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Rh the New Humanism is an accomplished fact. The early Renaissance had already dawned in Italy: a renewed interest in the Latin classics (Greek was not yet generally cultivated by scholars) proved that there was a revival of learning in France. Livy was done into French by Bersuire, Seneca by Bauchant, Boccaccio by Laurent de Premier Fait, and a celebrated translator appeared in the person of Nicolas Oresme, who, however, rendered Aristotle from a Latin version. In England Chaucer executed translations of Boetius and part of the Roman de la rose, and succeeded equally in interpreting the philosophic treatise and the allegorical poem. A still further advance is discernible in the book of travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville: this work, which seems to have been originally written in French, is rendered into English with an exceptional felicity which has won for the translator the loose-fitting but not altogether inappropriate title of “the father of English prose.” The English version of Mandeville is assigned to the beginning of the 15th century. About 147O Sir Thomas Malory produced from French originals his Morte d'Arthur, a pastiche of different texts translated with a consummate art which amounts to originality. Malory's inspired version, together with the numerous renderings from the French issued (and often made personally) by Caxton, stimulated the public taste for romantic narrative, raised the standard of execution, and invested the translator with a new air of dignity and importance.

Yet the 15th century has a fair claim to be regarded as the golden age of translation. The Gothic version of the Bible, made by Ulfilas during the 4th century almost simultaneously with St Jerome's Vulgate, is invaluable as the sole literary monument of a vanished language; the 14th century English version by Wycliffe and the 15th century English versions which bear the names of Tyndale and Coverdale are interesting in themselves, and are also interesting as having contributed to the actual Authorized Version of 1611. But they are incomparably less important than Luther's German translation of the Bible (1522-1534) which, apart from its significance as indicating the complete victory of the liberal middle class and the irremediable downfall of the feudal and ecclesiastical autocracy, supplanted minor dialects and fixed the norm of literary expression in German-speaking countries. Luther, it has been truly said, endowed Germany with a uniform literary language, a possession which she had lost for nearly three hundred years. The effect of profane literature was speedily visible in Fischart's translations of Rabelais's Pantagruéline (1572) and the first book of Gargantua (1575). But before this date France had produced a prince of translators in Jacques Amyot, bishop of Auxerre. In 1548 Nicolas de Herberay had published a French translation of Amadis de Gaule which enchanted the polite world at the court of Henry II., had its day, and is forgotten. But A1nyot's translation of Plutarch (1559) remains an acknowledged masterpiece, surviving all changes of taste and all variations of the canon of translation. Montaigne writes: “Je donne la palmeavecque raison, ce me semble, a Jacques Amyot, sur tous nos escripvains Francois.” If “e scrip vain” be understood to mean “translator,” this judgment is beyond appeal.

Lord Berners will not bear comparison with Amyot in achievement or influence; but. though less completely equipped and less uniformly happy in his choice of texts (for Amyot translated the Aethiopian History and Daphnis and Chloe as well as Plutarch), Lord Berners holds a distinguished place in the ranks of English translators. His renderings of Fernandez de San Pedro's Carcel de amor and of Guevara's Libro aureo are now read solely by specialists engaged in tracing English euphuism to its remoter sources, and some of his other translations—the Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux and Arthur of Little Britain-are too poor in substance to be interesting nowadays. But Lord Berners is justly remembered by his notable translation of Froissart (1525-1525). Froissart offers fewer opportunities than Guevara for the display of that “fecundious art of rhetoric” in which the English translator thought himself deficient, and, with this temptation removed, Lord Berners is seen at his best. In his version of Froissart, apart from endless confusion of proper names, he makes few mistakes of any real importance, and, if he scarcely equals his original in brio, he is almost invariably adequate in reproducing the French blend of simplicity with stateliness. Such translations as Phaer's Virgil (1557) and Golding's Ovid (1561) have not the historical importance of William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, a miscellaneous collection of stories rendered from the Italian, nor of Jasper Heywood's version of Seneca (1581) whose plays had exercised immense influence upon the methods of Garnier and Montchrétien in France. Though Kyd translated Garnier's Cornélie, the Senecan system was destined to defeat in England, and Heywood's translation did not even postpone the catastrophe. On the other hand Marlowe found the subject of his Tamburlaine in Painter's collection, and thus began the systematic exploitation of the Palace of Pleasure which was continued by his successors on the stage. A translator of the rarest excellence was forthcoming in Sir Thomas North, who rendered Guevara (1557) from the French (revising his second edition from the Spanish), and The Morall Philosophie of Doni-“a worke first compiled in the Indian tongue” from the Italian (1570). But, good as they are, both these versions are overshadowed by the famous translation of Plutarch which North published in 1579. He may have referred occasionally to the Greek, or perhaps to some intermediate Latin rendering; but the basis of his work is Amyot, and his English is not inferior to the French in sonority and cadence of phrase. This re translation of a translation is a masterpiece of which fragments are incorporated with scarcely any change in Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra; and touches from North have been noted also in the Midsummer' Night's Dream and in Timon of Athens. Amyot greatly influenced the development of French prose, and his translation was the source of Racine's Mithridate; but, if we reflect that Shakespeare not only took some of his subjects from the English Plutarch and found nothing to amend in the diction of many passages, North's triumph may be reckoned as even more signal than Amyot's. Very little below North's translation of Plutarch comes John Florio's translation of Montaigne (1605), a fantastically ingenious performance which contributed a celebrated passage to The Tempest and introduced the practice of the essay into England. It is impossible to cope with the activity of English translators during the last half of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th. To this period belongs Chapman's impressive and resounding translation (1598-1616) of Homer, which was to enrapture Keats two hundred years later. Adlington's version of Apuleius, Underdown's renderings of Heliodorus and Ovid, the translations of Livy, Pliny, Suetonius and Xenophon issued in quick succession by Philemon Holland are vivid and often extravagantly picturesque in their conveyance of classic authors into Elizabethan prose. With them must be named the translator of Tacitus (1591), Sir Henry Savile, who served later on the committee which prepared the Authorized Version of the Bible, and must therefore be counted amongst those who have exercised a permanent influence on English prose style. Thomas Shelton produced the earliest translation (1612) of Don Quixote, a version which, in spite of its inaccuracies and freakishness, preserves much of the tone and atmosphere of the original. Mabbe's translation (1622) of Guzmán de Alfarache was lauded by Ben Jonson, and widely read during the 17th century, and his version of the Celestina deserved-a success which it failed to obtain. It compares most favourably with a Version of Tasso (1600) by Edward Fairfax, who has been persistently overpraised. But the Puritanical instinct of the English people, powerful even when not in the ascendant, was an insuperable obstacle to the acclimatization of Spanish literature in England. The Leviathan has obscured Hobbes's fame as a translator, but he is known to scholars by his sound but crabbed rendering of Thucydides (1629), and by a wholly unnecessary version of Homer which he published at the very end of his career (1674). Sir Roger L'Estrange is responsible for translations of Seneca, Cicero and Josephus, which are usually lively enough to be readable and unfaithful enough to be misleading; the most popular of his renderings is a translation of Quevedo's Suenos