, I think I was right in discouraging the Jugoslays from reading English in translations.
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