Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“
[ocr errors]

to reply, we hope not; but we may venture to express a wish that, if he does pursue the swelling theme,' he may be less diffuse, less trivial, less partial; and rather more solicitous to amuse or inform his readers, than to increase, by every artifice of amplification, the bulk of his volumes, and the consequent amount of his copyright.

By the Rev. Henry 1833.

ART. II.—1. Pindar in English Verse. Francis Cary, A.M. London. 12mo. 2. The Odes of Pindar, translated from the Greek, with Notes Critical and Explanatory. By Abraham Moore, Esq. Part II. 3. Bibliotheca Græca, curantibus Frid. Jacobs et V. C. F. Rost. Vol. VI. continens Pindari carmina, edente Ludolpho Dissenio, Professore Gottingensi. Gothæ et Erfordiæ. 1830.

'IF

F a man should undertake,' says Cowley, 'to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another; as may appear when he that understands not the original, reads the vulgar traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving. And sure, rhyme, without the addition of wit and the spirit of poetry-(quod nequeo monstrare, et sentio tantum)—would but make it ten times more distracted than it is in prose.' He adds, I have in these two odes of Pindar taken, left out, and added what I please; nor make it so much my aim to let the reader know precisely what he spoke, as what was his way and manner of speaking.' And then, by way of letting the English reader know precisely the way and manner in which Pindar was accustomed to speak, Cowley proceeds to render the commencement of the second Olympic Ode in the following terms :—

Queen of all harmonious things,

Dancing words and speaking strings,
What god, what hero wilt thou sing?
What happy man to equal glories bring?

Begin, begin thy noble choice,

And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice!'— To the merit of which Pindaric burst Pindar himself can no otherwise lay any claim than on the score of three Greek lines, which, in despite of Cowley's hard words, we will venture to set before the reader in three lines of literal prose:

[ocr errors][merged small]

There is in the original a superb compound—¿važiQóguiyyes— which rings on the ear like the sounds of a harp by night; with the exception of that fine word, the poet suffers but little loss

in

in our plain English. Pindar at times bitterly reviles his enemies, and calls them crows, and daws, and worse; yet their malignity did him small harm with his contemporaries, and none with posterity; but, strange to say, the admiration of a poet of exquisite genius and fancy-the very model, upon occasion, of pure diction in his own language, has been well nigh fatal to him in modern Britain. Pindar would have loved Cowley had he known him in the flesh, for they were both pure, religious, loyal, and learned men; yet his self-love must have been less active than we think it was, if he would not have considered the friendship even of Cowley purchased too dearly at the expense of having his great Olympic song so handled by our countryman as it was destined to be.

That Cowley did not understand the construction of Pindar's odes, is apparent from the argument which he prefixes to his translation of this second Olympic, where he says that 'this ode (according to the constant custom of the poet) consists more in digressions than in the main subject.' The manner which he thus mistakenly imputes to Pindar, Cowley adopted himself in the composition of those odes of his own, which, from a supposed similarity of style, he called Pindarique Poems,—not worthless, but yet of little worth, and which, by popular association, have largely contributed to throw the poetry of Pindar into that discredit or neglect which they themselves excited, and partly deserved. Some particular passages in the works of the Theban poet have indeed been excepted by scholars, and noted for general admiration; but the fine passages' are not the finest things in Pindar, and the charge of general obscurity and want of unity has been gathering for a long time so thickly round his name, that it may seem worse than idle to attempt at this time of day to dispel the settled gloom.

The fame of Pindar amongst the ancients was transcendant and unique. Horace, who had but little of his spirit, had nevertheless a deep sense of his unapproachable majesty. Cowley, who was much nearer akin to the Latin than the Greek poet, expresses his own and Horace's feelings upon this point with great prettiness, after his peculiar manner :—

'Lo! how the obsequious wind and swelling air
The Theban swan does upward bear

Into the walks of clouds, where he does play,
And with extended wings opens his liquid way!
Whilst, alas! my timorous muse

Unambitious tracks pursues;
Does with weak unballast wings
About the mossie brooks and springs,

About the trees' new-blossom'd heads,
About the gardens' painted beds,

C 2

About

Εὐτρίαιναν· ὁ δ ̓ αὐτῷ

πὰρ ποσὶ σχεδὸν φάνη.—Olymp. I. v. 114. 'He came; and by hoar Ocean's flood Alone in darkness stood;

Then call'd, amid the sullen roar,

On him whose trident shook the shore.
Straight at his feet the god appear'd.'-Cary.

Or the picture of Pallas appearing to Bellerophon by night:

κυαναιγὶς ἐν ὄρφνα κνώσσοντί οἱ

παρθένος τόσα εἰπεῖν

ἔδοξεν. ἀνὰ δ ̓ ἔπαλτ ̓ ὀρθῷ ποδί.

παρκείμενον δὲ συλλαβὼν τέρας. κ. τ. λ. Olymp. XIII. ν. 94.

• As he in darkness slept,

Thus, to his sight reveal'd,

Waving her azure shield,
The Virgin seem'd to say.

Straight on his feet he leapt;

The wonder seized that near him lay.'-Cary.

Or, if we may be excused a further and longer illustration, take the account of Evadne's labour and the birth of Iamus :—

[ocr errors]

‘Α δὲ φοινικόκροκον

ζώναν καταθηκαμένα.—κ. τ. λ.—Olymp. VI. v. 66.

'Her crimson'd girdle down was flung,

The silver ewer beside her laid,

Amid a tangled thicket hung

With canopy of brownest shade;

When forth the glorious babe she brought,

His soul instinct with heavenly thought.

Sent by the golden-tressed god,
Near her the Fates indulgent stood

With Ilithyia mild.

One short sweet pang releas'd the child;

And Iamus sprang forth to light.

A wail she utter'd; left him then
Where on the ground he lay;
When straight two dragons came

With eyes of azure flame,

By will divine awaked out of their den;

And with the bees' unharmful venom they

Fed him, and nursled thro' the day and night.*

The king meanwhile had come,

From stony Pytho driving; and at home

Did of them all, after the boy, inquire,

Born of Evadne;-" for," he said, "the sire

Was Phoebus, and that he

Should of earth's prophets wisest be,

And that his generation should not fail.”

*Surely unharmful venom' is a misleading version of àμsμpeĩ ¡ã μeλicov, which means the blameless or pure dew or juice of the bees-honey.

Not

Not to have seen or heard him they avouch'd,
Now five days born. But he, on rushes couch'd,
Was cover'd up in that wide brambly maze,—
His delicate body wet

With yellow and empurpled rays
From many a violet.

And hence his mother bade him claim

For ever this undying name.'-Cary.

The sympathetic sense of the picturesque in poetry, and the power of preserving it in another language, which gave Mr. Cary so much advantage in translating Dante, have insured to him a proportionate success with Pindar. We do not say that his success, taken absolutely, is equal in this his later attempt; and it is not surprising that such should not be the case, the difficulties of adequately rendering Pindar being so much greater. Add to the mere talent or knack of translation which many possess, the generally pure and racy diction, and the strong sense of the picturesque which cannot be denied to Mr. Cary, and you have provided the main qualities of a good translator of Dante. The moral tone and manner of narrative of the Divine Comedy are very easily imitable, as may be inferred by the uniformity, in this one respect, of versions by Hayley, Cary, Byron, and Wright; but the difficulty of executing the terza rima in English is, we think, insurmountable. Perhaps (as we lately had occasion to express our opinion) Mr. Cary showed the soundest judgment in adopting the Miltonic measure-not as like, but as a satisfactory substitute for, the original. Certainly Mr. Wright's double triplets without the third rhyme, which so subtly links together the total rhythmic flow of the Italian, sound to our ears as little like the Dantescan harmony as Cary's blank verse, and not so easy and noble. But, considerable as the difficulty of the terza rima is in the way of a translator of Dante, it is little in comparison with the task of rendering into English the various and complicated movements of Pindar's Odes. The great Florentine marches through the nether, middle, and upper worlds with an even step; learn his pace once, and you may keep up with him always. But it is not so with Pindar; the speed with which he sets out is often enough doubled or trebled before he gets to the end of his course; eagle of song as he was, and dared to call himself—not the swan, as Horace and Cowley call him-he has all the movements of that imperial bird, now towering right upwards to heaven's gate, now precipitating himself to the earthnow floating with spread wings in the middle ether, and now couching with the setting sun on the gilded battlements of a temple. No poet is so slow-none so rapid; a master of sentences, a

preacher

preacher of piety, an offerer of prayers, he drops word after word as if he feared the escape of a light phrase in the presence of God; and with a thought, the string of his tongue is loosened, the fire is kindled within him, and the verse bursts forth like the gushes of a virgin fountain, swelling, heaving, falling, but ever increasing; the melodies converge, interlace, twist, and unite, till a sound of many waters arises-a unison of many voices inextricably blended, yet distinctly perceptible-and the accumulated harmony subdues the inner and the outer sense, as with the chorus of a distant organ, or the gentle roar of a dying storm at sea.

• Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ
Addiderat, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.
Fulgores nunc horrificos, sonitumque, metumque
Miscebat operi, flammisque sequacibus iras.'

The metre and rhythm of Dante in the Divine Comedy being so elaborately opposite to the prevailing movement in Pindar—as the incessus of Jupiter might be to the impetus of his eagle—it is obvious that in the mechanism of the verse the translator of Pindar has to satisfy a very peculiar and very trying demand upon his skill. Our English lyric poetry will afford him no adequate model by which to express any of the longer odes of Pindar in all the varieties of their movements; the language itself presents no natural facilities, although we are far from from saying that in the hands of a master it might not be wrought into the ductility and continuousness required for the purpose, In the choruses of the Samson Agonistes, Milton has shown that the lyric manner, which chiefly prevails in the Greek drama, can be competently preserved in English. Take for example that solemn and affecting complaint,

'God of our fathers! what is Man,

That Thou towards him with hand so various,

Or might I say contrarious,

Temperest thy providence thro' his short course,—
Not evenly, as Thou rulest

The angelic orders, and inferior creatures mute,
Irrational and brute!' &c.

-passing off into this variety of rhythm,

'But who is this, what thing of sea or land—

Female of sex it seems

That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay,

Comes this way sailing,

Like a stately ship

Of Tarsus, bound for the isles

Of Javan or Gadire,

With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,

Sails fill'd, and streamers waving,

Courted

« AnkstesnisTęsti »