152
Come my Celia, let us prove,
While we may, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours, for ever:
He, at length, our good will sever.
Spend not then his guifts in vaine.
Sunnes, that set, may rise againe:
But if once we loose this light,
'Tis, with us , perpetuall night ...
PARTISAN REVIEW
Jonson did not have to trouble about readers with no Latin or with
critics of the "where is this in the original?" school objecting that lines
three through five have no equivalent there. "Refleshing" Catullus,
as Tomlinson puts it, he "brings over the very cleanliness of Latin"
and Englishes the Roman sonority of
nox est perpetua una dormienda
more convincingly than any literalist can ever hope to do.
For some two hundred and fifty years, from Gavin Douglas's
early sixteenth-century
Aeneid
to Samuel Johnson's reworkings of
Juvenal, poetic translation of this sort flourished and still constitutes
a rich though, as Tomlinson says, "largely forgotten" province of
English literature. For whatever reason, English departments seem
for the most part to regard translation as no part of their business.
The typical translator of these centuries, declining what one of their
number called "that servile path . .. Of tracing word by word, and
line by line," confidently transformed his originals, particularly his
Latin originals, into what often are nearly new English poems .
If
there is any reservation to be made about this achievement, it is that
writers (like their readers) were so much at home in Latin that they
scarcely felt it to be a foreign language, hence we miss in their work
that shock of the alien which can bring new energies into a culture
and open up fresh perspectives. That was only to come in our own
century, with Pound. Juvenal, in Dryden's hands, speaks like this:
In Saturn's Reign, at Nature's Early Birth,
There was that Thing call'd Chastity on Earthe ...
Those first unpolisht Matrons, Big and Bold,
Gave Suck to Infants of Gygantick Mold;
Rough as their Savage Lords who Rang'd the Wood,
And Fat with Akorns Belcht their windy Food .
There is something so massively, truculently English here - an
Englishness that goes back to Chaucer and starts to soften
