Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877 edition. Excerpt: ... DANTE AND HIS TRANSLATORS. The interval between the publication, in 1805, of Mr. Cary's translation of Dante's Inferno, and that of Mr. W. M. Rossetti in 1865, is marked by a great change rather in the practice than in the canons of the translator's art, seeing that the latter have never been well defined. Attention had been drawn, more by examples than by any special reasoning on the subject, to the fact that it is the duty of the translator to convey the exact sense, and, as far as possible, the spirit of a poem from a foreign tongue into our own, so that it is not thought any longer necessary to adopt the elegant paraphrases of Dryden and Pope, but, on the contrary, to follow the author whether he deal with commonplace or noble objects. Dryden, in translating Virgil, was shocked that Venus should place Cupid on a bed of sweet marjoram, "for these village words, as I may call them, give us a mean idea of the thing;" and he does not hesitate to say, with respect to his translations, "Some things I have omitted, and sometimes have added, of my own." In particular he omits what he calls technical words, because the poet writes "to men and ladies of the first quality, who have been better bred than to be more nicely knowing in the terms." This practice did not long survive the wigs and ruffles of an artificial age, and the more natural style both of poetry and dress, which succeeded them. It could not be otherwise than that the natural style of Cowper's poetry should influence his rendering of Homer. Since Cowper's time the translations B of Homer have become more and more exact, and their success may be tested by the qualities which Matthew Arnold claims for Homer himself: --1. He is eminently rapid; 2. eminently plain and direct in...