FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

PROFESSOR PAGE AS TRANSLATOR*

It is doubtful whether the ordinary cultivated reader realizes the difficulties of an adequate rendering of a piece of French literature into English. The double requirement of an accurate version of the original and fidelity to the genius of the English language, have baffled even the greatest talents; and this is true often when the translator possesses fine scholarship and, at the same time, a poet's sensitiveness to his own tongue. Occasionally a prose work is translated from the French in a fairly successful manner, as, for example, Van Laun's translations of Taine. Usually, though, a fine piece of English means a wide departure from the French; while a bit of accurate translation may merely reveal the unimaginative plodder. As for French verse, a few happy renderings by poets such as Andrew Lang, Austin Dobson, and especially Rossetti, only emphasize by their rarity the great difficulties of harmonizing the genius of the two languages.

This perpetual failure of the English translator to render French prose or verse with a scholar's accuracy and an artist's phrasing, makes particularly noteworthy by contrast the achievement of Professor Curtis Hidden Page. Professor Page's first success, and one which (it must be said) he has not since surpassed was a translation of Ronsard's sonnets into English verse. It would be interesting in this connection to compare his version of the "Sonnet to Helen" with Thackeray's familiar lines beginning,

"Some winter night, shut snugly in Beside the fagots in the hall."

which are no more beautiful, and are much less faithful to the original.

Equally remarkable for its verbal accuracy while bringing out all Ronsard's poetic melancholy is the well-known, "Sweetheart, Come See if the Rose." The "Regret for Marie Stuart's Departure" deserves quoting as a whole:

"If spangled fields should lose their every flower, And woods their leaves; If heaven should lose the stars that are its dower, The sea its waves, A palace proud, the glory of its king, Its pearl, a ring, These would be like to France, that now has lost Your beauty bright, Her flower, her precious pearl, her glory and boast, Her star, her light. Scotland, I would that thou like Delos free Couldst wander far, Nor e'er behold thy bright Queen from the sea Rise like a star; Till wearied with pursuit, she seek again Her own Touraine. Then should my lips o'erflow with songs, my tongue Thrill with her praise, Till like the swan my sweetest notes were sung To end my days."

Professor Page's translations of Moliere, cast in a sort of seventeenth century English, show the same conscientious accuracy. A noteworthy fact about these translations is that among them we find the first serious attempts at a rendering of Moliere's metrical comedies into English verse. Finally may be listed an edition of Rabelais intended for the general English readingpublic, perfectly adequate for its purpose, although, of course, for the connoisseur it will not supplant entirely Urquhart's less faithful but more complete version.

All this is byway of preface to Professor Page's latest success, his version of Anatole France's one act farce, "La Comédie de célui qui épousa une femme muette." A. less conscientious translator would have been satisfied with what is generally known as an "adaptation." This is really translation; the French is mirrored in the English. "The play to quote Professor Page's foreword, "is founded on a brief passage in the 'Lives, Heroick Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son, Pantagruel', where one of Rabelais' characters tells of a joyous incident of his student days at Montpellier."

This, in brief, is the story: Master Leonard, a judge in Paris, has married Catherine, in spite of her being dumb, and because of her beauty and fortune. But soon wearying of her perpetual silence—and what he thinks are its disadvantages—he calls in a doctor and surgeon who operate so successfully that Catherine is able to speak. In fact, after her recovery she does nothing else; her words are a torrent. At last, in despair, her husband sends for the physicians once more, and asks them to make her dumb again. This their science cannot reach; the cure has been permanent. They compromise by making the unlucky judge deaf; and this.so enrages Catherine that she goes mad, biting Master Leonard who bites others in his turn. The play ends characteristically in the whole company dancing to a quaint, mediaeval ditty.

The translator has reproduced very generally the author's qualities; no small achievement. One problem in particular he has successfully solved; that is in making Catherine's speeches fall, as Hamlet advised the Players, "trippingly from the tongue." Monsieur France did this in French; Mr. Page has given the same effect in English.

As produced by Granville Barker, with his sense of fitness of a setting, the play was "staged like a ducal masque," as one critic expressed it. It was a true artistic triumph.

Professor E. B. Woods is the author of "For a Disciplined Patriotism" in the New Republic for November 6.

G. P. Putnam's Sons have just published "A Sketch of English Legal History" by Frederic W. Maitland and Francis C. Montague, edited with notes and appendices by Prof. James F. Colby. This will be reviewed in a later issue of this MAGAZINE.

"The Patterson Plan for a Federal Constitution" by Prof. Charles R. Lingley appears in the History Teachers'Magazine for November IS.

"On the Complete Independence of Schimmack's Postulates for the Arithmetic Mean" by Prof. R. D. Beetle was published in Mathematische Annalen, Volume 76, Number 4.

"University Debaters' Annual, Constructive and Rebuttal Speeches Delivered in the Intercollegiate Debates of American Colleges and Universities During the College Year 1914-15," edited by Edward Charles Mabie, and published by H. W . Wilson & Company, White Plains, New York. In his introduction Mr. Mabie says this is the first volume of a series of year books of college debating. The volume contains various college debates including the Brown-Dartmouth-Williams debates, and the Chicago-Dartmouth debates. Besides the debates the year-book contains bibliographies on the subjects debated.

The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife by Anatole France. Translated for Granville Barker by Curtis Hidden Page. John Lane & Co., 1915.