best we have yet seen of the Romance of Cervantes; and that if corrected in its licentious abbreviations and enlargements, and in some other particulars which I have noticed in the course of this comparison, we should have nothing to desire superior to it in the way of translation. CHAPTER XIII. Other Characteristics of Composition, which render Translation difficult.-Antiquated Terms- New Terms-Verba ardentia.Simplicity of Thought and Expression—In Prose-In Poetry.-Naïveté in the Latter.-Chaulieu-Parnell-Theocritus-La Fontaine.-Series of Minute Distinctions marked by Characteristic Terms.-Strada. -Florid Style and Vague Expression.— Pliny's Natural History. N In the two preceding chapters I have treated pretty fully of what I consider as a principal difficulty in translation, the permutation of idioms. I shall in this chapter touch upon several other characteristics of compo sition, which, in proportion as they are found in the original works, serve greatly to enhance the difficulty of doing complete justice to them in a translation. 1. THE poets, in all languages, have a licence peculiar to themselves, of employing a mode of expression very remote from the diction of prose, and still more from that of ordinary speech. Under this licence, it is customary for them to use antiquated terms, to invent new ones, and to employ a glowing and rapturous phraseology, or what Cicero terms Verba ardentia. To do justice to these peculiarities in a translation, by adopting similar terms and phrases, will be found extremely difficult; yet without such assimilation, the translation presents no just copy of the original. It would require no ordinary skill to transfuse into another language the thoughts of the following passages, in a similar species of phraseology: Antiquated Terms: For Nature crescent doth not grow alone In thews and bulk; but as this temple waxes, The inward service of the mind and soul The virtue of his will SHAK. Hamlet, Act. 1. New Terms: So over many a tract Of heaven they march'd, and many a province wide, Of rigid spears, and helmets throng'd, and shields Paradise Lost, B. 6. All come to this? the hearts That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave The wishes, do discandy SHAK. Ant. & Cleop. Act 4. Sc. 10. |