FRERE'S TRANSLATION OF ARIS TOPHANES. Born in 1769, graduate of Cam bridge in 1792, occupying various positions con nected with the Foreign Office from 1799 to 1808, intimate friend of Canning, John Hook ham Frere is among England's many remark able examples of public men in letters. In spite of interpretations and views sometimes at variance with recent exact scholarship; in spite of — perhaps because of —an old-fashioned freedom, his version of 'The Acharnians,)
Certain principles- of translation formulated by Frere in a renew of Mitchell's Aristophanes (Quarterly Review, July 1820) help to account for the qualities of his work. They may be restated briefly as follows: The language of translation should never attract attention to itself ; expressions remarkable in themselves should as far as possible be avoided. The forms of language should be translated ac cording to the intention with which they are employed. In his representation of the vast mass of feeling, passion, interest, action and habit always and everywhere common to man kind, the translator should make use of the phrase in his own language to which habit and custom have assigned a conventional im port similar to that of the corresponding an cient phrases, taking care, however, to avoid those which, from their form or other cir cumstances, are connected• with associations belonging exclusively to modern manners. The translator should omit all local peculiarities which, however interesting as matters of curi osity to the antiquary, would have no other effect than that of distracting the attention, or diverting it from the broad general expres sion of character• and humor which is evidently the primary object of the poet. The text of the original is not necessarily the original itself. The tone and the intended impression of the original must first be ascertained, and the trans lator may then expand his own sentences to a dimension capable of bearing a distinct and intelligible impress of character. Or, he may
contract; for example, the well-known coarse ness of Aristophanes, which was a sop to the vulgar crowd, should be represented in the modern version, which is addressed to an audi ence of greater refinement, in greatly modified form. Again, just as Aristophanes compen sated for extravagance of plot and situation with reality of speech, so the translator should employ truthfulness of language; remembering, however, to give intentional unrealities, such as burlesque, their corresponding form. Finally, the successful translation should be free from any of those peculiarities, unintelligible to an English reader, which belong to antiquity but are in no wise characteristic of it, and which would distract the attention without affording employment for the imagination; and yet should so perfectly maintain the tone and character of antiquity, and the general spirit of the original author, as to make it impossible for any one to feel sure, without special acquaintance with the text, that a deviation from the original had taken place.
. The difficulties confronting the translator of Aristophanes, who, it must be kept in mind, resents the comedy of personal satire, and is therefore honeycombed with localisms, arc enormous — in the words of George Cornewall Lewis, an exacting critic who wrote in 1844, there are °the endless variety of his style and metres, the exuberance of his witty imagination, the richness and flexibility of the 'Attic lan guage in which he wrote, and the perpetual by play of allusions (often intimated merely by a pun, a metaphor, or a strange new compound) to the statesmen, poets, political events and institutions, manners and domestic history of his times.° Without claiming everything either as to ability or consistency, it may be said that Frere has met these difficulties with extraordi tary success, and that his success has been due to more or less faithful observance of his own principles. He is not always literally accurate, and he sometimes admits the localisms and modernisms he condemns; but he reproduces with great vividness the spirit of audacious extravagance and droll absurdity, the rippling, sparkling variety, the dash and rapidity, the brilliant flights of poetic fancy, which are the essential traits of Aristophanes. Frere is a case of genius translating genius.