The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
“weapon-smith,” “wound-smith,” “tooth-hedge”? These, and scores of
other such we have marked for notice, are surely as little like Virgil
as they are like any English that is spoken to-day; and they are
scarcely less potent than Mr. Morris’ archaisms in disturbing and
altering the Virgilian tone. Of a like effect are the quaint and
unconsequential translations now and then of Latin names—as of _Musæ_
into “Song-maids,” _Eumenides_ into “Well-willers,” _Avernus_ into
“Fowlless,” and soon—whereby for a perfectly familiar and intelligible
term of the Latin is substituted in the English a grotesque and
puzzling word, and which again stops the current of the story until
the reader can readjust his mind to the novel ideas it awakes. The
most unclassical of readers has his notions formed of the Muses and
the Furies, at least, if not of the Eumenides; but of these
Song-maids—who might as well be milk-maids—and of these
Well-willers—who rather suggest well-diggers—he must form a new notion
as he reads. And one might add, at the risk of seeming to split hairs,
that in thus translating the word _Eumenides_ we lose much of the
effect of that euphemism with which the Greeks, like all strongly
imaginative peoples, sought to keep disagreeable subjects at arm’s
length—the form τι παθεῖν, as a synonym for dying, is exactly
paralleled by the Irish phrase “suffered,” applied to an executed
rebel—or perhaps to ward off the wrath of these ticklish neighbors, as
Celtic races, again, are in the habit of calling fairies “the good
people.” A more substantial objection is that Mr. Morris seems
capricious in the matter, for we see no particular reason for his
translating one such name and others not at all—-why he should not
give us Quail-land for Ortygia, or Chalk Island for Crete, as well as
Westland for Hesperia, or Fowlless for Avernus.
It is a result of these affectations, or—for we are loath to press the
charge of affectation against a poet whose own writing is so genuine and
sincere—of these peculiarities of style, which have on the reader all
the seeming and effect of affectation, that the pathos of Virgil, the
one quality to which Mr. Morris should have been best fitted to do
justice, he has greatly impaired. Affectation is fatal to pathos; one
cannot have much feeling for the woes which are carefully set forth in
verbal mosaic. Take but a single example—a passage in Virgil already
referred to—which sets forth admirably that faculty the Latin poet has
to so curious a degree of infusing sadness into mere words, but in which
Mr. Morris is little behind him. It is the death of Æolus, which Mr.
Morris renders thus:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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