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[2] See Diez, Romance Dictionary, s. v. “Marrir.”

[3] On literally retranslating lost into Italian, we should get the quite different word perduta.

[4] The more flexible method of Dr. Parsons leads to a more satisfactory but still inadequate result:–

“Half-way on our life’s Journey, in a wood,
From the right path I found myself astray.”

All these, however, are difficulties which lie in the nature of things,–difficulties for which the translator is not responsible; of which he must try to make the best that can be made, but which he can never expect wholly to surmount. We have now to inquire whether there are not other difficulties, avoidable by one method of translation, though not by another; and in criticizing Mr. Longfellow, we have chiefly to ask whether he has chosen the best method of translation,–that which most surely and readily awakens in the reader’s mind the ideas and feelings awakened by the original.

The translator of a poem may proceed upon either of two distinct principles. In the first case, he may render the text of his original into English, line for line and word for word, preserving as far as possible its exact verbal sequences, and translating each individual word into an English word as nearly as possible equivalent in its etymological force. In the second case, disregarding mere syntactic and etymologic equivalence, his aim will be to reproduce the inner meaning and power of the original, so far as the constitutional difference of the two languages will permit him.

It is the first of these methods that Mr. Longfellow has followed in his translation of Dante. Fidelity to the text of the original has been his guiding principle; and every one must admit that, in carrying out that principle, he has achieved a degree of success alike delightful and surprising. The method of literal translation is not likely to receive any more splendid illustration. It is indeed put to the test in such a way that the shortcomings now to be noticed bear not upon Mr. Longfellow’s own style of work so much as upon the method itself with which they are necessarily implicated. These defects are, first, the too frequent use of syntactic inversion, and secondly, the too manifest preference extended to words of Romanic over words of Saxon origin.

To illustrate the first point, let me give a few examples. In Canto I. we have:–

“So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there”;

which is thus rendered by Mr. Cary,–

“Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.
Yet to discourse of what there good befell,
All else will I relate discovered there”;

and by Dr. Parsons,–

“Its very thought is almost death to me;
Yet, having found some good there, I will tell
Of other things which there I chanced to see.” [4x]

[Footnote 4x:
“Tanto e amara, che poco e piu morte:
Ma per trattar del teen ch’ i’ vi trovai,
Diro dell’ altre Bose, ch’ io v’ ho scorte.”]

Inferno, I. 7-10.

Again in Canto X. we find:–

“Their cemetery have upon this side
With Epicurus all his followers,
Who with the body mortal make the soul”;–

an inversion which is perhaps not more unidiomatic than Mr. Cary’s,–

“The cemetery on this part obtain
With Epicurus all his followers,
Who with the body make the spirit die”;

but which is advantageously avoided by Mr. Wright,–

“Here Epicurus hath his fiery tomb,
And with him all his followers, who maintain
That soul and body share one common doom”;

and is still better rendered by Dr. Parsons,–

“Here in their cemetery on this side,
With his whole sect, is Epicurus pent,
Who thought the spirit with its body died.” [5]