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T. CADELL AND W. DAVIES, STRAND, LONDON.

1821.

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. XLIX.

APRIL, 1821.

VOL. IX.

FABLES FROM LA FONTAINE, IN ENGLISH VERSE. "Full of wise saws and modern instances."--SHAKESPEARE.

"I am a nameless man-but I am a friend to my country, and of my country's friends."-IVANHOE.*

A translation is in general a sad dull business. It is like a dish twice dressed, and the flavour is lost in the cooking. The object should be rather to transfuse than translate; to embody, as it were, the spirit of the original in a new language; to give, in short, to translation, the same meaning in a literary which it bears in an ecclesiastical sense,-where it always implies an improvement in the thing translated. The mode of conducting this literary operation is as various as the terms by which it is expressed. Sometimes the work is, according to the Dutch phrase, overgeret, i. e. overdone; sometimes, according to the French phrase, it is traduit, i. e. traduced; and sometimes, according to our own phrase, it is done, i. e. done for into English. Dryden has perhaps furnished the most brilliant specimens in our language of successful execution in this line. His tenth Satire of Juvenal almost surpasses the original. What can be more beautifully easy and simple than the opening ?“Look round the habitable world, how

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The translator, adds a line, which heightens the sarcasm, and conveys, in the strongest manner, the spirit and temper of the speaker :"Let that vile soul in that vile body rest : The lodging is right worthy of the guest!" The only poet of modern times capable of translating Virgil-the elegant, the tender Virgil-was Racine. Dryden should have confined himself to Juvenal ;--though in saying this, we must not forget his splendid versions of Horace. Here, however, he gives us paraphrase rather than translation; he bears the Lyric Muse of the Latin bard upon his own sublimer pinions, to a loftier heaven of invention, and makes her sing in a higher tone of inspiration. There is nothing in the Odes of Horace that can be compared with "Alexander's Feast ;" and we shall seek in vain in the original for

* Octavo. John Murray, Albemarle Street, London. 1820. VOL. IX.

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