Chapter 3

“Last night, when some one spoke his name,From my swift blood, that went and came,A thousand little shafts of flameWere shivered in my narrow frame.”

If this physical perturbation seems strange to the more reticent man of northern blood, it was in no way strange to Theocritus, to Catullus, or to Lucretius. Once more, according to the German proverb, “he who would comprehend the poet must travel in the poet’s land.”

And here we are confronted with a supreme difficulty. While mere fact is readily translatable, and thought is approximately translatable, the literary quality, which is warm with the pressure and pulsation of a writer’s mood and rhythmic with his emotional state, is hopelessly untranslatable. It can be suggested, but it cannot be reproduced.The translation is too often like the bare, cold photograph of a scene of which the emotional effect is largely due to colour and atmosphere. The simpler and more direct the words of the original, the more impossible is translation. In the original the words, though simple and direct, are poetical, beautiful in quality and association. They contain in their own nature hints of pathos, sparks of fire, which any so-called synonym would lack. They are musical in themselves and musical in their combinations. They flow easily, sweetly, touchingly through the ear into the heart. The translator may seek high and low in his own languagefor words and combinations of the sametimbre, the same ethical or emotional influence, the same gracious and touching music. He will generally seek in vain. In his own language there may exist words approximately answering in meaning, but, even if they are fairly simple and direct, they are often commonplace, sullied with “ignoble use,” harsh in sound, without distinction or charm. He may require a whole phrase to convey the same tone and effect; he becomes diffuse, where terseness is a special virtue of his original. Let a foreigner study to renderthis—

“Had we never loved sae kindly,Had we never loved sae blindly,Never met, or never parted,We had ne’er been broken-hearted.”

Orthis——

“Take, O take those lips away,That so sweetly were forsworn,And those eyes, the break of day,Lights that do mislead the morn!But my kisses bring again,Seals of love, but sealed in vain.”

Is it to be imagined that he could create precisely the effect of either of these stanzas in French or Italian? Is not much of that effect inseparable from the words?

Take a perfectly simple stanza ofHeine—

“Du bist wie eine BlumeSo hold und schön und rein:Ich schau’ dich an, und WehmuthSchleicht mir ins Herz hinein.”

Near as English is to German, incomparably more easy as it is to render German into English than Greek into English, it may be declared that no English rendering of this verse conveys, or ever will convey, exactly the impression of the German original.

In respect of mere musical sound, what other words could run precisely like those of Coleridge at the openingofKubla Khan, or like Shelley’s “I arise from dreams of thee”? The case is exactly the same when we turn to a Greek lyric. Alcæus writes four words which mean simply “I felt the coming of the flowery spring”; but no juxtaposition of English words yet attempted to that effect can recall to the student of Greek the impression of

ἦρος ἀνθεμόεντος ἐπάϊον ἐρχομένοιο.

It is necessarily so with Sappho. She is an embodiment of the typical Greek genius, which demanded the terse and clear, yet fine and noble, expression of a natural thought, free, as Addison well says, from “those little conceits and turns of wit with which many of our modernlyrics are so miserably infected.” True Greek art detests pointless elaboration, strained effects, or effects which have to be hunted for. The Greek lyric spirit would therefore have loved the best of Burns and would have recognised him for its own. But you cannot translate Burns. Neither can you translate Sappho. Nevertheless one attempt may be nearer, less inadequate, than another. Let us take the hymn to Aphrodite. It is quoted by the critic Dionysius for its “happy language and its easy grace of composition.”

The first stanza contains in the Greek sixteen words, big and little. In woefulprose these may be literally rendered “Radiant-throned immortal Aphrodite, child of Zeus, guile-weaver, I beseech thee, Queen, crush not my heart with griefs or cares.”

In turning Greek poetry into English, and so inserting all those little pronouns and articles and prepositions with which a synthetic language can dispense, it may be estimated that the number of words will be greater by about one half,—the little words making the odd half. But Ambrose Philips makes thirty-four words out of thosesixteen—

“O Venus,beauty of the skies,To whom a thousand temples rise,Gaily false in gentle smiles,Full of love-perplexing wiles;O Goddess, from my heart removeThe wasting cares and pains of love.”

The italics should suffice for criticism upon the fidelity of this “translation.” Mr. J. H. Merivale, though more faithful to the material contents, finds forty-three wordsnecessary—

“Immortal Venus, throned aboveIn radiant beauty, child of Jove,O skilled in everyart of loveAndartful snare;Dread power, to whom I bend the knee,Releasemy soul and set it freeFrombondsofpiercingagonyAndgloomycare.”

We may perhaps without presumption ask whether the sense is not given more faithfully, in a more natural English form and rhythm, and in a shape sufficiently reminiscent of the original stanza, in the twenty-three words whichfollow—

“Guile-weaving child of Zeus, who artImmortal, throned in radiance, spare,O Queen of Love, to break my heartWith grief and care.”

Keeping to the same principles of strict compression and strict simplicity we may thus continue with the remainder of thepoem—

“But hither come, as thou of old,When my voice reached thine ear afar,Didst leave thy father’s hall of gold,And yoke thy car,And through mid air their whirring wingThy bonny doves did swiftly plyO’er the dark earth, and thee did bringDown from the sky.Right soon they came, and thou, blest Queen,A smile upon thy face divine,Didst ask what ail’d me, what might meanThat call of mine.‘What would’st thou have, with heart on fire,Sappho?’ thou saidst. ‘Whom pray’st thou meTo win for thee to fond desire?Who wrongeth thee?Soon shall he seek, who now doth shun;Who scorns thy gifts, shall gifts bestow;Who loves thee not, shall love anon,Wilt thou or no.’So come thou now, and set me freeFrom carking cares; bring to full endMy heart’s desire; thyself O beMy stay and friend!”

The perfection of the Greek style is fine simplicity. We must not say that this characteristic perfection is more absolutely displayed in Sappho than in Homer or Sophocles. It is, however, illustrated by Sappho in that region of verse which pre-eminently demands it, the lyric of personal emotion. There may be, with different persons and atdifferent dates, wide differences of interest in regard to the themes and structures of the epic, the drama, or the triumphal ode. Most forms of poetry must some time cease to find full appreciation, because of the peculiar ideas and conventions of their time and place. But the poetry of the primal and eternal passions of the human heart, of its experiences and its emotions, carries with it those touches which make the whole world kin. Love and sorrow are re-born with every human being. Time and civilisation make little difference. But those touches are only weakened by far-sought words and elaborate metres,by recondite conceits and ambitious psychology.

Perhaps the woman who seeks to come nearest to Sappho in poetry is Mrs. Browning, but she falls far short of her predecessor, not only through inferior mastery of form, but also through an excessive “bookishness” of thought. The poet movesby—

“High and passionate thoughtsTo their own music chanted.”

In the case of songs whose theme is what Sappho calls the “bitter sweet” of love, their proper style has been determined by the gathering consensus of humanity, and it is a style simple butpowerful, with a magic recurring in cadences easy to grasp and too affecting to forget. It is the style of “Ye flowery banks o’ bonnie Doon,” not of the Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day. Sappho’s songs fulfil all the conditions, and even of her fragments that is true which her imitator Horace said of her completer poems, as he more happily possessedthem—

“Still breathes the love, still lives the fireImparted to the Lesbian’s lyre.”

The virtue of Sappho is supreme art without artificiality, utter truth to natural feeling wedded to words of utter truth. Let Pausanias, thatancient Baedeker, declare that “concerning love Sappho sang many things which are inconsistent with one another.” She is only the more truthful therefor. No human heart, frankly enjoying or suffering the “bitter-sweet” moods and experiences of love, ever was consistent. Consistency belongs only to the cool and calculating brain. If love is cool and calculating, it is not love.

How much Sappho may have written on other subjects than this, the most engrossing of all, we shall perhaps never know. But we may be sure that one of the most priceless poetical treasures lost to the world has been those otherverses which, to quote Shelley on Keats, toldof—

“All she had loved, and moulded into thoughtFrom shape and hue and odour and sweet sound.”

There is, we may add, one quality besides beauty in verse which can never be analysed. It is charm. Sappho is pervaded with charm. And this suggests that we may conclude by quoting the judgment of Matthew Arnold upon one defect at least which must make Heine rank always lower thanSappho:—

“Charm is the glory which makesSong of the poet divine;Love is the fountain of charm.How without charm wilt thou draw,Poet! the world to thy way?Not by thy lightnings of wit—Not by thy thunder of scorn!These to the world, too, are given;Wit it possesses and scorn—Charm is the poet’s alone.”

The St.Abbs Press,London

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