BOOKS
721
Here it is the supreme virtue of the style that suffers--its raciness, its
vernacular. For there can hardly be another poem of like magnitude that
stays so close to the spoken word. Line after line, especially in the great
passages of Part I, comes to our senses as if
it
were just being said for the
first time; the impression persists even after repeated reading. The
translator's business
is
to hang on to this quality at all costs, especially
in a language which, apart from this signal exception, is better at it
than
the German. MacNeice does hang on to it for the most part, but
not consistently. One of his lapses is Frau Marthe's speech on p. 101.
But enough of strictures. The MacNeice translation at its best-and
it is often at its best-is good enough to make us regret lastingly that,
having done so much of the poem, he did not see fit to finish. All the
B.B.C. wanted of
him
was seven hours of radio time, which meant that
about one third of the text had to go. Fortunately the text carries us
through to the end and for this we must be grateful.
Looking at the work more broadly, we can soon convince ourselves
that, whatever the translator's views on the respective merits of the
two parts, it is Part II that he is really at home in, not Part I . And
this need not come as a surprise to those who realize how very modern
much of Part II is. Whereas in Part I he sometimes affects us as un–
easily bridging the gulf that separates him from the folkishness of the
late eighteenth century, in Part II MacNeice moves with such ease
that we feel he is not far from his natural element as poet of the 1950's.
Look at his splendid rendering of the Alpine monologue in which
Faust turns from the sunrise to the rainbow and resigns himself for the
moment to relativity:
Our aim was life, we wished to light the torch,
And a sea of fire laps round us-beyond measure!
Is it love? Or hate? Which burn and tum about us
In monstrous changing tides ,of pain and pleasure.
Consider too what he has done with the much maligned Classical
Walpurgisnacht, not the whole of it but some of the best parts, includ–
ing Faust's meeting with Chiron, who, it will be remembered, puts
him
on his back and gallops him through the night and tells him about
Hercules and Helen (this is the passage that Gide turned into French).
Faust tries to flatter Chiron as a pedagogue, but is rebuked:
Leave that,- it is irrelevant.
As mentor even Pallas is low-rated,-
