no
PARTISAN REVIEW
And, freed from the fumes of lore that swathe me,
To health in thy dewy fountains bathe me.
MacNeice, needless to say, does better, as his version of the passage
shows:
o
could I but walk to and fro
On mountain heights in thy dear glow
Or
fleat with spirits round mountain eyries
Or weave through fields thy glances glean
And freed from all miasmal theories
Bathe in thy d ew and wash me clean!
But he is not above reproach either, on
this
very score. We may pass
"eyries" as
good
enough, but what about "thy glances glean"? What
the German says is:
Auf Wiesen in deinem Dammer weben.
If
rhymed it must be, the line might better go:
Or weave through meadows silver-sheen.
But why keep the rhyme at all, if it has to be laboured? One is tempted
to lay it down as a principle for the translating of
Faust
into English
that it is better at every tum to sacrifice rhyme than to trifle with it in
any slightest degree.
There is a further point, not unrelated. MacNeice catches the
spirit of Faust's great opening monologue and handles it boldly. But he
makes us hesitate when he translates:
Und sehe dass wir nichts wissen konnen
into such abstract English as:
And this is all that I have fouond–
The impossibility of knowle.dge.
And he makes us resist
him
outright when he translates:
Schau aIle Wirkenskraft und Samen
Und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen
in such a way as to destroy its native force:
That the seeing its w hole germination, the seeing
Its workings, may end my traffic in words.
