MR. LUCAS'S achievement as a translator and as an introducer
of Greek poetry seems to me to be not only extensive but admirable. His first book, Greek Poetry for Everyman, with its excellent notes, deserved all the high praise it received. It passed triumphantly the two main tests—it was natural and it was accurate. Also it possessed many virtues and felicities of its own. Where it was inadequate, it was inadequate only, as it were, by necessity; for all good poetry must lose something in translation, and some of the best must lose the most. (Though it should be added that the best can, while losing a lot, still be better than anything else except itself.) On the whole I should guess that lyrical poetry is the hardest to translate, and epic and dramatic the easiest. But in Greek pootr/ this rule does not exactly apply, since, with regard to epic, no one has yet found an English line which at all corresponds with the hexameter, though Mr. Lucas himself has done some very fine things in his translation of Homer. He has done, however, even better, I think, in this companion volume on Greek drama. Dramatic poetry, like epic, has a story, and this fact alone is a great help to those who are to read it in translation. And the Greek iambic line, unlike the hexameter, has a rhythm not unlike what we are used to in English verse. The problem of the choruses is more difficult. It may be suggested that here a cunning mixture of English and Scots should be employed, but I cannot imagine that this would be anything but disgusting. Mr. Lucas decides on blank verse for the dialogue, and rhymed verse of varying metres for the choruses, and there is much to be said for his decision in theory—and (which is the important thing) even more to be said for the way in which he puts his theory into practice. It is perhaps worth glancing at what appear to me some defects in the theory before one turns to applaud the practice. Mr. Lucas in his interesting preface twice (at least) quotes with approval " that great scholar Walter Headlam." According to Headlam : "There is surely no more close affinity, historical and spiritual and artistic, than between the great dramatic speech of Aeschylus and Sophocles and the heroic blank verse of our Elizabethan Dramatists and Milton." Thii does not seem to me a very meaningful statement and I do not think that what I think it means is true. But, even if that were true, it would not follow that a modern translator should write in the manner of " our Elizabethan Dramatists and Milton." A modern translator must, in fact, be modern. He must write as though his original were alive to him today. This does not mean that he must insert colloquialisms where none were in the original. This does not mean that he may lack respect for the past. One can scarcely respect the dead in any way more than in being conscious that they are still alive. But Mr. Lucas, in theory at least, does not seem to share this view. He writes, for instance, " Unfortunately many persons have no sense of history and bClieve, like Bernard Shaw, that the past was populated by the same people, merely wearing different clothes." Yet Shaw's superficiality with regard to history is not the result of the belief which is here attributed to him. Some such belief was hel4 by Thucydides, of whom it cannot be said that he had "no sense of history." I thirik that what Mr. Lucas is really attacking is the attitude of those who regard the past as being, simply because it is past, either funny or in some way inferior to the present. He rightly deplores a sentence from one of Shaw's letters, "1 am at least quit of Athens, with its stupid classic Acropolis and smashed pillars." It is indeed a vulgar and ignorant attitude; but, in rejecting it, we do not have to fly in the face of Thucydides and people ancient Athens with a race of demi-gods. Indeed their greatness lies in their reality and part of their value to us is in their likeness to ourselves. This likeness will, as a rule, be more easily perceived if their words are translated into a contemporary idiom. And this, in fact, is what Mr. Lucas does with great success. His verse is neither recognisably 'modern' nor traditional.' It reminds one neither of Mr. Eliot nor of Milton. Without any wish to dis- parage it, I should describe it as 'efficient' verse. For this is what is needed in a translator who, 1 think, is a bad translator if he does not subdue himself to a great original. The greatness is important. For all I know one can improve on Omar Khayyam. But I know enough to know that one cannot improve on Aeschylus. Mr. Lucas has not attempted to do so. He has been faithful to his originals and, particularly in the choruses, he has been brilliantly ingenious and happy. Of course from time to time one is offended. In Mr. Lucas's most stimulating and interesting notes there occurs a translation of a line of Lucretius, "To so much misery can Religion lead," and I am sure that this was not what Lucretius meant. But these are minor criticisms. The important thing is to applaud a great achievement. For in this volume we have complete translations, and very good ones, of two plays by Aeschylus, two by Sophocles, two by Euripides and one by Aristophanes, together with extracts from plays by these and other dramatists.. There are lively and provocative notes and explana- tions, so that a complete picture of Greek drama is put, before the reader.
In his preface Mr. Lucas writes correctly of Professor Gilbert Murray, whose practice in translation he admires, but does not follow, "Few men have done so much to keep Greek poetry a living influence in England." I think that, with two such admirable volumes to his credit, Mr. Lucas himself is among those few to whom. for the same reason, we must all be permanently indebted.
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