Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 047.djvu/239

1840.] were guilty of no violence towards the idiom of their vernacular tongue, nor towards the spirit of the original work. In most cases, this cannot be brought out in a foreign tongue, without an entire abandonment of the words from which the translation is made. Therefore, we confess that in general we are no sticklers for literal faithfulness of interpretation, and beg to remind those who are, that their translations, like copies of a marble inscription taken in clay, may be extremely and even curiously faithful, while they yet exactly reverse every character of the original.

Closing these observations upon the necessity under which we think a translator lies, of being more than usually strict in his adherence to the idiom, the simplicity, and the ordinary conversational arrangement of his vernacular tongue, particularly when his work has to be executed in rhyme, we now proceed to illustrate our remarks, and to comment practically upon specimens extracted from the translations before us.

Although not in our list, we shall commence with Shelley, both on account of his greater poetical reputation, and because he was the first who led the way by translating certain portions of this drama. We quote his version of the ode chanted by the three archangels in the opening scene—a composition which, in the original, appears to us to be one of the most sublime strains that ever fell from the lips or the pen of a mortal man. The reader is probably aware that, in imitation of the opening scene in Job, the prologue of Faust is transacted in heaven. All the heavenly host are present—the three archangels come forward:—

In this translation various dramatic proprieties belonging to the situation of the speakers are found to be violated. Let us observe what this situation is. The archangels must be supposed to be standing on some sort of aërial platform in the skies, and are contemplating from afar the rolling magnificence of worlds. They then commence to describe not simply what they know to be the case, but what is actually passing before their eyes. All their remarks are uttered δεικτικως, that is, in a dramatically demonstrative manner. With regard, then, to Raphael's first observation, that "the sun makes music,"—or, as it would be better and more literally rendered, "sounds"—we remark that this is a very feeble and essentially undramatic manner of conveying what he really says. He does not merely mean to state the abstract fact, that the sun as "makes music" or "sounds," but he breaks forth with an emphatic declaration of what he hears and sees actually taking place at that very time; namely, that the sun is sounding, or (if it must be so expressed) "is making music." In the German language this form of expression is never used; but we, who have it, ought always to employ it when we are describing an event actually transacting before our eyes; for the dramatic effect of our description wholly depends upon its use. Other instances of this fault may be observed running through the whole version; but we need not particularise them further. In the fourth line, we think that "thunder speed" is wrong. Speed is not intended to be alluded to at all in this stanza; it is reserved as the predominant characteristic of the next. In Raphael's strain, the feeling