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The Poems and Fragments of Catullus Translated in the Metres of the Original By: Gaius Valerius Catullus (84 BC - 54 BC) |
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TRANSLATED IN THE METRES OF THE ORIGINAL
BY ROBINSON ELLIS, FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD,
PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1871.
LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
TO ALFRED TENNYSON.
[Transcriber's note: The preface uses macrons and breves above some
letters to indicate stresses. I have rendered the letters with breve
inside parenthesis (like th(i)s) and the letters with macron inside
square brackets (like th[i]s).]
PREFACE.
The idea of translating Catullus in the original metres adopted by the
poet himself was suggested to me many years ago by the admirable,
though, in England, insufficiently known, version of Theodor Heyse
(Berlin, 1855). My first attempts were modelled upon him, and were so
unsuccessful that I dropt the idea for some time altogether. In 1868,
the year following the publication of my larger critical edition[A] of
Catullus, I again took up the experiment, and translated into English
glyconics the first Hymenaeal, Collis o Heliconici . Tennyson's Alcaics
and Hendecasyllables had appeared in the interval, and had suggested to
me the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was not sufficient
to reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient quantity was
reproduced also. Almost all the modern writers of classical metre had
contented themselves with making an accented syllable long, an
unaccented short; the most familiar specimens of hexameter,
Longfellow's Evangeline and Clough's Bothie of Tober na Vuolich and
Amours de Voyage were written on this principle, and, as a rule,
stopped there. They almost invariably disregarded position, perhaps the
most important element of quantity. In the first line of Evangeline This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, there are no less than five violations of position, to say nothing of
the shortening of a syllable so distinctly long as the i in
primeval . Mr. Swinburne, in his Sapphics and Hendecasyllables, while
writing on a manifestly artistic conception of those metres, and, in my
judgment, proving their possibility for modern purposes by the superior
rhythmical effect which a classically trained ear enabled him to make in
handling them, neglects position as a rule, though his nice sense of
metre leads him at times to observe it, and uniformly rejects any
approach to the harsh combinations indulged in by other writers. The
nearest approach to quantitative hexameters with which I am acquainted
in modern English writers is the Andromeda of Mr. Kingsley, a poem
which has produced little effect, but is interesting as a step to what
may fairly be called a new development of the metre. For the experiments
of the Elizabethan writers, Sir Philip Sidney and others, by that
strange perversity which so often dominates literature, were as
decidedly unsuccessful from an accentual, as the modern experiments from
a quantitative point of view. Sir Philip Sidney has given in his
Arcadia specimens of hexameters, elegiacs, sapphics, asclepiads,
anacreontics, hendecasyllables. The following elegiacs will serve as a
sample. Unto a caitif wretch, whom long affliction holdeth,
And now fully believ's help to bee quite perished;
Grant yet, grant yet a look, to the last moment of his anguish,
O you (alas so I finde) caus of his onely ruine:
Dread not awhit (O goodly cruel) that pitie may enter
Into thy heart by the sight of this Epistle I send:
And so refuse to behold of these strange wounds the recitall,
Lest it might m' allure home to thyself to return. In these the classical laws of position are most carefully observed;
every dactyl ending in a consonant is followed by a word beginning with
a vowel or h affl[i]ct(i)(o)n holdeth , mom[e]nt (o)f h(i)s
anguish , ca[u]se (o)f h(i)s onely ; affliction wasteth , moment of
his dolour , cause of his dreary , would have been as impossible to Sir
Philip Sidney as mo[e]r(o)r t(e)nebat , mom[e]nt(a) p(e)r curae ,
ca[u]s(a) v(e)l sola in a Latin writer of hexameters... Continue reading book >>
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