Extracts From American and Canadian Journals
From an eloquent article in the “Boston Courier”, March 18, 1862, written by George Stillman Hillard, Esq., the author of “Six Months in Italy”—a delightful book, worthy of the beautiful country it so beautifully describes.
“Calderon is one of the three greatest names in Spanish literature, Lope de Vega and Cervantes being the other two. He is also a great name in the universal realm of letters, though out of Spain he is little more than a great name, except in Germany, that land so hospitable to famous wits, and where, to readers and critics of a mystical and transcendental turn, his peculiar genius strongly commended him. To form a notion of what manner of man Calderon was, we must imagine a writer hardly inferior to Shakespeare in fertility of invention and dramatic insight, inspired by a religious fervour like that of Doune or Crashaw, and endowed with the wild and ethereal imagination of Shelley. But the religious fervour is Catholic, not Protestant, Southern, not Northern: it is intense, mystical, and ecstatic: like a tongue of upward-darting flame, it burns and trembles with impassioned impulse to mingle with empyrean fire. The imagination, too, is not merely southern, but with an oriental element shining through it, like the ruddy heart of an opal”...
“But our purpose is not to speak of Calderon, but of his translator Mr. MacCarthy; and to make our readers acquainted with his very successful effort to reproduce in English some of the most characteristic productions of the genius of Spain, retaining even one of the peculiarities in the structure of the verse which has hardly ever been transplanted from the soil of the peninsula”....
“Mr. MacCarthy’s translations strike us as among the most successful experiments which have been made to represent in our language the characteristic beauties of the finest productions of other nations. They are sufficiently faithful, as may be readily seen by the Spanish scholar, as the translator has the courage to print the original and his version side by side. The rich, imaginative passages of Calderon are reproduced in language of such grace and flexibility as shows in Mr. MacCarthy no inconsiderable amount of poetical power. The measures of Calderon are retained; the rhymed passages are translated into rhyme, and what is more noticeable still, Mr. MacCarthy has done what no writer in English has ever before essayed, except to a very limited extent—he has copied the asonantes of the original”....
“We take leave of Mr. MacCarthy with hearty acknowledgments for the pleasure we have had in reading his excellent translations, which have given us a sense of Calderon’s various and brilliant genius such as we never before had, and no analysis of his dramas, however full and careful, could bestow”.
From a Review of “Love the Greatest Enchantment”, etc., in the “New York Tablet”, July 19, 1862, written by the gifted and ill-fated Hon. Thomas D’Arcy M’Gee, of Montreal.
“This beautiful volume before us—like virtue’s self, fair within and without—is Mr. Mac-Carthy’s second contribution to the Herculean task which Longfellow cheers him on to continue—the translation into English of the complete works of Calderon. Two experimental volumes, containing six dramas of the same author, appeared in 1853, winning the well-merited encomium of every person of true taste into whose hands they happened to fall. The Translator was encouraged, if not by the general chorus of popular applause, by the precious and emphatic approbation of those best entitled by knowledge and accomplishments to pronounce judgment. So here, after an interval of seven years, we have right worthily presented to us three of those famous Autos, which for two centuries drew together all the multitude of the Madrilenos, on the annual return of the great feast of Corpus Christi. On that same self-same festival, in a northern land, under a gray and clouded sky, in the heart of a city most unlike gay, garden-hued, out-of-door Madrid, we have spent the long hours over these resurrected dramas, and the spell of both the poets is still upon us, as we unite together, in dutiful juxtaposition, the names of Calderon and Mac-Carthy.
“How richly gifted was this Spanish priest-poet! this pious playwright! this moral mechanist! this devout dramatist! How rare his experience! how broad the contrasts of his career, and of his observation..... Happy poet! blessed with such fecundity! Happy Christian! blessed with such fidelity to the divine teachings of the Cross....
“Very highly do we reverence Calderon, and very highly value his translator; yet, if it be not presumptuous to say so, we venture to suggest that Mac-Carthy might find nearer home another work still worthier of his genius than these translations. Now that he has got the imperial ear by bringing his costly wares from afar, are there not laurels to be gathered as well in Ireland as in Spain? The author of ‘The Bell-Founder’, of ‘St. Brendan’s Voyage’, of ‘The Foray of Con O’Donnell’, and ‘The Pillar Towers’, needs no prompting to discern what abundant materials for a new department of English poetry are to be found almost unused on Irish ground. May we not hope that in that field or forest he may find his appointed work, adding to the glory of first worthily introducing Calderon to the English readers of this century, the still higher glory of doing for the neglected history of his fatherland what he has chivalrously done for the illustrious Spaniard”.