Page:Sophocles (Storr 1912) v1.djvu/17

 For a discussion of the genius of Sophocles as a dramatist and a poet, his relation to his older and younger contemporary, his religious and political creed, we must be content to refer our readers to the Bibliography, but a few words may be permitted on his language as it affects the translator. Dr. Warren has pronounced Sophocles “the least translatable and the least imitable of the Greeks,” and it is in the second epithet that the translator may find his best excuse for attempting the impossible. Greek critics assigned to Sophocles in his maturity “the common or middle diction,” that is, a diction halfway between the pomp of Aeschylus and the language of everyday prose, and Wordsworth might have taken him to illustrate the canon laid down in his Preface to “Lyrical Ballads.” Coleridge might no less have chosen Sophocles to refute that canon. The words themselves are familiar in men’s ears, but in Sophocles they have gained a new significance, sometimes simply from their collocation, sometimes by a reversion to their first meanings, oftener because (as in Virgil) they denote one thing and connote others. It is no paradox to say that the ease, the simplicity, the seeming transparency of the language, constitute the translator’s main difficulty. In the present instance he is painfully conscious of his xi