Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/66

 chan, Tchang-i's delight at the falling snow is expressed by changing the regular stanza, apparently reserved for dignified monologues and solemn descriptions, into the irregular or free measure which frees itself from the rule which subjects Chinese verse to the double yoke of cæsura and alliteration; in short, as M. Bazin "we must be able to read the verses in the original to gain an idea of the harmony which subsists between the style and the situation of the personage." How can this harmony be retained in the process of translating into any European language? If an effort were made to reproduce the Chinese metres in English, for example, the result would look ridiculous, even if it were not a complete failure; but that it would be a complete failure is clear from the fact which another Chinese scholar (Sir John Francis Davis) observes, viz. " that every word in Chinese poetry, instead of being regarded as a mere syllable, may more properly be regarded as corresponding to a metrical foot in other languages." Hence, one of the striking characteristics of Chinese verse is its parallelism in sound and sense, which has been compared with the parallelism of Hebrew poetry so carefully discussed by Lowth. Suppose, then, we were to translate a stanza of Chinese parallelism into Hebrew, would the result convey the Chinese form without alterations due to the Semitic dress? Far from it. The formations of the Semitic verb, noun, and particle are so different from the monosyllabic Chinese, that nothing like the Chinese parallelism could be produced either in Hebrew or Arabic. Here, then, is a case to illustrate the dependence of that harmony of sound and idea which we call "verse" upon the different sound-structures of languages, sound-structures which must be attributed to the varying appreciation of sounds possessed by the peoples whose