Sonnets of Jose - Maria de Heredia. Done into English by Edward
Robeson Taylor. (William Doxey, San Francisco.)— Tennyson was not particularly pleased at the translating of his poems into French, and we do not imagine that M. de Heredia will delight in being turned into English. There could scarcely be a more difficult task in translation than this which Mr. Taylor has set himself. We cannot withhold admiration from a book so boldly planned, and so beautifully got up and printed in San Francisco that it is a pleasure to turn it over. But to write again Heredia's sonnets with real success in English requires an art and a genius like his own. This poet, like the rest of his school but in advance of most of them, aims at nothing less than perfection,—and perfection within very narrow limits. His sonnets, as every one who has read them knows, are like mosaics, like blazoned coats of arms, like the ancient, glowing church windows in which every scrap of jewelled colour is necessary to the perfection of the whole. But the boldness of the subjects is on a level with the intensity of the colouring and the delicacy of the art. Old mythology and history, mediEeval art and legend, Oriental and tropical Nature, sometimes a wild aspect of the Nature that we all know, but more especially Spanish and tropical subjects, and the conquest of America by men from whom the poet himself is descended. It is an art in itself to treat such subjects as these after the fashion of a middle-age illuminator. Strong, sonorous, imaginative, as the sonnets are, every word is a study and could be replaced by no other; every line is a delicate harmony. It is evident that translation must be a tremendous undertaking ; and it must be added that English is hardly the language for this kind of mosaic work. Mr. Taylor has kept as close as possible to the original, and here and there his lines are really successful. We may certainly say that he gives a fair notion of M. de Heredia's mind and method to readers unacquainted with him.
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