ABSTRACT
A young Oxford B.A., speaking lately of Mr. Browning’s ‘transcription,’ said: ‘at almost every page I had to turn to the Greek to see what the English meant.’ This is severe, but it is not unmerited. Mr. Browning, so delightfully clear when he pleases, as in The Ride to Ghent, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, &c., usually affects obscurity; Rednightcap Country is in parts obscure enough; long passages in that terribly long poem The Ring and the Book, are very tough reading. But in this ‘transcription’ he outdoes himself, and certainly rivals his original. Now a translation (for we do not profess to say anything about the transcription) proposes to itself one of two objects, either it is to help the unclassical reader to some understanding of the original, or it is to please the scholar, by showing him how gracefully and yet adequately the thought with which he is familiar may be rendered in English words. The danger for the first class of translations is lest they run into paraphrase. Pope’s Homer has given thousands an interest in the ‘tale of Troy divine’, but it is not a translation. Even Dryden’s Virgil does not altogether deserve the name. Translations of the other class are sometimes apt to become stiff and pedantic,—word-puzzles rather than natural arrangements of words. But, at any rate, their general aim is to please in some way or other. Mr. Browning is far above such an unworthy aim; his object is simply to reproduce his author ‘with all the artistic expression of tenses, moods, and persons with which the original teems’, and also, we must add, with all the picturesque incomprehensibility which the very corrupt state of the text gives to that original. Æschylus, no doubt, is not an easy poet; yet we will not believe that he who in his Prometheus writes what ordinary men can, with more or less thought, get a fair meaning out of, would in the Agamemnon have become as obscure as Mr. Browning makes him. The fault, in this play, and in the Supplices,1 is in the exceed ingly corrupt state of the text, as to which even. Mr. Browning remarks: ‘I keep to the earlier readings, so long as sense can be made out of them’ And, so keeping, he strives to be ‘literal at every cost, save that of absolute violence to our language/ It is, of course, a question how much wrestling of the ordinary
the way in which Mr. Browning has tortured it of old, and now tortures it even more fiercely. Our readers must judge whether the few extracts which we shall give are ‘turned in as Greek a fashion as the English will bear,’ or are not rather barbarous nonsense. We don’t want ‘to gape for Æschylus and get Theognis;’ but we do not think we get Æschylus, or if anything of him only his skeleton, in the book before us. Any attempt to reproduce ‘the reputed magniloquence and sonorosity of the Greek’ Mr. Browning wholly disclaims; he will give us ‘the ideas of the poet-a strict bald version of word pregnant with thing.’ But we contend that in such a form the ideas (supposing them there) are worthless. To the unlearned they say little or nothing; to the scholar they suggest a painful reminiscence of school-boy flounderings through passages at most a quarter understood.
