Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/54



TRANSLATIONS.

FRENCH.

O foreign writer is so popular, and has been so thoroughly acclimatised in France, as Edgar Poe. This popularity and power is largely due to the translations and influence of Charles Baudelaire who has made his transatlantic idol a veritable French classic. Edgar Poe's influence upon literature, declares de Banville, is ceaseless and spreading, and as powerful as that of Balzac.

The Raven, despite the almost insurmountable difficulty of making anything like a faithful rendering of it into French, is a favourite poem in France. Again and again have well known French writers attempted to translate Poe's chef d'œuvre into their own tongue, but with varying success. They have as a rule to discard the rhymes, abandon the alliteration, and lose all the sonorous music produced by artistic use of the open vowel sounds; in fact, attempt to reconstruct the wonderful house of dreams without having any of the original materials out of which it was formed. To give a prose rendering of The Raven is, in every sense, to despoil it of its poetry.