The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867

To be surpassed in fall, as in its rising.
I saw Bellincion Berti walk abroad
In leathern girdle, and a clasp of bone;
And, with no artful coloring on her cheeks,
His lady leave the glass. The sons I saw
Of Nerli, and of Vecchio, well content
With unrobed jerkin; and their good dames handling
The spindle and the flax: O happy they!
Each sure of burial in her native land,
And none left desolate abed for France.
One waked to tend the cradle, hushing it
With sounds that lulled the parent's infancy:
Another, with her maidens, drawing off
The tresses from the distaff, lectured them
Old tales of Troy, and Fesole, and Rome.
A Salterello and Cianghella we
Had held as strange a marvel, as ye would
A Cincinnatus or Cornelia now.
In such composed and seemly fellowship,
Such faithful and such fair equality,
In so sweet household, Mary at my birth
Bestowed me, called on with loud cries; and there,
In your old baptistery, I was made
Christian at once and Cacciaguida."

    —Cary.
It would be easy to extend our quotations; but we have given enough of Mr. Longfellow's translation to show with what conceptions of duty to the original he came to his task, and how perfectly that duty has been performed. According to his theory, then, as we gather it from these volumes, translation is not paraphrase, is not interpretation, is not imitation, but is the rigorous rendering of word for word, so far as the original difference of idioms permits. Its basis is truth to the form as well as to the thought, to the letter as well as to the spirit, of the text. The translator is like the messengers of the Bible and Homer, who repeat word for word the message that has been confided to them. He, too, if he would be true to his office, must give the message as it has been given to him, repeat the story in the words in which it was told him. Every deviation from the letter of the original is a deviation from the truth. Every epithet that is either added or taken away is a falsification of the text. The addition or the omission may sometimes be an improvement, but it is an improvement which you have no authority to make. It is not to learn what you think Homer or Dante might have said that the reader comes to your translation, but to see what they really said. When Cesarotti undertook to show how Homer would have written in the eighteenth century, he recast the Iliad and called it "The Death of Hector," and in this he dealt more honestly with his readers than Pope; for, although he failed to make a good poem, he did not attempt to pass it for Homer.

The greatest difficulty of the translator arises from his personality. He cannot forget himself, cannot guard, as he ought, against those subtle insinuations of self-esteem which are constantly leading him to improve upon his author. His own habits of thought would have suggested a different turn to the verse, a different coloring to the image. He finds it as hard to forget his own style, as to forget his identity. It demands a vigorous imagination, combined with deep poetic sympathies, to go out of yourself and enter for a time wholly into the heart and mind, the thoughts and feelings, of another; and it is not to all that such an imagination and such sympathies are given. There is scarcely a great failure in poetical translation, which may not be traced to the want of this power.

It may seem like the grave enunciation of a truism to say that another indispensable qualification of the translator is perfect familiarity with the language from which he translates, and a full command of his own. It is not by mere reading that such a familiarity can be acquired. You must have learnt to think in a language, and made it the spontaneous expression of your wants and feelings, if you would find in it the true interpretation of the wants and feelings of others. Its words and idioms must awaken in you the same sensations which the words and idioms of your own language awaken; giving pleasure as music, or a picture, or a statue, or a fine building gives pleasure, not by an act of reflection under the control of the will, but by an intuitive perception under the inspiration of a sense of the beautiful. The enjoyment of a thought is partly an intellectual enjoyment; you may even reason yourself into it; but the enjoyment of style and language is purely an æsthetic enjoyment, susceptible, indeed, of culture, but springing from an inborn sense of harmony. To extend this enjoyment to a foreign language, you must bring that language close to you, and form with it those intimate relations between thought and word which you have formed in your own. The word must not only suggest the thought, but become a part of it, as the painting becomes a part of the canvas. It must strike your ear with a familiar sound, awakening pleasant memories of actual life and real scenes. Idioms are often interpreters of national life, giving you sudden glimpses, and even deep revelations, of manners and customs, and the circumstances whence they sprang. They are often, too, brief formulas, condensing thought into its briefest expression, with a force and energy which the full expression could not give. To mistake them, is to mistake the whole passage. Not to feel them, is not to feel the most characteristic form of thought.

The preposition da is one of the most versatile words in Italian. Its literal meaning is from; it is daily used to express to. Da me may mean from me: it may also mean to me. Fit or deserving to be done is a common meaning of it; and it is in this sense that Dante uses it in the following passage from the fourth canto of Paradiso, fifty-fifth line:—

"Con intenzion da non esser derisa,"—
With intention not (deserving to be) to be derided.

Cary, though a good Italian scholar, translates it to shun derision; and, giving it this sense, quotes Stillingfleet to illustrate the thought which, for want of practical familiarity with the language, he attributes to Dante.

We believe, then, that the qualifications of a translator may be briefly summed up under the following heads:—

He must be conscientiously truthful, studiously following his text, word by word and line by line.

He must possess a thorough mastery over both languages, feeling as well as understanding the words and idioms of his original.

He must possess the power of forgetting himself in his author.

And, lastly, he must be not merely a skilful artificer of verses, or a man of poetic sensibility, but a poet in the highest and truest sense of the word.

We would gladly enlarge upon this interesting subject, which not only explains the shortcomings of the past, but opens enticing vistas into the future. We cannot doubt that Mr. Longfellow's example will be followed, and that from time to time other great poets will arise, who; not content with enriching literature with original productions, will acknowledge it as a part of what they owe the world, to do for Homer and Virgil and Æschylus and Sophocles what he has done for Dante. It is pleasant to think that our children will sit at the feet of these great masters, and, listening to them in English worthy of the tongues in which they first spake, be led to enter more fully into the spirit of the abundant Greek and the majestic Latin. It is cheering to the lovers of sound study to feel that every faithful version of a great poet extends the influence of his works, and awakens a stronger desire for the original. We never yet looked upon an engraving of Morghen without a new longing for the painting which it translated.

We have not left ourselves room for what we had intended to say about the notes, which form half of each of these three volumes. Those who know what conscientious zeal Mr. Longfellow brings to all his duties need not be told that they bear abundant testimony to his learning, industry, and good taste. They not only leave nothing to be asked for in the explanation of real difficulties, but, as answers to a wide range of philosophical, biographical, and historical questions, form in themselves a delightful miscellany. Dante has been overladen by commentators. In Mr. Longfellow he has found an interpreter.

It is not to Mr. Longfellow's reputation only that these volumes will add, but to that of American literature. It is no little thing to be able to say, that, in a field in which some of England's great poets have signally failed, an American poet has signally succeeded; that what the scholars of the Old World asserted to be impossible, a scholar of the New World has accomplished; and that the first to tread in this new path has impressed his footprints so deeply therein, that, however numerous his followers may be, they will all unite in hailing him, with Dante's own words,—

"Tu Duca, tu Signore e tu Maestro,"—
Thou Leader and thou Lord and Master thou.

THE OLD STORY

The waiting-women wait at her feet,
And the day is fading down to the night,
And close at her pillow, and round and sweet,
The red rose burns like a lamp a-light.
Under and over, the gray mist lops,
And down and down from the mossy eaves,
And down from the sycamore's long wild leaves,
The slow rain drops and drops and drops.

Ah! never had sleeper a sleep so fair;
And the waiting-women that weep around
Have taken the combs from her golden hair,
And it slideth over her face to the ground.
They have hidden the light from her lovely eyes;
And down from the eaves where the mosses grow
The rain is dripping, so slow, so slow,
And the night-wind cries and cries and cries.

From her hand they have taken the shining ring,
They have brought the linen her shroud to make;
O, the lark she was never so loath to sing,
And the morn she was never so loath to awake!
And at their sewing they hear the rain,—
Drip-drop, drip-drop, over the eaves,
And drip-drop over the sycamore-leaves,
As if there would never be sunshine again.

The mourning train to the grave have gone,
And the waiting-women are here and are there,
With birds at the windows and gleams of the sun
Making the chamber of death to be fair.
And under and over the mist unlaps,
And ruby and amethyst burn through the gray,
And driest bushes grow green with spray,
And the dimpled water its glad hands claps.

The leaves of the sycamore dance and wave,
And the mourners put off the mourning shows,
And over the pathway down to the grave
The long grass blows and blows and blows.