a needless
obscurity. We think that he was theoretically right; but he should not
have pushed his theory to the extent of puzzling the reader, where his
aim was to give only that air of strangeness which allures the fancy. As
respects ballads dealing with the supernatural, Jamieson's notion of
the duty of a translator was certainly the true one. There is something
almost ludicrous in a ghost talking the ordinary conversational language
of every-day life, which might, to be sure, serve very well for some
of Jung Stilling's spirits in bottle-green hunting-coats with brass
buttons, but hardly for the majesty of buried Denmark. Dr. Prior may
claim that his renderings are more literal; but it is the vice of
literal translation, that the phrases of one language, if exactly
reproduced in another, while they may have the same sense, convey a
wholly different impression to the imagination. It is to such cases that
the Italian proverb, _Tradutiore traditore_, applies. Dryden, citing
approvingly Denham's verses to Fanshawe,

"They but preserve his ashes, thou his flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame,"

says, with his usual pithiness, "Too faithfully is indeed pedantically."

In Dr. Prior's version of the "The Buried Mother" we find a case
precisely in point. The Stepmother says to the poor Orphans,--

"In blind-house shall ye lie all night."

Jamieson gives it,--

"Says, 'Ye sall ligg i' the mirk all night.'"

Now, the object in all translations of ballad-poetry being to reproduce
simple and downright phrases with equal simplicity and force, to give
us the same effects and not the same words, we vastly prefer Jamieson's
verse to Dr. Prior's, in spite of the affectation of _ligg_ for _lie_.
If _blind-house_ be the equivalent for _dark_ in the original, Dr.
Prior should have told us so in a note, giving us the stronger (because
simpler) English word in the text. He might as well write _hand-shoe_
for _glove_, in a translation from the German. Elsewhere Jamieson errs
in preferring _groff_ to _great_, and the more that _groff_ means more
properly _coarse_ than _large_.

The following couplet is also from Dr. Prior's translation of this
ballad:--

"They cried one evening till the sound
Their mother heard beneath the ground."

Jamieson has it,--

"'Twas lang i' the night, and the bairnies
grat [cried],
Their mither she under the mools [mould]
heard that."

Again, Dr. Prior gives us,--