Virgil in English Hexameters [45]
[45] The Eclogues of Virgil. Translated into English Hexameter Verse by the Right Hon. Sir George Osborne Morgan, Bart., Q.C., M.P. London.
Sir George Osborne Morgan has served his generation in much more important capacities than those of a scholar and a translator of Virgil, and had this little work, therefore, been less meritorious than it is, no critic with a sense of the becoming would deal harshly with it. But it challenges and deserves serious consideration, not only as an attempt to solve a problem of singular interest to students of classical poetry, but as a somewhat ambitious contribution to the literature of translation. Sir Osborne Morgan is, however, mistaken in supposing that in translating Virgil into his own metre he "has undertaken a task which has never been attempted before." In 1583 Richard Stanihurst published a translation of the first four books of the Æneid in English hexameters; and, if Sir Osborne will turn to Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie, published as early as 1586, he will find versions in English hexameters of the First and Second Eclogues, while Abraham Fraunce, in a curious volume, entitled The Countess of Pembroke's Ivy Church, which appeared in 1591, has, among the other hexameters in the collection, given a version of the Second Eclogue in this measure. But Sir Osborne Morgan has been more immediately anticipated in his experiment. In 1838 Dr. James Blundell published anonymously, under the title of Hexametrical Experiments, versions in hexameters of the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Eclogues, and to this translation he prefixed an elaborate preface, vindicating the employment of the hexameter in English, and explaining its mechanism to the unlearned. Indeed, Blundell arrived at the same conclusion as Sir Osborne Morgan, that the proper medium for an English translation of hexametrical poems in Greek and Latin is the English hexameter. We may, however, hasten to add that Sir Osborne has little to fear from a comparison with his predecessors, who have, indeed, done their best to refute by example their own theory. It may be observed, in passing, that the translations of Virgil into rhymed decasyllabic verse are far more numerous than Sir Osborne Morgan seems to suppose. He is, he says, acquainted only with two—the version by Dryden and Joseph Warton—not seeming to be aware that Warton translated only the Georgics and Eclogues, printing Pitt's version of the Æneid. The whole of Virgil was translated into this measure by John Ogilvie between 1649-50, and by the Earl of Lauderdale about 1716, while versions of the Æneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues, in the same metre, have abounded in every era of our literature, from Gawain Douglas's translation of the Æneid printed in 1553, to Archdeacon Wrangham's version of the Eclogues in 1830.
It is no reproach to Sir Osborne Morgan that, in the occupations of a busy political life, his scholarship should have become a little rusty, but it is a pity that he should so often have allowed himself to be caught tripping, when a little timely counsel in the correction of his proof sheets might have prevented this. In the First Eclogue the line
"Non insueta graves temptabunt pabula fetas"
is translated
"Here no unwonted herb shall tempt the travailing cattle."
What it really means is, no change of fodder, no fodder which is strange to them, shall "infect" or "try" the pregnant cattle, "insueta" being used in exactly the same sense as in Eclogue V. 56, "insuetum miratur limen Olympi," and "temptare" as it is used in Georg. III. 441, and commonly in classical Latin. It is, to say the least, questionable whether in the couplet—
"Pauperis et tuguri congestum cæspite culmen,
Post aliquot, mea regna videns, mirabor aristas?"—
the last line can mean
"Gaze on the straggling corn, the remains of what once was my kingdom."
"Aristas" is much more likely to be a metonymy for "messes," i.e. "annos," like αροτου in Sophocles' Trachiniæ, 69, τον μεν παρελθοντ' αροτον, a confirmative illustration which seems to have escaped the commentators; but it is difficult to say, and Sir Osborne has, it must be owned, excellent authority for his interpretation. In Eclogue III. the somewhat difficult passage
"pocula ponam
Fagina....
Lenta quibus torno facili superaddita vitis
Diffusos hedera vestit pallente corymbos"—
i.e. "where the limber vine wreathed round them by the deft graving tool is twined with pale ivy's spreading clusters,"—is translated:
"Over whose side the vine by a touch of the graving tool added
Mantles its clustering grapes in the paler leaves of the ivy."
This is quite wrong. "Corymbos" cannot possibly mean clusters of grapes, but clusters of ivy berries, "hederâ pallente" being substituted, after Virgil's manner, for "hederæ pallentis." In Eclogue IV. 24 there is no reason for supposing that the "fallax herba veneni" is hemlock; it is much more likely to be aconite. In line 45 "sandyx" should be translated not "purple" but "crimson," vague as the colour indicated by "purple" is. In Eclogue V.
"Si quos aut Phyllidis ignes,
Aut Alconis habes laudes, aut jurgia Codri"
is not
"Phyllis's fiery loves you would sing or the quarrels of Codrus,"
but "your passion for Phyllis, your invectives against Codrus," "ignes" being used far more becomingly for a man's love than for a woman's. So, again, "pro purpureo narcisso" cannot mean what nature never saw, "purple daffodil," but the white narcissus. In Eclogue VIII. "Sophocleo tua carmina digna cothurno" is turned by what is obviously a lapsus calami, "worthy of Sophocles' sock." A scholar like Sir Osborne Morgan does not need reminding that the "sock" is a metonymy for Comedy, as Milton anglicizes it in L'Allegro, "if Jonson's learned sock be on." In the exquisite passage in Eclogue VIII. 41—
"Jam fragiles poteram ab terrâ contingere ramos"—
to translate "fragiles" as "frail" is to miss the whole point of the epithet. What Virgil means is, "I could just reach the branches from the ground and break them off"; if it is to be translated by one epithet, it must be "brittle." Again in the Ninth Eclogue the words
"quâ se subducere colles
Incipiunt, mollique jugum demittere clivo,"
do not mean "where the hills with gentle depression steal away into the plain," but the very opposite: i.e. "Where the hills begin to draw themselves up from the plain," the ascent being contemplated from below. In Eclogue IX., in turning the couplet
"Nam neque adhuc Vario videor, nec dicere Cinnâ
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores,"
the translator has no authority for turning the last verse into "a cackling goose in a chorus of cygnets," for there is no tradition that cygnets sang, and goose should have been printed with a capital letter to preserve the pun, the allusion being to a poetaster named Anser. Unfortunately for the English translator, our literature can boast no counterpart to "Anser" totidem literis, but Goose printed with a capital is near enough to preserve, or suggest the sarcasm. There is another slip in Eclogue X.: "Ferulas" is not "wands of willow" but "fennel."
Occasionally a touch is introduced which is neither authorized by the original, nor true to nature. There is nothing, for instance to warrant, in Eclogue I. 56, the epithet "odorous" as applied to the willow, nor does "salictum" mean a "willow" but a "willow-bed or plantation." To translate "ubi tempus erit" by "when the hour shall have struck" reminds us of Shakespeare's famous anachronism in Julius Cæsar and is as surprising in the work of a scholar as the lengthening of the penultimate in arbutus, "Sweet is the shower to the blade, To the newly weaned kid the arbutus." As a rule, the translator turns difficult passages very skilfully, but this is not the case with the couplet which concludes the "Pollio":—
"Incipe, parve puer: cui non risere parentes
Nec deus hunc mensâ, dea nec dignata cubili est";
that is, the "babe on whom the parent never smiled, no god ever deemed worthy of his board, no goddess of her bed"—in other words, he can never enjoy the rewards of a hero like Hercules; but there is neither sense nor skill, and something very like a serious grammatical error, in
"Who knows not the smile of a parent,
Neither the board of a god nor the bed of a goddess is worthy."
But to turn from comparative trifles. No one who reads this version of the Eclogues can doubt that Sir Osborne Morgan has proved his point, that the English hexameter, when skilfully used, is the measure best adapted for reproducing Virgil's music in English. The following passage (Ec. VII. 45-48) is happily turned; let us place the original beside the translation:—
"Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,
Et quæ vos rarâ viridis tegit arbutus umbrâ,
Solstitium pecori defendite: jam venit æstas
Torrida, jam læto turgent in palmite gemmæ."
"Moss-grown fountains and sward more soft than the softest of slumbers,
Arbutus tree that flings over both its flickering shadows,
Shelter my flock from the sun. Already the summer is on us,
Summer that scorches up all! See the bud on the glad vine is swelling."
Again (Ec. X. 41-48):—
"Serta mihi Phyllis legeret, cantaret Amyntas:
Hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori,
Hic nemus: hic ipso tecum consumerer ævo.
Nunc insanus amor duri me Martis in armis
Tela inter media atque adversos detinet hostes:
Tu procul a patriâ—nec sit mihi credere tantum!—
Alpinas, ah dura, nives et frigora Rheni
Me sine sola vides."
"Phyllis would gather me flowers and Amyntas a melody chant me;
Cool is the fountain's wave and soft is the meadow, Lycoris;
Shady the grove! Here with thee I would die of old age in the greenwood.
Mad is the lust of war, that now in the heart of the battle
Chains me where darts fall fast, and the charge of the foemen is fiercest,
Far, far away from your home—Oh, would that I might not believe it—
Lost amid Alpine snows or the frozen desolate Rhineland,
Lonely without me you wander."
Many other felicitous passages might be quoted; indeed, there is no Eclogue without them; but the translator is not sure-footed, and, if he occasionally illustrates the hexameter in its excellence, he illustrates, unhappily too often, some of its worst defects. Two qualities are indispensable to the success of this measure in English. Our language, unlike the classical languages, being accentual and not quantitative, if the long syllable is not represented where the stress naturally falls, and the short syllables where it does not fall, the effect is sometimes grotesque, sometimes distressing, and always unsatisfactory. Nothing, for example, could be worse in their various ways than the following:—
"Wept when you saw they were given the lad, and had you not managed."
"Let not the frozen air harm you."
"Scatter the sand with his hind hoofs."
"The pliant growth of the osier."
"Worthy of Sophocles' sock, trumpet-tongued through the Universe echo."
"Own'd it himself, and yet he would not deliver it to me."
A very nice ear, too, is required to adjust the collocation of words in which either vowels or consonants predominate, and the relative position of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, the predominance of the former in our language increasing enormously the difficulty. No measure, moreover, so easily runs into intolerable monotony—a monotony which Clough sought to avoid by overweighting his verses with spondees, and which Longfellow illustrates by the cloying predominance of the dactylic movement. Sir Osborne Morgan tells us that he took Kingsley as his model. Kingsley's hexameters are respectable, but they have no distinction, and he had certainly not a good ear. Longfellow's are far better, and are sometimes exquisitely felicitous, as in a couplet like the following, which, with the exception of one word, is flawless:—
"Men whose lives glided on like the rivers that water the woodlands,
Darken'd by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of Heaven."
Probably the best hexameters which have been composed in English are those in William Watson's Hymn to the Sea and those in which Hawtry translated Iliad III. 234-244, and the parting of Hector and Andromache in the Sixth Iliad, models—these versions—not merely of translation, but of hexametrical structure. There are, however, certain magical effects, particularly in the Virgilian hexameter, produced by an exquisite but audacious tact in the employment of licences, which can never be reproduced in English.
Such would be—
"Nam neque Parnassi vobis juga, nam neque Pindi
Ulla moram fecere, neque Aonie Aganippe.
Illum etiam lauri, etiam flevere myricæ;
Pinifer illum etiam solâ sub rupe jacentem
Mænalus et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycæi."
Milton, and Milton alone among Englishmen, had the secret of this music, but he elicited it from another instrument.