connection with their roots; many of them, which originally had a distinct significance, have been reduced to little more than conventional signs; they have become literary characters, and have lost their speaking quality. The thirteenth century had a new language, the nineteenth century has only old ones. Thought has changed with language. What was natural to Dante is often unnatural to us. His simplicity is sometimes what we should call quaintness; his directness, what would seem to us, in a modern, like want of art; his style is of his age, and not of ours.

Mr. Rossetti, losing sight, as it seems to us, of this fact, has excused certain singularities and oddities of phrase in his version with the plea "that generally I am odd to the English reader for one only reason, that Dante also is odd to the Italian reader in the same passage." No doubt, to the modern uncultivated Italian reader, Dante may often be odd; but there is no ground for believing that Dante, however startling he may have been, was odd to his contemporaries. His poem, if truly translated, may be strange to our modern temper of mind, but will not be odd to our ears. The very nature of the case creates a dilemma. If we translate Dante in the antique style, we run into the affectation of archaism; if we translate him in our modern style, we change his characteristic air and manner.

Many other special difficulties beset the English translator of Dante, in the matter of form, even supposing him to overcome those attending the choice and use of words. Our language is very poor in rhymes as compared with the Italian, and lends itself unwillingly to repeated consonances. It is only by straining that it can accomplish a succession of triple rhymes, which in Italian, at least in Dante's Italian, flow continuously, without apparent effort or exhaustion. Dante is reported to have said, that no word ever compelled him to say what he did not will; but the translator who tries the triple rhyme in English is constantly compelled by his words to say what he would not.

"It is almost impossible," said Dryden in one of his admirable critical prefaces, "to translate verbally [that is, word for word and rhyme for rhyme] and at the same time to translate well. The verbal copier is encumbered with so

many difficulties at once, that he can never disentangle himself from all. He is to consider, at the same time, the thought of the author, and his words, and to find out the counterpart to each in another language; and besides this, he is to confine. himself to the compass of numbers and the slavery of rhyme. It is like dancing on ropes with fettered legs. A man can shun a fall by using caution, but the gracefulness of motion is not to be expected; and when we have said the best of it, it is but a foolish task, for no sober man would put himself into a danger for the applause of escaping without breaking his neck."

The numerous attempts at rendering the Divine Comedy with the rhyme of the original are, after all, even the best of them, only more or less successful intellectual tours de force. We doubt if any English reader would ever read for its poetic quality Mr. Dayman's or Mr. Ford's laborious and often curiously ingenious version. Even the best passages in them are faint copies of the text. They are like chromolithographs of Raphael's Madonnas; the colors are the same in name, but not in quality or tone. The translator who chooses the triple rhyme must curtail, must amplify, must transpose, in every verse.

The difficulties which await a translator who chooses another system of rhyme, even though it be one more manageable in English, are hardly less numerous. If he translate freely, he runs the risk of giving a modern air and an English tenor to the poem; and if he aim at literality, he runs the risk of stiffness, and of using forms of construction averse to the poetic style. He either gives us a poem which is not Dantesque, or a series of verses which are not English.

In choosing the measure and rhyme which he has used, Dr. Parsons chose with the instinct of a genuine poet. He felt, with Sir John Denham, that it is not the translator's "business alone to translate language into language, but poesy into poesy; and poesy is of so subtle a spirit, that, in pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit is not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum." Dr. Parsons has rendered in this sense many passages with great force and

* Preface to the Second Book of Virgil's Æneid.

beauty, and the whole of his work may be read with pleasure as a poetic composition; but he has not succeeded in doing the impossible, by giving in English the effect of Dante's Italian poetry. For, in fine, it is impossible to transfuse the spirit of Dante into English rhyme. As a work of highest literary art, its original form is essential to it, and in another language than its own,

"la forma non s' accorda

Molte fiate alla intenzion dell' arte,

Perch' a risponder la materia è sorda."

A brief extract from the Divine Comedy, and a comparison of it with the various versions before us, will illustrate what has now been said. We choose some lines from the Tenth Canto of the Inferno, beginning with the address of Farinata to Dante. Let the reader notice the simplicity and straightforwardness of the construction of the original, and observe what force and dignity these qualities give to the style. It is as direct as prose; each verse is vigorous and compact; there are no words to spare, no more required. It is a specimen of the noblest diction.

"O Tosco, che per la città del foco

Vivo ten vai così parlando onesto,
Piacciati di ristare in questo loco.
La tua loquela ti fa manifesto
Di quel nobil patria natio
Alla qual forse fui troppo molesto.
Subitamente questo suono uscio

D' una dell' arche: però m' accostai,
Temendo, un poco più al Duca mio.
Ed ei mi disse: Volgiti; che fai?
Vedi là Farinata che s'è dritto:
Dalla cintola in su tutto il vedrai.

Io avea già il mio viso nel suo fitto;
Ed ei s'ergea col petto e colla fronte,
Com' avesse lo Inferno in gran dispitto."

Inf. X. vv. 22-36.

Literally translated this passage reads as follows:

"O Tuscan, who through the city of fire goest alive, speaking thus decorously, may it please thee to stop in this place. Thy speech makes manifest that thou art native of that noble country to which perhaps I was too harmful. Suddenly this

sound issued from one of the chests, wherefore I pressed, fearing, a little closer to my guide. And he said to me: Turn thee. What doest thou? Behold there Farinata, who has raised himself upright. From the girdle upwards wholly thou shalt see him. I had already fixed my look on his; and he rose erect with breast and front, as though he had Hell in great despite."

Now let us compare the versions of Mr. Dayman and Mr. Ford.

"Tuscan, who thus, of honest parlance "O Tuscan, who alive dost wend thy

Elaborate as both of these versions are, it is obvious that neither of them reproduces the poetry of the original. No one would select either of them as specimens of noble diction. The hard necessity of rhyme has destroyed simplicity of expression, and changed the whole effect of the narrative. Now let us take Dr. Parsons's translation of the same passage:

666

"O Tuscan! thou who com'st with gentle speech,

Through Hell's hot city breathing from the earth,

Stop in this place one moment I beseech,
Thy tongue betrays the country of thy birth.
Of that illustrious land I know thee sprung,

Which in my day perchance I too much vexed.'
Forth from one vault these sudden accents rung,
So that I trembling stood, with fear perplexed.
Then as I closer to my master drew:

Turn back! what dost thou?' he exclaimed in haste;
'See! Farinata rises to thy view,

Now mayst behold him upward from his waist.'

Full in his face already I was gazing,

While his front lowered and his proud bosom swelled,

As though even there, amid his burial blazing,
The infernal realm in high disdain he held.”

This is spirited and powerful poetry; and though far less literal than either of the preceding renderings, it does more justice to Dante in its freedom than the others in their constraint. The Divine Comedy rendered in this manner remains at least a poem. But its tone is not that of Dante's poem; its merits are its own.

Is the Divine Comedy, then, not to be translated at all? If its spirit cannot be transfused into English rhyme, can it be better brought into unrhymed verse? It is a sad conclusion to reach, that all the beauty and sweetness and subtile association of rhyme, on which so much of the charm of the original depends, that this element of its form with which its spirit is so intricately involved, -that this concord of sound and sense,must be forfeited before we can hope to render satisfactorily into English what remains of the original after this loss. And yet to this conclusion we are forced. The loss is greater in any other process. We must be content to retain only so much of the original as may be preserved in a translation which prefers to cling to the features of most significance, those which are general, essential, universal, and capable therefore of transference into another tongue,- than to those which are special, and belong to the external form more than to its interior substance. It is not necessary to go with Dr. Carlyle to the extreme of rendering the poem into prose. A translation may be made in verse which shall retain more of the characteristics of the poem than the noblest prose version can give.

to

What poetic form, then, shall the translator choose, and