given the version of the later editions. It contains these corrections: "garish columbine” altered to "well attir'd woodbine"; "escutcheon beares" altered to "escutcheon weares"; then to "imbroiderie beares" and this to "imbroiderie weares"; the two last lines are transposed, and "let" is altered to "and". 1. 157 A. “humming” altered to "whelming". B. “humming", but in Milton's copy corrected. 1. 160 A. "Corineus" altered to "Bellerus". 1. 176. "Listening the..." altered to "and heares". 1. 177. In B this line is omitted. It is inserted by Milton in his copy. For all true students of the Lycidas these corrections are of very great interest. One sees (e.g. in the passage 1. 58 sq.) Milton working his thing of beauty from the crude ore; and yet one does not see how he did it, though one sees it done. By some wondrous alchemy he transforms (sometimes by a single word) what seems of little value into pure gold: for instance by the alteration of "burnisht" into "westring", and "escutcheon beares" into "imbroiderie beares". In some cases one might perhaps venture to wish that this process of transformation had not stopped short at the first alteration, e.g. in "buttons" altered to wardrobe ". And such original versions as "he well knew" may well give us pause when descanting on the "inevitable" in Miltonic music. In this connection the following lively remarks of Charles Lamb may afford matter for rumination. "I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty-as springing up with all its parts absolute-till in an evil hour I was shown the original copy of it in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown it into the Cam, or sent it after the later cantos of Spenser into the Irish Channel. . . . How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined! corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and these fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again." Except in his Sonnets, Milton used rimed verse for the last time in the Lycidas, and in his preface to Paradise Lost he described rime as 66 the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre ". In the Arcades and the Vacation Exercise he had already used the so-called ten-syllabled line in riming couplets, but in the Comus he had tested blank verse with such splendid result that it is not easy to understand why he reverted to rime when using once more the same measure. Perhaps he felt that it to some extent supplied the soft and graceful music which is audible in Virgil's pastoral poetry (what Horace calls its "molle atque facetum"), and which he despaired of producing otherwise when using his "strident" native tongue.1 In Lycidas the persistent riming couplet is abandoned. The rimes are, as Dr. Johnson says, tain"; we have what Professor Masson well describes as "free musical paragraphs", in which consecutive, alternate, and more widely-separated rimes are used with exquisite effect,2 rhythm and rime seeming to "wed their divine sounds" in perfect harmony. Now and then there is a line unanswered by any rime (e.g. I, 13, 22, 39, &c.), and a line with three "beats" instead of five.3 This variation Milton probably imitated from Italian poets, such as Tasso and Guarini. 66 uncer Of Milton's Paradise there are translations in many 1 Epitaph. Damonis, l. 171. 2 I do not know if it has been noticed that four of the "musical paragraphs" in the early part of the poem consist each of fourteen lines and have some similarity to the general structure of a sonnet (i.e. 1-14, 23-36, 50-63, " For Milton's verse of five beats or stresses see Appendix. 77). modern languages, as well as in Latin hexameters (by Hogg, 1694). The Lycidas has been translated into Greek (by Plumptre) and into Latin (by Hogg, Calverley, and others; parts of it also very finely by Munro), and also into German, French, Italian, and possibly other modern tongues. The Latin and Greek versions may have some value from the academical point of view, but both these (with perhaps the exception of Munro's lines), and all other translations of Milton that I have seen, appear to be eminently unsuccessful in reproducing anything that in the least recalls the original. What Macaulay terms the "magical influence" of Milton's poetry is due so very largely to his "grand style" that he is probably the most untranslatable of all poets. Whether any fairly satisfactory translation of the Lycidas does exist, or might exist, in French or German, I am unable to say. Of those that I have seen there are two which are perhaps worthy of mention, if not for reasons that would have been very highly appreciated by the writers. As various German friends of mine, well versed in such matters, unanimously recommended Böttger's translation as the best, I procured it. It is published in a well-known series of classical writers, and is in its sixth edition. On glancing through the versions of the Paradise, Comus, and L'Allegro, I found a good deal that somehow did not seem to square with the original. I then turned to the Lycidas. The first two lines puzzled me for some time. Retranslated into English they are, "Once more, ye laurels, and once more, ye myrtles, do not mount up with ivy"! After long reflection I was forced to the conviction that our translator had taken "with ivy never sere" to mean "with ivy never soar”, i.e. "mind you never soar with ivy". Then "and hath not left his peer" is und hatte doch nicht den Genossen verlassen (i.e. "has nevertheless not abandoned his mate"); "gory visage" is lichtes Antlitz ("gleaming countenance"); "but now my oat proceeds" is doch nun gedeiht meine Frucht ("but now my crop flourishes"); "that sacred head of thine" is dein treuloses Haupt ("thy faithless head"); “and nothing said. But that two-handed engine . . ." is und nichts gesagt, als dass eine feste derbe Maschine and so on. And all this in a jerky unmusical rimeless measure of four beats! But even this pales before the performances of an anonymous French translator, whose (prose) version of Milton's poetical works I discovered lately in the salon of a remote mountain hotel, where I was spending a few weeks, in Valais. The book dates from the last century. It contains a "Life", and many critical remarks, and a translation of Addison's essays on the Paradise. It is not always easy to discover whether in this so-called translation the deviations from the original are due to misunderstanding, or whether they are sometimes meant for "improvements"; for, quite in the manner of his great predecessor Racine, the parodist observes that he has not scrupled to improve Milton's work en réformant quelques idées. From a large number of equally delightful specimens culled from "Le Lycidas", I select the following: Note on 66 Deva's wisard stream": Le Deve, autrement le Dan, fleuve d'Ecosse, sur lequel est situé Aberben, autrefois capitale du royaume. Translation of "my destined urn": l'urne que je destine à renfermer les cendres de l'illustre défunt. Translation of "the gray-fly winds her sultry horn": chant de coq. The passage about "Camus, reverend sire" is omittedperhaps being unintelligible-and with reference to the subsequent lines a note is given which might have pleased Dr. Johnson: J'ai substitué Pan, Dieu des bergers, au lieu de Saint Pierre, pour ne pas confondre avec Milton le sacré ei le profane. Lastly, the final lines of the poem, "At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue, are thus rendered Bientôt après il (apparently le soleil) sortit de l'océan, où il avoit paru se plonger, et rendit aux bois et aux prairies toute la beauté de leur verdure et à l'air tout l'éclat du bleu céleste qui en fait la sérénité. |