"Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris."
instead of primus we were to pronounce it primis (is being long, and us short).
It is this cunning choice, along with the skilful arrangement of words, that, even more than the thought, eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. More than any other quality it is a writer's own property; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is "the ordered march of his lordly prose" that is the secret of Macaulay's charm; and it is the unstudied grace of Hume's periods which renders him, in spite of his imperfect learning, in spite of his wilful perversions of truth, in spite of his infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of England.
It has been truly said by a brilliant New England writer that this mystery of style,-why it is, that when one man writes a fact, it is cold or commonplace, and when another man writes it, in a little different, but equivalent phraseology, it is a rifle-shot or a revelation,-has never been sounded. "One can understand a little how the wink or twinkle of an eye, how an attitude, how a gesture, how a cadence or impassioned sweep of voice, should make a boundless distance between truths stated or declaimed. But how words, locked up in forms, still and stiff in sentences, contrive to tip a wink, how a proposition will insinuate more scepticism than it states, how a paragraph will drip with the honey of love, how a phrase will trail an infinite suggestion, how a page can be so serene or so gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry or so cool, as to lap you in one intellectual climate or its opposite,-who has fathomed yet this wonder?"
From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of literature by means of translations. Among the arguments against the study of the dead languages, none is more pertinaciously urged by the educational red republicans of the day than this,-that the study is useless, because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot enjoy Carlyle's version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth's Cicero, Morris's Virgil, Martin's Horace, or Carter's Epictetus, must be either a prodigious scholar or a prodigious dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion of many, upon Schiller's "Wallenstein." All this seems plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar knows it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the finest passages in an author,-the exquisite thoughts, the curious verbal felicities,-are precisely those which defy reproduction in another tongue. The most masterly translations of them are no more like the original than a walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence of a writer,-the life and spirit,-all that is idiomatic, peculiar, or characteristic,-all that is Homerian in Homer, or Horatian in Horace,-evaporates in a translation.
It is true that, judging by dictionaries only, almost every word in one language has equivalents in every other; but a critical study of language shows that, with the exception of terms denoting sensible objects and acts, there is rarely a precise coincidence in meaning between any two words in different tongues. Compare any two languages, and you will find that there are, as the mathematicians would say, many incommensurable quantities, many words in each untranslatable into the other, and that it is often impossible, by a paraphrase, to supply an equivalent. To use De Quincey's happy image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative, is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not coincide; the words overlap. Even words denoting sensible objects are not always exact equivalents in any two languages. It might be supposed that a berg (the German for mountain or hill) was a berg all the world over, and that a word signifying this tangible object in one language must be the absolute equivalent of the word expressing it in another. Yet, as a late German writer[1] has said, this is far from being the case. The English "mountain," for instance, refers to something bigger than the German berg. On the other hand, "hill," which has the next lower signification, in its many meanings is far too diminutive for the German term, which finds no exact rendering in any English vocable.
A comparison of the best English versions of the New Testament with the original, strikingly shows the inadequacy of the happiest translations. Even in the Revised Version, upon which an enormous amount of labor was expended by the best scholars in England and the United States, many niceties of expression which mark the original fail to appear. Owing to the poverty of our tongue compared with the Greek, which, it has been said, can draw a clear line where other languages can only make a blot, the translators have been compelled to use the same English word for different Greek ones, and thus obliterate many fine distinctions which are essential to the meaning. Thus, as one of the Revisers has shown, it is impossible to exhibit in English the delicate shades of difference in meaning which appear in the Greek between the two verbs both rendered "love,"[2] in John xxi, 15-17. "The word first employed by Christ is a very common one in the New Testament, and specially denotes a pure, spiritual affection. It is used of God's love to man, as in John iii, 16-'God so loved the world,' etc.-and of man's love to God, as in Matt. xxii, 37-'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,' etc. The other word more particularly implies that warmth of feeling which exists between friends. Thus, it is used respecting Lazarus in John xi, 3: 'Behold, he whom thou lovest is sick;' and again, in John xx, 2, of St. John himself, when he is spoken of as 'the disciple whom Jesus loved.' Now, the use of the one word at first by Christ serves to remind St. Peter of the claim which his Divine Master had upon his deep, reverential love. But the Apostle, now profoundly sensible of his own weakness, does not venture to promise this, yet, feeling his whole heart flowing out to Christ, he makes use of the other word, and assures the Saviour at least of a fervent personal affection. Christ then repeats His question, still using the same verb, and Peter replies as before. But on asking the question for the third time, Christ graciously adopts the term employed by the Apostle: He speaks to him again as a friend; He clasps the now happy disciple afresh to His own loving heart."[3] Now all this is lost through the comparative meagreness of our language. To what extent the subtle distinctions of the Greek original are and must be lost in the translation, may be guessed from the fact that there are no fewer than ten Greek words which have been rendered "appoint" in the ordinary version, no fewer than fourteen which stand for "give," and no fewer than twenty-one which correspond to "depart."
Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle an essence to be poured from one vessel into another without loss. Of Cicero's elegant and copious rhetoric, of the sententious wisdom of Tacitus, of the keen philosophic penetration and masterly narrative talent of Thucydides, of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and even of Martial's jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling through an English medium; but of the beauties and splendors of the Greek and Latin poets,-never. As soon will another Homer appear on earth, as a translator echo the marvellous music of his lyre. Imitations of the "Iliad," more or less accurate, may be given, or another poem may be substituted in its place; but a perfect transfusion into English is impossible. For, as Goethe somewhere says, Art depends on Form, and you cannot preserve the form in altering the form. Language is a strangely suggestive medium, and it is through the reflex and vague operation of words upon the mind that the translator finds himself baffled. Words, as Cowper said of books, "are not seldom talismans and spells." They have, especially in poetry, a potency of association, a kind of necromantic power, aside from their significance as representative signs. Over and above their meanings as given in the dictionary, they connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by their employment for hundreds of years. There are in every language certain magical words, which, though they can be translated into other tongues, yet are hallowed by older memories, or awaken tenderer and more delightful associations, than the corresponding words in those tongues. Such words in English are gentleman, comfort, and home, about each of which cluster a multitude of associations which are not suggested by any foreign words by which they can be rendered. There is in poetry a mingling of sound and sense, a delicacy of shades of meaning, and a power of awakening associations, to which the instinct of the poet is the key, and which cannot be passed into a foreign language if the meaning be also preserved. You may as easily make lace ruffles out of hemp....
