Page:The lay of the Nibelungs; (IA nibelungslay00hortrich).pdf/12

viii so great, that a translator may well be excused from facing them. Assuming the indispensable qualification of sympathy needful in the translation of any work of art from one medium to another, the differences in word-formation, in inflexion, and in grammatical construction between any two languages interpose mechanical obstacles which are inconsistent with the preservation of metrical similarity; a more or less close approximation is all that can be looked for. Still more are the difficulties increased when the task involves the presentation to a modern reader of a work which belongs to a distant and nebulous past, deals with a primitive and imperfect phase of human culture, and teems with motives which, if not eradicated from human nature, are no longer regarded as legitimate and are often repugnant to modern ideas. In these circumstances it might be thought that a prose rendering would have the best or only chance of doing justice to the original. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that a prose translation of a rhymed poem can never be an adequate equivalent, especially in a work like the Nibelungenlied, where it must be obvious to any student that its construction in rhyme and strophe have played an important part in determining its style and character. Rhyme and rhythm are essential features of it; and the modern reader (as distinguished from the student) requires, no less than the medieval listener, the stimulus which they supply. To give for 9,000 lines of verse a corresponding quantity of prose seems—apart from considerations of verbal accuracy—to fail in doing due justice to the poem.

So at least the translator and editor, who are jointly responsible, have thought; though, at the same time, they have been fully alive to the necessity of a close adherence to the text. They are of the opinion of Dryden, as expressed in the preface to his version of Ovid’s Epistles, that it is the business of a translator,