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Edward FitzGerald's Preface to Aeschylus's Agamemnon


[整理者注:转录自1876年Bernard Quadritch版。Edward FitzGerald在此略加论述的翻译原则(liberal rather than literal)也符合他翻译《鲁拜集》的实践。]

PREFACE


[This Version -- or Per-version -- of Aeschylus was originally printed to be given away among Friends, who either knew nothing of the Original, or would be disposed to excuse the liberties taken with it by an unworthy hand.

Such as it is, however, others, whom I do not know, have asked for copies when I had no more copies to give. So Mr. Quaritch ventures on publishing it on his own account, at the risk of facing much less indulgent critics.

I can add little more to the Apology prefixed to the private Edition.]

I SUPPOSE that a literal version of this play, if possible, would scarce be intelligible. Even were the dialogue always clear, the lyric Choruses, which make up so large a part, are so dark and abrupt in themselves, and therefore so much the more mangled and tormented by copyist and commentator, that the most conscientious translator must not only jump at a meaning, but must bridge over a chasm; especially if he determine to complete the antiphony of Strophe and Antistrophe in English verse.

Thus, encumbered with forms which sometimes, I think, hang heavy on Aeschylus himself; [note: For instance, the long antiphonal dialogue of the Chorus debating what to do -- or whether do anything -- after hearing their master twice cry out (in pure Iambics also) that he is murdered.] struggling with indistinct meanings, obscure allusions, and even with puns which some have tried to reproduce in English; this grand play, which to the scholar and the poet, lives, breathes, and moves in the dead language, has hitherto seemed to me to drag and stifle under conscientious translation into the living; that is to say, to have lost that which I think the drama can least afford to lose all the world over. And so it was that, hopeless of succeeding where as good versifiers, and better scholars, seem to me to have failed, I came first to break the bounds of Greek Tragedy; then to swerve from the Master's footsteps; and so, one license drawing on another to make all of a piece, arrived at the present anomalous conclusion. If it has succeeded in shaping itself into a distinct, consistent, and animated Whole, through which the reader can follow without halting, and not without accelerating interest from beginning to end, he will perhaps excuse my acknowledged transgressions, unless as well or better satisfied by some more faithful Interpreter, or by one more entitled than myself to make free with the Original.

But to re-create the Tragedy, body and soul, into English, and make the Poet free of the language which reigns over that half of the world never dreamt of in his philosophy, must be reserved -- especially the Lyric part -- for some Poet, worthy of that name, and of congenial Genius with the Greek. Would that every one such would devote himself to one such work! whether by Translation, Paraphrase, or Metaphrase, to use Dryden's definition, whose Alexander's Feast, and some fragments of whose Plays, indicate that he, perhaps, might have rendered such a service to Aeschylus and to us. Or, to go further back in our own Drama, one thinks what Marlowe might have done; himself a translator from the Greek; something akin to Aeschylus in his genius; still more in his grandiose, and sometimes authadostomous verse; of which some lines relating to this very play fall so little short of Greek, that I shall but shame my own by quoting them before hand;

"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Iliam?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!"