Page:King Alfred's Old English version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies - Hargrove - 1902.djvu/46

XL ALFRED'S VERSION OF THE SOLILOQUIES -tellection, a promise which, however, was never fulfilled.

4. Alfred's Version. - Coming now to Alfred's treatment of his original, we find in general that he begins, as elsewhere, with a strict adherence to his Latin, and gradually departs more and more from it, until at the end he is entirely alone and original. In Book I, we may say, he was a translator; in Book II he was an adapter; in Book III he was author, at least so far as Augustine is concerned.

Alfred's method of translation was unique, as the fact will show. At times he is literal, but more often he is quite free, seizing on the essential thought and epitomizing or recasting it, or rejecting some minor point and adding another instead - always imparting a distinctly individual eavor to what ever he touches. He seems to have felt a posflrnsibility not so much to his original as to his readers. To this extent he was a creative artist. How otherwise in kind did Chaucer and Shakespeare treat their sources, when the former converted Boccaccio's Teseida into the Knight's Tale, and the latter created Hamlet out of The History of Hamblet?

Our study of Alfred's method of translation will be confined to Book I. Since the Latin and Old English are printed on the same page, so that any one can easily compare the versions, it will not be necessary to go extensively into this subject.

In his prefaces Alfred speaks several times of rendering 'now word for word, now sense for sense'. This is a clue to his method, but the former was made use of very rarely. The following heads will contain typical examples:

4 Cf. Augustine's Retractiones, 1.4.1: 'Inter haec scripsi etiam duo volumnia. . . de his rebus, quas maxime scire cupiebam, me inter- rogans mihique respondens tamquam duo essemus, Katio et ego, cum solus essem; unde hoc opus Soliloquia nominavi, sed imperfectum remansit'.

4 Cf. Preface of Pastoral Care and Boethius,