To counteract, in so
far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the
translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full
swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr.
Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the
words; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetry
with a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a
billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice
passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity,
this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in
the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some
pages, have--contrary to all good usage--the superfluous eleventh
syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson
in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do
good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his
Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book
of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in
dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a
weakness.
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