“The Spectator,” May 10, 1913

Shelley, himself a translator of one of the best known of the epigrams of the Anthology, has borne emphatic testimony to the difficulties of translation. “It were as wise,” he said, “to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.”

The task of rendering Greek into English verse is in some respects specially difficult. In the first place, the translator has to deal with a language remarkable for its unity and fluency, qualities which, according to Curtius (History of Greece, i. 18), are the result of the “delicately conceived law, according to which all Greek words must end in vowels, or such consonants as give rise to no harshness when followed by others, viz. n, r, and s.” Then, again, the translator must struggle with the difficulties arising from the fact that the Greeks regarded condensation in speech as a fine art. Demetrius, or whoever was the author of De Elocutione, said: “The first grace of style is that which results from compression.” The use of an inflected language of course enabled the Greeks to carry this art to a far higher degree of perfection than can be attained by any modern Europeans. Jebb, for instance, takes twelve words—“Well hath he spoken for one who giveth heed not to fall”—to express a sentiment which Sohocles (Œd. Tyr. 616) is able to compress into four—καλῶς ἔλεν εὐλαβονένῳ πεσεῖν.