Page:Masterpieces of Greek Literature (1902).djvu/17

Rh of the original. A great painting may be copied,—translated, as it were; but even here, where the medium of translation is the same as that which was used in the original, color and drawing, how inadequate and disappointing the result! Still more is this the case when the medium of translation is something wholly different from the original medium, as when a work in one language is translated into another of alien spirit and genius. In all translations something is lost, something is added. If all the thoughts of the original are preserved, something of the color, form, atmosphere necessarily disappears; and when the translation is made from Greek into a language like English,—at once rich and poor, brilliant and bizarre, particolored and bald, each word in its vocabulary surcharged with manifold meanings and associations,—it is inevitable that even at the hands of the most competent and careful of translators much should be imported into the translation that was not in the original, the language of which is, above all, simple, direct, vivid, "fitting aptest words to things," only the translucent veil of thought, not its cumbrous garment.

But translations have been made, and many of them are as successful as the limitations and conditions of the problem will allow. The requisites of what may be called a successful translation are twofold: not only scholarship to know, and fully and delicately to appreciate, all that was in the original—substance of thought, form, tone, color; but also creative literary power, often the poetic gift, so to render the original into English phrase that it may produce on the unlearned modern reader the entire effect, so far as may be, that it produced on the readers for whom it was first designed. In translations to be included in a