CURRENT LITERATURE.
Milton's L'Allegro and 11 Penseroso. Translated into French. By John Roberts, M.A. (Harrison and Sons.)—Mr. Roberts's translation of these noble poems is painstaking, and in a certain stiff way tolerably correct, but we cannot regard the complete effect as satisfactory. The French version is deficient in the melody and in the fine grace of the original. Take, for instance, these lines :— " Mats views Con, C nymphe divine! Aux clear &melee Euphrosyne, Et qua Is pauvre burnanit6
Adore an nom de is Gait& Duo eau] travail Is deuce mbre, Vines, te mit h in lumihre, Ave c tee deux wears, at ton peva Put Bacchus, couronnd de llerre."
Apart from the incongruity of such a phrase as la pan ore humanite- with the whole poem of L'Allegro, how common-place is the rendering of,—
"But come, thou goddess, fair and free, In heaven y-clep'd Euphroysne, " Mais se vollant d'un hien dicent Nuage, tandis que le vent Ebranle tout en mugissant."
These lines evoke a totally different notion of atmospheric effect. Milton's is wildness, not destruction ; a "gust," not a tempete, as we find it given in the following line, and no sound can less resemble
4‘ piping" than " mugissant." We mast deprecate the inversion of Milton's epithets which the translator occasionally permits himself. Ante is a grave example, in the famous lines,—
"There held in holy passion still, Forget thyself to marble."
which the translator renders by,—
Beate en ta passion aniai, NOM& en saint oubli."
'The attempt to translate these poems was a very ambitious one, and we are not so much disposed to censure its failure in this instance, as to doubt the possibility of its success in any.
And by men, heart-easing Mirth, Whom lovely Venus at a birth, With two sister Graces more, To Ivy-crowned Bacchus bore "!
A divine nymph adored by poor humanity under the name of Gaiety,— " Mirth " being despoiled of its beautiful epithet "heart-easing,"—is not only not Milton's" Allegro," but is a perversion of the idea. The French word allegresse really translates "mirth," but "guile" is as artificial as it is meagre thus employed. Neither is "wrinkled care" correctly interpreted by "fa Sagesse an front austere," nor does "la celeste voix" convey Milton's meaning, in the marvellous description of Song which is one of the supreme beauties of the poem. "The melting voice through mazes running" is a unique image, which should not have been degraded into perhaps the most hackneyed of epithets. Mr. Roberts has been more successful with II Penseroso, though here also he sometimes misses the grace and exquisite appropriateness of the original; as, for instance, in the fine apostrophe to Night, and description of Morn.
"But kerehierd in a comely cloud,
While rocking winds are piping loud,"— is rendered by,—
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