Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 1.djvu/13



Among the difficulties which beset the path of the conscientious translator, a sense of his own unworthiness must ever take precedence; but another, scarcely less disconcerting, is the likelihood of misunderstanding some allusion which was perfectly familiar to the author and his public, but which, by reason of its purely local significance, is obscure and subject to the misinterpretation and emendation of a later generation.

A translation worthy of the name is as much the product of a literary epoch as it is of the brain and labor of a scholar; and ’s version of the letters of Pliny the Younger, made, as it was, at a period when the art of English letter writing had attained its highest excellence, may well be the despair of our twentieth century apostles of specialization. Who, today, could imbue a translation of the Golden Ass with the exquisite flavor of William Adlington’s unscholarly version of that masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding’s rendering of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hicke’s masterly rendering Rh