Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/120

Rh understand. This is due in a great measure to Cellini's colloquial style, and to the involved constructions occasioned by his impetuous flow of utterance in dictation, but also to his habitual use of familiar terms regarding life and art, the exact significance of which can now be hardly reproduced. Furthermore, I may add that it is no easy matter to avoid slips while working through so long a narrative in prose, and aiming at a certain uniformity of diction.

The truth is, that to translate Cellini's Memoirs taxes all the resources of the English language. It is, in the first place, well-nigh impossible to match that vast vocabulary of vulgar phrases and technical terminology. Some of Cellini's most vivid illustrations owe their pungency and special colouring to customs which have long passed out of current usage. Many of his most energetic epigrams depend for their effect upon a spontaneous employment of contemporary Florentine slang. Not a few of his most striking descriptions lose their value without the precise equivalents for works of art or handicraft or armoury now obsolete. In the next place, his long-winded and ungrammatical periods, his suspended participles, his vehemently ill-conjugated verbs, his garrulous anacolutha and passionate aposiopeses, his ingenious recourse to repeated pronouns and reiterated adverbs for sustaining a tottering sentence, his conversational resumption of the same connective phrases, his breathless and fiery incoherence following short incisive clauses of a glittering and trenchant edge, all these peculiarities, dependent on the man's command of his