Two Plays of Menander

WHAT is the straight and narrow path for a translator? By being literal he perpetuates usages and tricks of speech, natural to another tradition, which confuse the strange reader and lend a false woodenness to the original. His accuracy in detail therefore ends in a larger inaccuracy. Or, trying to escape this woodenness by free translation, be may gain ease and a seeming naturalness, but at the expense of some falsity of tone. And whether literal or free, he needs great literary flair if he is to succeed at all.

Gilbert Murray has never lacked flair. Some have felt that he imported to Euripides a certain Swinburnian excitement and a tone of slightly sentimental liberalism, either of which might have surprised the ancient playwright considerably. But it is his great merit to have conceived of translation as a work of art and to have felt in the originals a relevance largely independent of time.

These defects and these merits both appear in his current reconstruction and translation of two fragmentary plays of the comedian Menander discovered on papyrus some forty years ago. Born in 342 B.C., a. few years after Plato’s death and when Demosthenes and Aristotle were older men, Menander was of the vexed generation which saw both the violent expansion of the Greek world through the conquests of Alexander and the decay of the old life of the city-states through their loss of power and independence. It tells something of his time that his most notable contemporaries were Epicurus and Zeno the Stoic, founders of the cosmopolitan philosophies of the coming age.

Menander shared this cosmopolitanism. He forsook the old political and local tradition of Aristophanes for a new comedy of manners and human types — the comedy which, transplanted into Latin by Plautus and Terence, lived on in Molière, Wycherley, Sheridan, and, one could almost say, Jane Austen and Trollope. His peculiar qualities were tolerance, grace, a certain half-philosophic wonder at the accidents of life, a feeling for balance and the absurdity of extremes. He was vastly admired, and centuries later St. Paul could give modern currency to one of his lines: Evil communications corrupt good manners.

The jacket announces that, about half the first play, The Rape of the Locks (Murray says Shaw suggested the title), goes back to the original. That assertion is not wholly correct. Fewer than 500 lines remain, while Murray’s version goes to nearly 1400 lines. The proportion is more even in the second play. The Arbitration. In any case, there is much room for reconstructing both speech and incident, and this freedom seems to write large all Murray’s qualities as a translator. He is natural, animated, and at times moving. His whole impulse to conceive the plays entire is delightful and characteristic.

But it is perhaps no disrespect to say that Murray is not Menander. Menander is merciful, Murray tends to be sentimental; Menander is meditative, Murray whimsical (as in the wholly invented speech, indeed character, of Callisto in the second play); Menander is limpid, Murray takes on a half-mystical, half-romantic tone (as at the end oi the same play). He is furthermore hardly at his best when, attempting to be familiar, he ends in rather tame and very British slang.

Nevertheless one can be grateful for the plays, both in themselves and because they suggest, if they do not wholly catch, the poise of this most graceful of Attic minds, which, contemplating change, found, in human character at least, some permanence.

JOHN FINLEY