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The Princess Tyszicwiez wished to print at Warsaw, at her own expense, a translation I had executed of Kotzebue's 'Menschenhass and Reue, to which I gave the title of 'L'Inconnu'. I arrived at Vienna on the 26th of March 1792, when I was informed of the serious illness of the Emperor, Leopold II, who died on the following day.
I am also bound to tell your lordship, in my own defence, that from the beginning of the first Georgic to the end of the last AEneid, I found the difficulty of translation growing on me in every succeeding book. For Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.
If the authorized translation be true to the intent of the Greek, and therefore to that of the Syriac, how could his parents, knowing him as they did from all that had been spoken before concerning him, from all they had seen in him, from the ponderings in Mary's own heart, and from the precious thoughts she and Joseph cherished concerning him, have failed to understand him when he said that wherever he was, he must be about his father's business?
"Nay, I meant you have torn away the thorns from the roses of philosophy! If Kant would only write like you " "He might understand himself," flashed the beautiful Henrietta Herz. "And lose his disciples," added her husband. "That is really, Herr Mendelssohn, why we pious Jews are so angry with your German translation of the Bible you make the Bible intelligible."
Cicero for instance, although in prose one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency, revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution and the augural discipline; "patriotism requires," we find him saying, "that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation of Sophocles than the original."
But there was another which deserves particular notice, inasmuch as it did far more than merely interest or amuse him, raising a deep question in his mind, and one worthy to be asked. This book was the translation of Klopstock's Messiah, to which I have already referred. It was not one of his grandmother's books, but had probably belonged to his father: he had found it in his little garret-room.
It is solely in defence that the truth is now told. But I have read another translation of the book, mainly the work of a man who was also an Orientalist and a distinguished soldier, which, though doubtless inferior to Burton's, is more than sufficient to give one full knowledge of the character of the book.
"What is this passage about?" asked the Baroness, with some anxiety; "tell me." "I have a French translation, ma mignonne," said Madame; "you shall have it afterwards." "No! I detest reading," said the young lady, with an imperious air; "translate it to me at once."
In the evening hours and on Sunday Charley had worked at his drawings for the scenery and costumes of the Play, and completed his translation of the German text, but there had been days when he could not put pen to paper. Life to him now was one aching emptiness since that day at the Rest of the Flax-beaters Rosalie had been absent.
I have often heard people who might sit with him on the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing immediately.
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