Translated Poetry

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

“WITH the world thus young, beauty eternal, fancy free,” writes Colonel Higginson in the fragrant and picturesque Introduction to his versions of Petrarch,¹ “ why should these delicious Italian pages exist but to be tortured into grammatical examples ? Is there no reward to be imagined for a delightful book that can match Browning’s fantastic burial of a tedious one ? When it has sufficiently basked in sunshine, and been cooled in pure salt air, when it has bathed in heaped clover, and been scented, page by page, with melilot, cannot its beauty once more blossom, and its buried loves revive ? ” Thanks to an unusually successful collaboration of writer and printer, this little volume is itself the best answer to these questionings. It is fulfilled of sunshine and sea air, melilot and clover ; and the buried loves of Francis Petrarch and Laura de Sale do indeed revive in it with a strange impressiveness.

Though Petrarch was the fountain and original of that sad school of Platonizing, sonneteering, literary Love, which through two centuries corrupted the healthy springs of European letters, he was himself, beyond all question, a sincere and constant lover. It is in his keen perception of this, and in the sympathetic, imaginative power by which he has achieved reality of tone, that Colonel Higginson’s fifteen sonnets from Petrarch are distinguished from other attempts.

On the purely formal side he has been but little less successful. The cadenced flow of the soft Italian vocables, melting “ like kisses from a female mouth,” has always been the despair of Northern translators. Most recent writers who have endeavored to render Petrarch in English have adopted, like Mr. Garnett, a sensuous, full-toned, Rossetti-like type of sonnet, which makes musical reading, but which — at least in the judgment of the present writer — is better adapted to convey a just impression of the sonnetsinging of Camoëns, the great but Euripidean successor to the laurel and purple of Petrarch, than to present in English the finer beauty of his original. Colonel Higginson’s chief care, on the other hand, has been for refinement and reality of diction. He has been for the most part singularly fortunate in discovering the pure and glowing phrase. The result is that his work suggests the Sidneian showers of eloquence of the best Elizabethans more than the voluble moonlight passion of Rossetti, — flute and violin more than the bassoon, — and so is nearer in temper to the delicately modulated yet unaffected poetry of Laura’s lover. How fine and expressive Colonel Higginson’s workmanship may be will appear from his version of the sonnet to Laura singing, which will be quoted to convey a touch of his quality : —

From Petrarch, the first great humanist of the Renaissance, to Pierre de Ronsard, its poetic herald in France, is not a far cry, and in many other respects Mr. Page’s attractive volume² is a fit shelfcompanion for Colonel Higginson’s. The introductory critical essay is so amiable and intelligent a characterization of the poet of flame and roses that one is tempted to fall into Jeffreyan phrase and say, We like Mr. Page better as commentator on poetry than as a poet. The truth is that Mr. Page’s adventure was one of the extremest difficulty. The charm of Ronsard’s most characteristic lyrics, which has been so perfectly phrased as une fadeur exquise, an exquisite silvery faintness, is a far more incommunicable essence, even, than the charm of Petrarch’s noble numbers. Mr. Page’s versions of the daintier and seemingly more unpremeditated lyrics of the type of Mignonne, allons voir si la rose and Versons ces roses en ce vin are faithful and spirited, yet the reader who has known and cared for them in Ronsard’s newly minted French, so delicately clear, is likely to feel that their beauty has been cheapened. On the other hand, Ronsard’s sonnets, and more particularly those in a major key, are excellently done. Take, for example, that hearty sonnet To His Valet, wherein Ronsard has epitomized unwittingly the two motive passions of the Renaissance, — the love of learning and of ladies : —

Here we have Mr. Page composing in a key of plain and manly vigor, clearly attuned to the chord of Donne and Drayton, yet curiously faithful to the chime of the French original. From this it would appear, as well as from the exceptional success of Colonel Higginson’s very Sidneian versions of Petrarch, that he who would give us an acceptable translation of a Continental poet of the Renaissance should give his days and nights to the study of the Elizabethans.

F. G.