CHAPTER VI THE CASE FOR GRAMMAR AND PROSE STILL, it will be said, granted the importance of studying the civilisations and literature of Greece and Rome, why cannot this be done in English? Why spend so much time on laboriously acquiring two dead languages, when there are excellent translations from them? Above all, why these miserable Latin and Greek proses, with all the grammar and gerund-grinding they entail? The present chapter is an attempt to deal with these two criticisms. I would note by the way that the first of them ignores certain practical uses of knowing Latin. Latin lies behind French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; it is a great help in learning these languages, and essential to a scientific knowledge of them. It has also contributed largely to English. These are stock reasons for its study, and probably more than any other have given it a predominance over Greek. I have already glanced at similar arguments on p. 62 f., and they are too obvious to need further comment. Besides this, Latin is the key both to Roman law and to the documents which hold the history of the Middle Ages, and some persons will need it for these purposes. However, I will not dwell on these arguments, of which the first is clearly the strongest, but proceed to enquire how far those who study Greek and Latin can profitably do so in translations. Undoubtedly such experiments might be tried, and the newer Universities in particular, which contain students who have never had a chance of acquiring the classical languages and yet wish to know something of the classical literatures, have a great interest in, and a great opportunity of trying them. This is to some extent done already, and it would be very instructive to have an opinion on the results. With certain authors little would be lost, with others something would be gained. North's translation of Plutarch is far more delightful than the late Greek of the Lives; Longinus 1 is at least as good in English as in Greek; Orrery has exactly caught the manner of Pliny the 1I use this name as a convenient way of designating the author of the περὶ ὕψους. Younger; and Philemon Holland's translations are generally more pleasant reading than the originals. Aristotle again can be read with profit in a translation, though the reader will often want to refer to the Greek, and fine shades of thought and expression (important things in philosophy) will be lost; translations of works of thought are never quite satisfactory; otherwise the recovery of the Greek text of the New Testament by Erasmus would not have been so momentous an event. The thought of Plato can be found in Jowett's excellent English, though we often lose the simplicity and lucidity of his philosophical language, and, what is more serious, his exquisite style. Thucydides of all the great writers probably suffers least by translation, which disguises his eccentricities but not his genius.2 But our difficulties are only beginning here. The authors I have mentioned so far are great thinkers or interesting writers, but, except Plato and Thucydides, they are none of them great men of letters. They are none of them stylists. It is when we come to the poets and prose writers of 1 Some of the difficulties and objections will occur to the reader who has noted my remarks on page 177. 2 Many scholars would hotly contest this view. genius, that translations are so profoundly unsatisfactory. We might read Johnson or Bishop Butler in a German translation; but what should we say to a critic who suggested that Milton and Shelley, Ruskin and Carlyle were as good in a foreign language as in their native tongue? Plato, for instance a translation renders his thought adequately but gives no idea of the magic and charm of his style. Or try Demosthenes, a quite plain writer. Lord Brougham called him the greatest orator of the world; but no translation which I have ever seen, not even Lord Brougham's, has caught the faintest reflection of his genius. And the difficulties increase when we come to the poets. In English, they are as an Italian scene would be to eyes that have no colour sense and view the world in black and white; or as an oleograph of the Sistine Madonna compared with the original. If a man says that Homer is practically as good in a translation as in the Greek, there is nothing to be done but to listen politely and change the subject. Let anyone who knows Greek look at Morshead's translations of Aeschylus and then turn to the original, and ask himself how much of Aeschylus' genius has percolated into the English of what is really an excellent version. Even Professor Murray's translations of Euripides, works of genius, and likely to live as long as our language, never quite succeed in bringing the original under our eyes; when we go back to the Greek, we feel ourselves in a different world. And this is the real difficulty: it is a different world. Of any poetry most literary critics would say that it cannot really be translated, if to translate is to awake the feelings excited by the original; the thing becomes many times more difficult with Greek and Latin. What might be possible with a modern language, is not therefore possible with them, for, while English and German are allied tongues, English and Greek have no such kinship. The genius of the two languages is totally different, and to translate from one to the other is like the task of the alchemists who hoped to translate an alien metal into gold. It is a pis aller to read the poetry of Goethe or Victor Hugo in English (how many people would think it worthwhile?); it is much more to read translations of Homer and Aeschylus. And we miss something more than a literary pleasure when we read the classics in translations; we miss the genius of the two nations which created them. The best revelation of the Greek genius is the Greek language, fine, subtle, analytic, capable |