FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

Songs and Sonnets of Pierre De Ronsard.

Translated into English Verse with an Introductory Essay and Notes by Curtis Hidden Page. (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924.)

"La musique est la soeur puisnee de la poesie.. . .sans la musique la poesie est presque sans grace".... ; so wrote Ronsard, maintaining that good poetry always lends itself to musical setting. I do not know whether musicians have proved his contention by levying extensively upon him for the words of their songs; but in a different sense music is surely the younger sister of all that Ronsard wrote: none of his verses are without the charm of lovely melody. It is the great merit of Professor Page's volume of translations (first printed in a limited edition by the Riverside Press in 1903) that it captures and reproduces this most illusive of qualities. In certain of the Odes, for example, Professor Page has given us almost vowel for vowel the very breath and cadence of Ronsard's lines; his versions are faithful recreations of their originals, and— rarest of virtues—leave no sense of insufficiency behind. It is hard to imagine a better rendering than this of Ronsard's Ode (Book IV, 38) beginning:

"Verson ces roses pres ce vin, Pres de ce vin verson ces roses, Et boiuon l'un a l'autre, a fin Qu'au coeur nos tristesses encloses Prennent en boiuant quelque fin."

"Pour we roses into wine! In this good wine these roses Pour, and quaff the drink divine Till sorrow's hold uncloses From our hearts, both mine and thine." (P. 62)

This is among Professor Page's best translations—one regrets the omission of four stanzas of the original. His rendering of Ode 16, Book V, is equally fine, especially of these captivating lines

"Je vais boire a Henry Estienne, Qui des enfers nous a rendu Du vieil Anacreon perdu La douce lyre Teienne."

"I'll drink to Estienne Who saved from Lethe's treasures The sweet, sweet Teian measures Of that lost singer olden, Anacreon the wine-king." (P. 61)

Both French and English lose by being torn from their contexts, but I am not sure that of these two extracts, the English, with the open vowels of the last lines, is not the finer. Professor Page is at his best when translating into these blithe lyric measures.

Of this volume of some seventy-eight poems, about one-half are sonnets. Professor Page has here set himself the impossible task of translating with practically literal fidelity his originals, at the same time preserving the strict Petrarchan form, with its heart-breaking rhyme scheme. When one compares his renderings with the originals, one must marvel at the extraordinary ingenuity and facility he displays— certainly one cannot see how the work could be done better. And yet it remains true that often there is an artificiality or a thinness about the English versions which leaves one dissatisfied. Occasionally the diction seems unnecessarily conventional; certainly the exigencies of the rhyme scheme tend to obtrude themselves. Once, even, the lyric note fails, in the concluding tercet of "To Mary Stuart, Queen of France" (P. 85). (Will these lines bear translation?) It seems to the reviewer that Pro- fessor Page should have allowed himself more liberty with the letter of his text, as Keats did when he translated, from memory, "Nature Ornant Cassandre., .Professor Page's version is of course more accurate than Keats's, but it does not seem to be as fine a reflection of the essential poetry of this sonnet. Such expansions as "The cloudy kings of high Olympus," with their "slavish sighs," more than justify themselves by their effect on the reader. It must not be supposed, however, that Professor Page's sonnets are not beautiful and effective. Among the best are "Love's Perfect Power"; "Love's Quickening," with its noble last line; "The Poet's Gift"; "Marie, Arise"; "Love's Token"; "Love's Flower," with its fine sestet; "Her Immortality," especially good for its first sonorous tercet; and, above all, "To His Valet"; perhaps the best translation in the book, with its fine close—a stroke of genius on the translator's part which has all the colloquial vigor of Drayton's line, "Nay, I have done, you get no more of me." One can wish for no better version of this sonnet.

The translations of four other sonnets should be mentioned (those on pages sixteen to twenty) because here Professor Page has departed from the sonnet form with distinguished effect. As he says in his notes, the English sonnet line is scarcely capable of reproducing the lyricism of many of Ronsard's sonnets; and accordingly, allowing himself unwonted freedom, Professor Page has employed the swifter lyric measures. What could be more felicitous than his rendering of the sonnet, "Pour-ce que tu sgais bien que ie t'ayme trop mieux" ? It begins,

Love's infidel Whom I adore, You know too well That I love you more By a hundred score Than mine eyes or heart! So you'd die before You'd be called "sweet-heart!" (P. 18)

These poems make one wish that Professor Page had oftener chosen this method of rendering the sonnets.

The volume is provided with an introductory biographical and appreciative essay, written in Professor Page's spontaneous and graceful style, and with casual notes which pleasantly conceal the real erudition, they contain. But it is a pity that Professor Page has so frequently neglected to give references to his French texts, for it is certain that many readers of this volume will be impelled by the.charm of the translations to reread the originals, and it is not always easy to find a given poem among the thousand pages of Ronsard's work. This is the only discernible lack in a volume which is undoubtedly one of the most interesting testimonies in English to the fame of The Prince of Poets —a poet whose great influence on English verse we are only now coming fully to understand.

History of the 151 st Field Artillery. By Louis L. Collins. Edited by Wayne E. Stevens. Published by the Minnesota War Records Commission, Saint Paul, 1924.

Whoever wishes to gain a realizing sense of the way in which the American army played its part in the World War would do well to follow up his perusal of the general histories of the American share in the war by reading a number of good personal narratives and at least one well-written history of a typical military unit which took a considerable part in the fighting. For the latter purpose he can scarcely do better than to read the History of the 151 stField Artillery, as edited by Professor Wayne E. Stevens, of the History Department.

Few American military units saw as much actual service as did the 151 st Field Artillery. Belonging to the famous Rainbow Division, it entered the line at an early stage in the American part of the fighting. Its first important service was to help repel the great German drive east of Rheims on July 15, 1918. Afterwards it took part in the bitter fighting that drove the Germans from the Marne to the Vesle, then had a share in the reduction of the St. Mihiel salient, and finally fought in the gigantic and long continued battle of the Meuse-Argonne.

Louis L. Collins, a newspaperman who was a member of the 151 st, wrote but did not publish a history of the regiment. Its commander, Colonel G. E. Leach, kept a diary. Professor Stevens's task was to weave together these two accounts and to supplement them by additional data from the official records in such a way as to work out an accurate, well proportioned, and interesting history of the regiment. The work has been well done in every respect. It is not too much to say that the book is a model of its kind and that it enables the reader to get a vivid and correct conception of certain aspects of the war which can be obtained only through the history of a typical military unit.

The August issue of Current History contains an article, "Dartmouth's Reformed Curriculum," by Mr. Arthur C. White. This article was reprinted in its entirety in the Boston Herald and mentioned extensively elsewhere. Mr. White is also the author of "Darwin in a Brothel," an article on restrictive tendencies in American education, in the July number of the Haldeman-Julius Monthly; "Maze," a drama in one act in the Spring number of Poet Lore; and "In Defense of Youth," an essay in the July-August number of the American Review.

Recent reprints of Professor John H. Gerould are "A Right-Left Gynadromorph of the Alfalfa Butterfly, Colias Eurytheme, Var. Alba," reprinted from the Journal of Experimental Zoology, V. 42, No. 2, July 5; and "Periodic Reversal of Heart-Beat in a Chrysalis" reprinted from Science, December 19, 1924, V. LX.

The American Library Association is publishing a series of volumes "Reading With a Purpose," a series of reading courses. Number 3 of this series is "Ten Pivotal Figures of History, a little volume of 36 pages, by Professor Ambrose W. Vernon. The figures discussed by Professor Vernon are Socrates, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Paul, Luther, Francis Bacon, Rousseau, Washington, Lincoln, and Wilson.

Professor H. Feldman is the author of "The Regularization of Employment, a study in the prevention of unemployment," published by Harper Brothers. This volume is published under the auspices of the American Management Association.

The May number of the American MidlandNaturalist contains a list of the Pteridophyta and Spermatophyta of the Cold Spring Harbor region by Professor N. M. Grier, while the July number includes the "Fossil Flora of Long Island" by the same writer.

"The Geology of New Hampshire" by Professor James Walter Goldthwait has been published by the Rumford Press. This book of 86 pages is published as Handbook Number 1 of the New Hampshire Academy of Science. It will be reviewed in the next issue of the MAGAZINE.

Richardson Hall