Exotics

THIS many-colored bouquet of strange flowers would interest us at once as coming from the hands of a father and daughter who have wrought together as if they had been brother and sister. It may even be doubted if brother and sister would ever work together in such perfect accord as father and daughter are sometimes found doing, and as they have done in this labor of love. Poets have commonly invoked the muse to aid them, but to find one dwelling under one’s own roof, a child that was rocked in the household cradle, that has grown into girlhood and womanhood by the family fireside, is a rare and singular felicity. In this case it is not always easy to say whether the father or the daughter is author of the particular translation before us. The masculine hand is so nice in touch, and the feminine one is so firm and true, that we may be pardoned for looking now and then to make sure whether it is to J. F. C. or to L. C. that we owe the verses which we have been reading.

Other readers must perform the critical labor of comparing these versions with the original. For us, as for most of those into whose hands they will pass, they are valuable in themselves, as English poems. One would hardly be thought to have read them carefully if he did not point out a false rhyme in two or three places; “morning” and “dawning” (VI.), “morn” and “gone” (XX.), and the “out” repeating itself (LXXIX.). The grandeur of those two parallel sentiments “Æquo pede pulsat,” and “ la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre,” falters in the rhythm of the translation, and in one instance, at least, as acknowledged in a foot-note, the classic air of the poem is modernized. But these are small matters and need not disturb our judgment.

The translation of a poem from one language to another is in one sense an impossibility — as much as it is to get a ripe peach from New Jersey to Boston; to carry a full - blown rose from here to San Francisco; to waft the salt-sea odor of Nahant to St. Louis. Or, to change the comparison, it is like the reproduction of a painting in mosaic. The scenes and figures that “savage Rosa dashed or learned Poussin drew,” the sweeps of Michel Angelo’s brush, the flood from the paint-jars of Rubens which overflowed some palace ceiling, have to be reproduced by picking out little colored bits one by one, and thus cheating the eye if possible into the belief that they are something other than mere patches brought together in a state of mind the very opposite of that in which paintings are conceived and executed. So the mental condition of the translator is like to be, in the vast majority of cases, the very reverse of that of the poet whom he is trying to reproduce.

What is the poet’s condition when writing? If Shakespeare called it a “fine frenzy,” a modern psychologist would be quite as likely to say it is a kind of clairvoyance. The poet is a medium, and he has always recognized himself as such ever since and long before the invocation which begins the great early epic. He holds the pen, and the divinity, the muse, the inspiration, the genius, the spirit-influence, — whatever the time may choose to call it, — shapes the characters. The difference is this. In the “medium” commonly so called, the mechanical process of writing is automatically performed by the muscles, in obedience to an impulse not recognized as proceeding from the will. In poetical composition the will is first called in requisition to exclude interfering outward impressions and alien trains of thought. After a certain time the second state or adjustment of the poet’s double consciousness (for he has two states, just as the somnambulists have) sets up its own automatic movement, with its special trains of ideas and feelings in the thinking and emotional centres. As soon as the fine frenzy or quasi trance - state is fairly established, the consciousness watches the torrent of thoughts and arrests the ones wanted, singly with their fitting expression, or in groups of fortunate sequences which he cannot better by after treatment. As the poetical vocabulary is limited and its plasticity lends itself only to certain moulds, the mind works under great difficulty, at least until it has acquired by practice such handling of language that every possibility of rhythm or rhyme offers itself actually or potentially to the clairvoyant perception simultaneously with the thought it is to embody. Thus poetical composition is the most intense, the most exciting, and therefore the most exhausting of mental exercises. It is exciting because its mental states are a series of revelations and surprises; intense on account of the double strain upon the attention. The poet is not the same man who seated himself an hour ago at his desk, with the dust-cart and the gutter, or the duck-pond and the hay-stack and the barn-yard fowls beneath his window. He is in the forest with the song-birds; he is on the mountain-top with the eagles. He sat down in rusty broadcloth, he is arrayed in the imperial purple of his singing - robes. Let him alone now, if you are wise, for you might as well have pushed the arm that was finishing the smile of a Madonna, or laid a rail before a train that had a queen on board, as thrust your untimely question on this half cataleptic child of the muse, who hardly knows whether he is in the body or out of the body. And do not wonder if, when the fit is over, he is in some respects like one who is recovering after an excess of the baser stimulants.

If the reader thinks this is put too strongly, let him open the little book before us and read the first poem in it, a translation from Goethe, which is headed —

THE RULE WITH NO EXCEPTIONS.

He must show it, he must sing it.
Tell the fellow then to bring it !
Though he knows you can't abide it,
’T is impossible to hide it.
I will tell as I am bidden, —
POEMS never can be hidden.

“ Song intoxicates the poet.” His brain rings with it for hours or days or weeks after it has chimed itself through his consciousness. The vibration dies away gradually, like the tremor of a bell which has been struck, and the medium comes to himself again. What a pity that the passion and the fever and the delirium are not a measure of the excellence of the product of the poetic trance! It is mournful to think how many rhymes have been written in tears of ecstasy and self-admiration, which have been read with the smile of pity or the sneer of contempt. No small fraction of the correspondence of an over-good-natured literary man consists of replies to the victims of the delusion that their vascular and nervous excitement is the index of their power. He cannot help the same kind of commiseration for them that he would have for the poor, foolish, sickly mother who should insist on sending her limp infant to one of those elevating spectacles known as “baby-shows;” her blood is in its veins, and her milk is in its blood: how can she help thinking it worthy to be admired of all?

The passion with which verse is written does not measure its true poetical value, but that true poetry can be evolved by any calm process, like the working out of a mathematical problem, is hardly to be conceived. Under what conditions, then, can a translation, which is a transfer, drop by drop, into a more or less opaque receptacle, of the crystalline thought that sprang up into the air from its hidden fountain, have anything of the effect of the original?

The answer is that if the translator is really “ penetrated by a sense of the qualities of his author,” he must have some mental gift like that of his author. His mind must have a mordant for the colors to be transferred from the original pattern. The poem to be translated must have lain in his memory long enough to have naturalized itself as a part of his thought. It must have worked itself in before it tries to work itself out. When this “fretting in” has taken place, and not before, the translator, if, as has been assumed, he has something of the poetical nature akin to his original, may reproduce a poem with somewhat of the passion which accompanied its conception in the mind of the author. He will not then give us a literal rendering, but a new poem, which produces an impression on the reader’s mind as nearly as possible like that which the original produced on his own. The treatment is not unlike that of a landscape by a true painter, who often gets his best effects by neglecting the details which a novice would have thought essential. This is the kind of work the reader may look for in the pages before us.

In every work where taste and judgment are called in requisition, we try the man in some measure by his book, but we are also, in some degree, influenced in our estimate of the book by what we know of the man. Mr. Emerson’s Parnassus, for instance, independently of any excellences it possesses as a collection of poems, interests us and commands our respect as showing what has especially pleased the unforeseeable selective instinct of his ethereal but incisive intelligence. It is only fair, then, to ask who it is that gives us, with the occasional aid of his homebred and long domesticated muse, this book of choicely gathered poetical blossoms from various ages and climates.

Fifty years of friendly association, beginning in the earliest college days, may tempt the writer to speak of James Freeman Clarke in terms which have ripened towards the superlative, but it is an ungenerous silence which leaves all the fair words of honestly - earned praise to the writer of obituary notices and the marble-worker. These translations are the work of one who, though not unknown as a poet, is not a mere man of letters. They reveal some of the mental affinities of a man whose life has been passed in labor of various kinds; very little of which has come even as near to recreation as the work of making these careful versions; all of which labor has been directed to high and unselfish ends. A faithful, untiring preacher and pastor, a diligent student from his youth upward, for more than an entire generation constantly before us, speaking and writing manly and living thoughts on vital subjects ; a Christian without a crook of ecclesiasticism or a squint of bigotry; a philanthropist who leaves no aftertaste of bitterness in any word he utters, as largely human in his sympathies as the old neighbor of Terence’s play; ready to lend a hand to every useful project, in church, college, state, society; scholarly in acquisition, familiar in imparting knowledge, always cheerful and hopeful, — he is wanted in as many places and fills those places as well as any man among us. The accomplishment of verse is no more needful to his record than it was to that of John Quincy Adams, who felt, nevertheless, as so many other great personages have felt, that to get into the inmost heart of his fellow men and women, his thought must wind its way aided by the flexuous graces of rhythmical expression.

The reader cannot but like to know what are the inmates of such a man’s memory, his favorites, which he has robed in the fairest garments of his vocabulary, as a mother adorns her children for a festival.

Where was ever the poet who did not sing of love? Where was ever the lover of poetry who lived long enough to outgrow the recollection of the love-songs of his youth? “My lyre will ring to love alone,” said Anacreon, though the maidens told him he was no longer young. Its dreams and memories at least belong to every age, and so the reader will be glad to know that love, hoping and despairing, love returned and love rejected, love with its anticipations and love with its regrets, is the burden of one third of these poems. Devotion, self - forgetfulness, prayer, faith, good works, patriotism, wise counsel, epigrammatic satire, lively pictures from Roman life, and chips of various aspects from the poets’ workshops, help to fill the volume, which, small as it is, holds more than many of those great books whose very size has given them a name of reproach.

A few of the more attractive poems may be mentioned, and this notice will be closed most fitly by the citation of one or two as specimens. Rabia, it may be taken for granted, everybody remembers; once heard it is hard to forget it. If the reader wishes to smile, let him read the translation from Goethe, entitled Modern Catholics. If he would smile at the expense of some of his estimable but sometimes ill-balanced neighbors, let him read the lesson to Philanthropists, which ends with the four lines, —

But if he does not laugh with delight when he reads the following, he has not had the experiences through which some of us have passed. It is the same counsel, with an addition, which good Dr. Primrose gives in the Vicar of Wakefield, and is credited to the Gulistan of Saadi.

Miss Clarke’s part of the joint labor is, as has been said, not unworthy to be associated with the best of her father’s. Two verses — a translation from Geibel — will be enough at least to show her graceful management of language.

TEARS.

One more specimen must be given in full, and can hardly fail to leave the reader longing for the book which holds it. This is from the hand of the father.

MOSES AND THE WORM. (Herder.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes.