The year in which Socrates appeared Thomas Francklin brought 1758 out the first part of what was long to remain the best English rendering of Sophocles. The splendid march of the hexameter and the lyric beauty of the choruses Francklin does not reproduce at all, but he does convey impressively if not brilliantly the nobility and simple grandeur of his great original. He has tried to be natural, an unusual aim in any translation of the classics made at that time,—and accordingly has many passages as conversational as this: Let me hear the sound Of your long-wish'd for voices; do not look With horror on me, but in kind compassion In this sad place.1 True, he often carries this laudable purpose too far, to the detriment of his verse, as when he writes, The man thou seek'st is not far from thee . . . cease then thy search, and tell me Wherefore thou com'st; 2 yet there is not a page, or hardly a speech, in his entire volume that does not bear the stamp of Paradise Lost. Here is an example: Behold before thee Paean's wretched son, With whom, a chance but thou hast heard, remain The dreadful arrows of renown'd Alcides, Ev'n the unhappy Philoctetes, him Whom the Atridae and the vile Ulysses Inhuman left, distemper'd as I was By the envenom'd serpent's deep-felt wound.3 The latter part of this passage was thus rendered in 1788 by Robert Potter, the next writer to put Sophocles into blank verse: Philoctetes; whom the Chiefs, And Cephallene's king, here basely left An outcast, and alone, with dire disease Consumed, and tortured with this gnawing wound This extract may be too brief to show that it is from a more diffuse, 1 Philoctetes, II. i. 7–11. 2 Ajax, I. i. 8-11. 3 Philoctetes, II. i. 40–46. 2. 3. language," remarked William Taylor, "it is often necessary to I heard his thund'ring voice, I saw his form Between 1781 and 1783, when Potter published the two volumes of his Euripides, Michael Wodhull's rendering of the same dramatist appeared (1782). Less formal and Miltonic than Potter's, it is also less interesting and less impressive, duller, more diffuse, and more prosaic. There are too many lines like that with which several of the plays close, And thus does this important business end. As a rule, the style is not so close to Paradise Lost as in this passage: As on our turrets We stood exalted, and o'erlook'd the plain, Soon vaulting, to the city they drew near.3 These were the great eighteenth-century translations of the Greek drama. With all their shortcomings they were the best to be had, and in some cases almost the only ones accessible. As they were better than most versions of the classics made at the time, edition after edition of them was called for, and they held undisputed sway till past the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, over a hundred years after they first appeared, all three were in whole or in part reprinted in cheap popular form. Not until the appearance of Gilbert Murray's finely poetic free renderings have any later translations of these dramas attained such vogue as those of Francklin, 1 J. W. Robberds, Memoir of Taylor (1843), i. 329. 2 Seven against Thebes, Potter's Aeschylus (Norwich, 1777), p. 169; cf. P. L., i. 590, 284-6, vi. 765-6. The Choephorae has the phrase "Around his gloomy eyeballs throw" (ib. 364, cf. P. L., i. 56); also the two lines quoted on page 471 below (the suggestion of Allegro is not in the original), and probably other borrowings. For Potter's imitation of Lycidas, see Bibl. III A, 1759. Phoenician Damsels, in Nineteen Tragedies, etc. (new ed., 1809), i. 214. Potter, and Wodhull enjoyed. Strange to say, except for a few single plays no further blank-verse translations seem to have been published till 1865, when E. H. Plumptre brought out his excellent Sophocles; but since that time the number has steadily increased. The best of these later renderings are far more poetic than the earlier, more noble and simple, and much more successful in their handling of the lyric choruses. Their blank verse has, of course, like that of other poems of the time, come to be less Miltonic than that written in 1777; yet a suggestion of Paradise Lost still clings to a large number of them. In many speeches it does not appear at all, while in some it is marked; but usually it is seen in only one or two lines out of five, ten, or even twenty. It is therefore difficult to illustrate, but a passage in which it is fairly clear may be quoted from Plumptre's Philoctetes: A son of Priam, Helenos his name, There was, whom this man, going forth alone By night (I mean Odysseus, full of craft, On whom all words of shame and baseness fall) Plumptre's renderings of both Sophocles (1865) and Aeschylus (1868) are distinguished by having the lyric choruses unrimed, a practice that was also followed by Robert Whitelaw in his Sophocles (1883). Passages as Miltonic as this occur throughout Whitelaw's able but somewhat stiff work: I see within the eyes of all of you Some fear of my intrusion, fresh portrayed; But shun me not, nor blame with hasty speech: For hither, charged with words, not deeds, I come, I who am old, and know that ye are strong, Ye and your city — in Hellas stronger none.. To mourn a kinsman's sufferings most belonged.2 The year in which Plumptre issued his Sophocles saw the publication of the first part of Anna Swanwick's Aeschylus (completed in 1872), which, though its literary merits are slight, has often been reprinted in the Bohn library. The style is more Miltonic than that of most translations of the period, yet each line, as the following extract shows, tends to stand apart from its fellows: She of her roaming hath the limit heard, That she not vainly to have heard may know, 1 Lines 604-9. 2 Oedipus at Colonus, 729-39. Her woes ere coming here I will relate, And of thy roamings reach at once the goal.1 The version of the same dramatist by E. D. A. Morshead, which began to appear in 1877, is as much more poetic than Miss Swanwick's as it is less Miltonic, but many passages, like the admirable opening of The Furies, certainly recall Paradise Lost: First in this prayer of all the gods I name The prophet-mother Earth; and Themis next, Lewis Campbell's vigorous, noble renderings of Sophocles (1883) and Aeschylus (1890) are much like Morshead's work. Often they do not seem at all Miltonic, and probably their debt is never greater than in these lines: Earth-born Palaechthon was my sire; I am named Whence, rightly named from me their sovereign, Of all the region Strymon's holy stream Divides, the westward portion owns my power.3 Meanwhile translations of single dramas, or extracts from them, were appearing. Sometime before 1846 W. S. Walker rendered a scene from the Persae of Aeschylus, and in 1849 George Burges published a version of the Ajax as stiltedly Miltonic as this: Dare not Unfeeling thus to cast away this man Without a burial; nor let violence urge thee So much to hate, as justice to tread down." This passage is typical of C. C. Clifford's Prometheus Chained (1852): Titan, give ear. Thee to thy mischief wise, Thee of the bitter spirit, that didst sin Against the Gods, to creatures of a day Bestowing honours, and the fire from heaven Stolen, thee the betrayer, I address." 1 Prometheus Bound, 842-7. 2 House of Atreus (2d ed., 1889), p. 137. I have not seen Morshead's translation of Sophocles's Oedipus, 1885. Aeschylus's Suppliants, in Seven Plays (new ed., 1906), p. 10. 4 See above, p. 344, n. 4. Lines 1314-17. • Page 41. Another version of the Prometheus (together with one of the Agamemnon) almost if not quite as Miltonic as Clifford's had been issued in America three years earlier by H. W. Herbert; and in 1873 J. G. Brincklé published in Philadelphia a translation of the Electra which follows Paradise Lost as closely as this: He sought of Hellas' games the illustrious pageant, To win the Delphic prize; and when he heard The foot-race first in order, forth he stepped, Milton's influence on the style and diction of these later translations is not vital or even important, but it affords an unconscious tribute to the supreme excellence of his manner for the purposes of lofty poetry. If a Greek drama that uses the verse and style of Paradise Lost is unexpected, a German play that follows the same course is even more so, particularly when it comes from the flippant pen with which Robert Lloyd had poked fun at Milton's followers. Yet Klopstock's Death of Adam, which Lloyd turned into English in 1763, is on the Greek model and in subject suggests the Christian epic. More was needed, however, than the occasional use of an adjective for an adverb, like "my breath Labours incessant," or of an inversion like "I have, of import, much to talk with Seth," to make this decidedly conversational translation at all impressive. Klopstock, "the Milton of Germany," owed so much to Paradise Lost that English versions of his works, even though made in the nineteenth century, might very naturally be Miltonic. The four of the Messiah in blank verse that I have seen certainly are: that of the first book issued in 1810 at Georgetown, South Carolina (the work of Solomon Halling), the brief passage from the ninth book which W. S. Walker translated about the same time, the anonymous rendering of all fifteen books that appeared in 1826, and the fragment published by W. S. Roscoe in 1834.3 From the last part of the anonymous version many hundred lines of the original are omitted; yet, since the piece extends to over six hundred pages, it is surely long enough. As a rule, it is less condensed and rather less effective than in this passage: Tow'rd th' Asphaltic sea, Meantime, Obaddon, minister of Death, Spread his broad wing; and soon, envelop'd thick 1 Lines 681-5. 2 Pages 20, 14. See below, Bibl. I, 1813, 1826, 1834. |