BOOKS.

SIR, GEORGE YOUNG'S TRANSLATION OF SOPHOCLES.* SIR GEORGE YOUNG'S opinion that Sophocles offers a more tempting field to a translator than any other "of the principal authors of Greek and Roman antiquity," is, to put it mildly, debateable. Homer, at all events, has found at least four times as many translators in England ; and between them, at a venture, these have gained a thousandfold more fame than the seven—to accept Sir George Young's reckoning —translators of Sophocles have. He is right, no doubt, in the estimate which he gives of the attempts of his pre- decessors. But the most that we anticipate for his own scholarly version is that it will prove as popular as Dean Plumptre's. And of that eminently poetical version, he says, with truth, that although its chief defects were corrected in the second edition, it has failed to maintain the high rank, even in popular estimation, to which at its first appearance it was welcomed by many, and by himself among the number.

"A certain monotony" is noted by Sir George Young as the drey-n.ote of this failure ; and "a certain monotony" is apparent in the versions which he has quoted from his predecessors of Eurydice's speech (Antig., 1183-91). He strangely over- rates that speech when he says that "it is remarkable for its pathos, its directness, its clear indication of character, and the picturesque value of the words employed." His own version is, if our ears be true, as monotonous as any of the others ; and for this we lay no blame whatever upon it. The reader, however, may judge for himself :— " 0 all you citizens, I heard the sound Of your discourse, as I approached the gates Meaning to bring my prayers before the face Of Pallas ; even as I undid the bolts, And set the door ajar, a note of trouble As of my own house pierces through my ears ; And I sink backward on my handmaidens Afaint for terror; but whate'er the tale, Tell it again ; I am no novice, I, In misery, that hearken."

So far as fidelity to the Greek is concerned, this version is quite equal to the best of its rivals ; and so far as poetical beauty is concerned, it has-as much of that as will be found in Dean Plumptre's. But the passage is not one that is suited as a test for translators. Let us see how Sir George Young acquits himself in a passage of greater dramatic force and of greater linguistic difficulty. Here is his version of the con- clusion of that famous speech in the Ajax which begins with a pun that he properly refuses to meddle with :— " As things are,

What must I do ? Whom plainly the Gods hate, Whom the Hellenian host abominate, Whom all Troy loathes, ay and these stones of it !

Shall I abandon the ship's anchorage, Leave the Atridte in the lurch, and pass Homeward across the Egean ? And what visage Shall I display, when I appear before My father Telamon ? How will he endure To look upon me in his presence, bare, Void of the honours wherein he himself Gained a great crown of glory ? It may not be.

Then shall I march against the fence of Troy, Fall, single-handed, only on the foe, And, after some good service, lastly die ?

• The Dramas of Sophocies. rendered in English Verse, Lyric and Dramatic. By Sir George Young, kart., M.A. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, and CO. London: George Bell and Sone. 19313. This is the way to please the Atridle, though. It is impossible. Some enterprise Must be sought out, by which to manifest

To my old father that, in heart at least, Not wholly nerveless I descend from him.

It is a shame to crave long life, when troubles Allow a man no respite. What delight Bring days, one with another, setting down Or putting off merely our date of death ?

I would not take the fellow at a gift Who warms himself with unsubstantial hopes ; But bravely to live on, or bravely end, Is due to gentle breeding. I have said."

Now, Sir George has duly and naturally, in his preface," taken it for granted that verse may best be represented by verse, as prose by prose." And it is conceivable, of course, that a translator endowed with the poetical genius of Coleridge or Shelley could give us a translation of the above passage which would leave prose toiling after it in vain. Meanwhile, till such a translator does arise, the inference which we draw from Sir George Young's version—and we make no doubt that the versions of his predecessors would corroborate that in- ference—is that prose is a better medium than verse for rendering in English the iambics of Sophocles. Professor Jebb has practically shown that this is the case, but he has not yet translated the Ajax. Omitting to notice, what will strike any reader, those bits of weak English which the use of metre has forced upon Sir George, his version of the famous and much-discussed lines,— "71 74 Trap' apiipapa .74reiv gxet rpooleicra ecitraeica TOE; ye Kareaniv," is, to our comprehension, unintelligible. ' or some such word, must be understood after the participles, and the meaning simply is, that when each morrow does but bring, us a step nearer to death, or put us a step further back from it, life has lost all pleasure. His final couplet, too, is rather weak, we think, for in prose it might be rendered,—" But a.

man of lofty lineage must live with honour or die with honour : I have nothing more to say." And five lines lower down, Sir George is mistaken, perhaps, and certainly misleading, in his translation of Ti); ciya-iy-CaCi; Ti;x1i; by "Necessity." Hermann, after Eustathius, interpreted this phrase to mean "captivity," but it far more probably means "death." We have no intention, however, to use microscopic criticism on the work before us, for Sir George Young is clearly a scholar of the calibre that needs not to be told of the faults which criticism of that kind might detect in it. We are arguing rather, but quite broadly and undogmatically, that an English trans- lator of any Greek tragedian will be more likely to succeed with prose for his instrument rather than with verse ; or he must be prepared to sacrifice the letter of his original as freely and boldly as Frere did in his splendid translations of Aristophanes.

What we have said of the iambics of Sophocles applies, of course, with double force to his lyrics. For Sir George Young is himself content to say that for the choruses, if they stood by themselves, a prose rendering might more easily be tolerated than for the dialogue. Two short illustrations of our own. view are all that we can find room for. Pages have been written about the first two lines of the opening chorus in the Ajax. They run thus :— TE.kap.05vse Ira? Tip aaciap(prou Iakcyayos troy Liciepov At least, so we print them in deference to the editors, though, we have little doubt that Lobeck was right in reading egyritotov, and are looking forward with great interest for Professor Jebb's final opinion on this subject. In prose, these lines run, —" 0 son of Telaraon, whose home is the wave-washed land of sea-girt Salamis." Sir George's verse is as follows :— "Son of Telamon, who dost keep Seat where sea-girt Salamis Borders on the ocean deep."

By "seat" he apparently refers AciepoY to the town of Salamis, and to this, of course, we can make no objection. But he clearly, therefore, reads clyxrcaov, and great credit was given to the scholar who first suggested that this epithet was applied to Salamis from its proximity to the coast. The Isles of Wight and Thanet are eivvrixot, and so is Euboaa. But there are other islands in the open main to which this epithet is given, and it seems safest to regard it as an epithet suitable only to small islands, every part of which is "near-the-sea," or, as with poetical exaggeration we have ventured to translate

it, is " wave-washed." Lower down in this chorus, we come to Sophocles at his best as a politician :—

Rearm cristKpoi pryciAcev ropls

crOciAEptiv it-47ov iSZALci wi'Aorrat

Acra

79 ficycf-kair Oaths gincri) 8r tcal yas Opeoie 67E8 isticporipoir.

Roughly, in prose,—" And yet the masses apart from the classes

are a poor tower of defence, for the masses will flourish best in union with the classes, and the classes when supported by -the masses." Apart from cacophony, this seems preferable to

Sir George's rhyme-spoilt verses :—

"Yet without the great, the small Make the tower but feeble wall ; And happiest ordered were that state Where small are companied with great, Where strong are propped by weak."

The difficulties which beset the writer of a verse translation are patent enough to Sir George, and he says most emphatically that the Prayer-Book version of the Psalms out-sings all metrical versions." He notices at the same time that "a

prose version of Homer is most pleasing to some readers." He is right, of course ; but in practice he fails to see that the literalness which is so effective when it is compassed by the freedom of English prose, with its resources of rhythm and vocabulary, is seriously, and even fatally defective, when it is set, as literalness should never be set, to dance in the fetters of metre. As a translation, Pope's Homer is below criticism,

but Pope's wise neglect of literalness secured for it a suc- cess which a poet of far higher genius would fail to secure, if he felt bound to keep as closely to his original as Sir George Young feels bound to keep to his. To his preface, however, we must refer the reader for as fine an estimate of a translator's duty and its rewards as we have ever met with.

In that preface, too, will be found an estimate of Sophocles which seems entirely just. He was, says his translator, as a poet, inferior to 2Eschylus and hardly superior to Euripides ; as a dramatist, he soars far above them both. This is hitting the nail on the head; but Sir George is scarcely so happy when he seeks to establish the "personal blamelessness" of Sophocles from a fragment of Flermesianax conjecturally restored. It would be absurd, indeed, to judge that poet's morality by a Christian standard, but it would be quite as absurd to try and

depict him as a Socrates or a Cicero in the matter of personal -purity. Sir George rejects, we are glad to see, the spelling which we have often condemned in these columns, and we quote his vigorous words on this point with great pleasure :— "Proper names should be given in their English dresses ; the Greek diphthongs, u's, k's, and terminations in -os, being still as much, in my opinion, mere barbarisms in an English book, as when -they were first imported, not from Greece, but from Germany. Aias ' and • Poluneikes ' in our Roman characters appear to me not so much Greek, as queer ; and such fantastic combinations of letters as •Rlutaimnestra' and • Oidipous ' stand, if for any- thing, for sounds not so near to the probable authentic pronuncia- tion of the names, as are the more popular forms in common use among ourselves."