ds of a Landsman" are the most notable additions of
recent years.

X

VERSE TRANSLATION

CHAPTER X

VERSE TRANSLATION

A working knowledge of some foreign language--say French or German--is
often very profitable to the verse maker. With a dictionary and a couple
of text books he can make very good translations of the poetry of the
language--work which may not bring a money return but which as an
exercise is both interesting and valuable. The process is not
complicated, though a good verse translation may be made as hard a task
as any falling to the lot of the literary worker.

Take a poem that strikes the fancy; read it and reread till every word
is clear and then shape the translation into a stanza and meter as near
the original as possible. If there are four three-line stanzas in the
original, build the translation into four three-line stanzas as closely
line for line as the ease of the verse will permit. In translating from
the German the original meter can be followed accent for accent, though
this is impossible with the French, whose syllables are without
emphasis, and would scarcely be advisable with any of the more
complicated Latin meters.

At first it is a good idea to make the English verse rigorously exact in
its meaning--to study every word until the verse not only rhymes and
runs with some degree of naturalness, but also is a correct rendering of
the cold facts. This is not so hard as it seems if one sits down and
thinks the right word out, and it gives opportunity for an excellent
overhauling of the vocabulary.

Any one who has had a high-school course in Latin can experiment with
Virgil, turning it either into couplets like Pope's Iliad or into the
more appropriate meter used by Longfellow in his Evangeline. With a
dictionary and a literal translation it is easy enough to puzzle out
Horace, who is more modern in his thought and who is, in a way, the
ancestor of our present _vers-de-societe_ writers. There is also this
advantage in the translation of Horace: One finds a chance to compare
his translation with the work of many others, for Horace has been more
widely translated than any other poet unless we except the Biblical
writers. The fame of Father Prout rests largely on his renderings of
Horace. Austin Dobson has translated several of the odes into the French
forms and many other poets have turned their hand to the task.

Among the Germans, Heine is a favorite with English trans