Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/111

Rh "the marks of imitation," has singled out the following instance. The original lines are from "Catullus," and are the following:

In one of his masques, Jonson translates this:

Hurd here calls Jonson "a servile imitator, and a painful translator." Now, what the true theory of translation is, is a matter on which the learned are as yet undecided. But the lines just quoted have far more force and beauty, than much smooth paraphrase, which is accepted as translation; and are more literal and infinitely superior to certain versions of Horace and Virgil lately published in a great University. There is at any rate this defence for them; they were written at a time when translation was in its infancy, and when great stress was laid upon verbal rendering. This was a false view of translation; but certainly more excusable than when now attempted in open violation of the fact, that such literal interpretations of the idioms of other languages compel the translator to violate those of his own, and in doing so, to commit a greater fault even than paraphrasing. There are two methods of translation, if, indeed, one deserves the name at all. The first is to give word for word H