whereas in Ovid, Cupid appears before us in the very act of guiding the vessel, seated as the pilot, and with his tender hand (tenerâ manu) contracting, or letting flow the sail. I need not point out another beauty in the original,—the repetition of the word Ipse.—Bowles.
Richardson has appended this note to the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in his copy of the quarto of 1717: "Corrected by the first copy, written out elegantly (as all his MSS.) to show friends, with their remarks in the margin; the present reading for the most part the effect of them." The remarks in the margin are mere exclamations, such as "pulchre," "bene," "optime," "recte," "bella paraphrasis," "longe præstas Scrope meo judicio," "minus placet," &c. They are doubtless from the pen of Cromwell, since it appeals from Pope's letter to him on June 10, 1709, that he had jotted down the same phrases on the margin of the translation of Statius. Bowles having quoted the observation of Warton, "that he had seen compositions of youths of sixteen years old far beyond the Pastorals in point of genius and imagination," adds, "I fear not to assert that he never could have seen any compositions of boys of that age so perfect in versification, so copious, yet so nice in expression, so correct, so spirited, and so finished," as the translation of the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon. The remark was made by Bowles in the belief that the version was the production of the poet's fourteenth year. Pope himself records on his manuscript that it was "written first 1707." He was then nineteen, and when the Epistle was published in 1712, in Tonson's Ovid, he was twenty-four.
"Ovid," says Dryden, "often writ too pointedly for his subject, and made his persons speak more eloquently than the violence of their passions would admit." Passion is sometimes highly eloquent; feeling strongly it expresses itself forcibly, and Dryden meant that the characters in Ovid, by their numerous strokes of studied brilliancy, seemed to be carried away less by their emotions than by the ambition to shine. These glittering artifices were formerly called wit, and Dryden complains that Ovid "is frequently witty out of season," but they are not wit in our present sense of the word. Occasionally they are the far-fetched or affected prettinesses which are properly called conceits; and more commonly they consist in terse antithesis, and a sparkle of words produced by the balanced repetition of a phrase. They are often as appropriate as they are showy, and if they are among the blemishes they are conspicuous among the beauties of Ovid. His writings are marked by opposite qualities. He is sometimes too artificial in his expression of the passions, and sometimes he is natural, glowing, and pathetic. He abounds in pointed sentences, and is not less distinguished for the easy, spontaneous flow of his language. He is at once prolix and concise, indulging in a single vein of thought till the monotony becomes tedious, and yet enunciating his ideas with sententious brevity. The condensation of the Latin in many places cannot be preserved in the diffuser idioms of our English tongue, but, if we overlook a few weak couplets, Pope has translated the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon with rare felicity, and notwithstanding the inevitable loss of some happy turns of expression, he has managed to retain both the passion and the poetry. Effusions of sentiment were better adapted to his genius than the heroic narrative of the Thebais; and his limpid measure, which neither resembled the numerous and robuster verse of Statius, nor was suited to an epic theme, accorded with the sweetness and uniformity of Ovid's verse, and with the outpourings of grief and tenderness which are the staple of these epistolary strains. There is no ground for the regret of Warton that Pope should have spent a little time in translating portions of Ovid and Statius. It would be as reasonable to lament that he stooped to the preliminary discipline which made him a poet. He has related that he did not take to translation till he found himself unequal to original composition, and, like all who excel in any department, he learnt, by copying his predecessors, to rival them.
[1] The ancients have left us little further account of Phaon than that he was an old mariner, whom Venus transformed into a very beautiful youth, whom Sappho and several other Lesbian ladies, fell passionately in love with.—Fenton.
[2] Mrs. Behn's translation:
[3] In the MS.:
[4] Our poet has not varied much here from the couplet of his predecessor, Sir Carr Scrope:
The first version in Pope's manuscript, though not so closely copied from Scrope, is decidedly inferior to the text:
[5] A childish, false thought.—Warton.
[6] Scrope's couplet exceeds this in simplicity, and to my taste, on the whole, is preferable:
[7] As Ovid tells the story in his Metamorphoses, Apollo fell in love with Daphne and pursued her. When he was gaining upon her in the race she was transformed, at her own request, into a laurel. The Cretan dame was Ariadne. Bacchus was smitten with her extraordinary beauty, and married her.
[8] This happy line, which is not too extravagant for a lover, belongs to Pope.
[9] Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus, an Æthiopian king. Her mother thought herself superior in beauty to the Nereids, which excited their jealousy, and through their influence a sea-monster was sent to prey upon man and beast in the dominions of Cepheus. To atone for her mother's vanity, and rid the land of the scourge, Cepheus agreed to offer up Andromeda to the monster. She was chained to a rock on the coast, where Perseus saw her at the critical moment when she was about to be devoured. Captivated by her charms he engaged and slew the monster, and made Andromeda his wife.
[10] This is very inferior to the conciseness, and simplicity of the original, "memini (meminerunt omnia amantes)." Sir Carr Scrope's translation is nearer the original, and more natural as well as elegant:
[11] This line is another of the embellishments which Pope engrafted on the original.
[12] The first line of this couplet is faulty in point of versification, and, to use our bard's own remark, ten low words creep in one dull line. As to the last line, it is wholly redundant, and has no place in the original.—Ruffhead.
[13] In the original, Erycina, which was a surname of Venus from Mount Eryx, in Sicily, where a celebrated temple was dedicated to her.
[14] He has here left four lines untranslated, which are thus rendered in the MS.:
Of the last couplet the MS. contains a second version:
[15] In the MS.:
[16] Cephalus tells the story poetically in Sandys' translation of Ovid's Met. vii. 701. He was a hunter, who was setting his nets in early dawn,
[17] Cynthia prolonged the sleep of Endymion, a shepherd of singular beauty, that she might kiss him without his knowledge.
[18] Scrope is pleasing here:
Pope's couplet was as follows in the MS.:
"Scrope melius hic," wrote Cromwell, and though Pope altered the lines the remark of Cromwell remains true.
[19] Ruffhead observes, that this line is superior to the original,
which he thinks flat and languid: but the simplicity of the appeal to the blot on her paper is admirable, and should be only mentioned as a fact. The imitator has destroyed the whole beauty of the line, by a quaint antithesis, and a laboured arrangement of words, which are not natural in affliction. Scrope's translation again excels Pope's:
[20] "The parenthesis is an interpolation," says a note transcribed by Richardson from Pope's manuscript, and the remark is equally applicable to the next line.
[21] In the first edition,
The original couplet in the MS. was
"Jejune, flat, and ill expressed," is written against the last line in the manuscript, and Pope profited by the criticism.
[22] This image is not in the original, but it is very pleasingly introduced.—Bowles.
[23] The ten next verses are much superior to the original.—Warton.
[24] From Dryden's Ovid, Epist. vii.:
It was at first thus in Pope's MS.:
[25] In the MS.:
[26] Of this couplet there are two other versions in the MS.:
And,
[27] "Antra nemusque" are not well rendered by "through lonely plains." Ovid is concise and specific, Pope general. Better rendered by Scrope:
[28] In the first edition:
[29] Scrope's translation:
Tereus married Progne, and afterwards fell in love with her sister Philomela. Both sisters conspired to revenge themselves upon him. They killed Itys, his son by Progne, gave him some of the flesh to eat. When, with savage exultation, they revealed the truth to him, and he was about to slay them, Progne was changed into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale.
[30] The Sappho of Ovid only says that she laid down upon the bank worn out with weeping. Pope is answerable for the extravagant conceit of "her swelling the flood with her tears." In the next verse Pope calls the Naiad "a watery virgin,"—an expression which borders on the ludicrous.
[31] There was a promontory in Acarnania called Leucate, on the top of which was a little temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it was usual for despairing lovers to make their vows in secret, and afterwards to fling themselves from the top of the precipice into the sea; for it was an established opinion that all those who were taken up alive would be cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the remedy, but perished in the experiment.—Fawkes.
[32] Aleæus arrived at the promontory of Leucate that very evening, in order to take the leap on her account; but hearing that her body could not be found, he very generously lamented her fall, and is said to have written his 215th ode on that occasion.—Warton.
The entire story was probably a legend.
[33] These two lines have been quoted as the most smooth and mellifluous in our language; and they are supposed to derive their sweetness and harmony from the mixture of so many iambics. Pope himself preferred the following line to all he had written, with respect to harmony:
Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis:
[34] In the MS.:
[35] In the place of this couplet, there were four lines in the MS.:
Another version ran thus:
[36] "Liked" seems a very unsuitable expression in the present day. It was a word, however, among our early writers of greater force and significance:
[37] In the MS.:
Cromwell wrote against the last line "recte, non pulchre," and Pope tried three variations of it before he cast them aside for the version in the text:
[38] Of ver. 242 and v. 244, Pope says in the MS., "So at first as printed, but objected [against] as tautological. Sic recte as [in the] margin, but carried afterwards as at first." "Sighs" was thought to be too nearly synonymous with "prayers," and Pope altered the lines by erasing the expressions "no sighs" and "my sighs," and affixing the epithet "tender" in both verses to numbers.
[39] In the MS.:
"Pleonasm," says a note on the manuscript. "Kinder, and more auspicious, too much."
[40] This image is very inferior to the original, as it is more vague and general: the picture in the original is strikingly beautiful. The circumstances which make it so, are omitted by Pope:
The objection of Bowles would not have applied to the manuscript, where this admirable couplet, which Pope unwisely omitted, follows the lines in the text:
There is a second, but inferior rendering:
Cromwell applied the words of Horace, "quæ desperat nitescere posse, relinquit," which seems intended to intimate that it was impossible to give a poetical translation of the original. Pope deferred to the mistaken criticism.