“Songs Of A Revolutionary Epoch.” By J. L. Joynes. (London: Foulger and Co., 13 Paternoster Row, E.C.)
It has often been questioned whether it is really worth while to translate poetry at all; and Mr. Joynes, in the preface to his own translation of “Songs of a Revolutionary Epoch” from the German, concedes or rather contends that “the charm that lies in the collocation of the words in the original must inevitably be lost when the words themselves are transformed into another tongue, although their meaning in each case may be identical”. This being so, some protest that unless we can read the originals it is idle to seek to read foreign poetry at all. That, however, is an impossibly hard saying for the multitude who only know their own tongue; and it is hardly necessary to find practical justification for Mr. Joynes’s attempts to let English readers, and especially working-class readers, have some idea of how the cause of Democracy has been promoted in the last generation in Germany by revolutionary singers. In such poetic literature, during the period in question, the Germans are richer than we, richer even than the French; and against the great figure of Hugo, for quality if not for quantity of political verse, there is to be set that of Heine, of whom Mr. Joynes gives eight good samples; the first and most characteristic of which, indeed, is not specially “revolutionary”. It was not a light undertaking to “revivify the charm”, in some eighty poems, of the necessarily lost collocation of the words of the originals, as Mr. Joynes says it is the “translator’s duty” to do, “by a different collocation”; but he has unquestionably risen above the average level of excellence in translation. He claims considerable latitude of rendering for the attainment of this end, and has certainly taken it without stint; but no one who compares his work with, say, Sir Theodore Martin’s translations from Heine (which are so astonishingly inferior to his “Faust”), will be disposed to quarrel with the freedom of the versions of these “Songs”—which, it may be well to explain, are not as a rule songs in the popular sense, but poems. Only on close reading can one see traces of the process of translation: the verse nearly all reads like original English composition, and that is the main matter when, as here, the spirit of the originals is well preserved. There are few downright slovenlinesses; and only an occasional deviation from sound judgment in phrase, as in “the blessing of his boon”, and “to din into their deafening ears”, on page 17.
Not much less than half the book is made up of translations from the fecund Freiligrath; and these, which are mostly in long metres, will probably be found most impressive by the majority of sympathetic readers. It is one result of free translation that grades of poetic quality disappear; and Freiligrath’s vigorous verse is not here noticeably inferior to the one or two serious pieces of Heine, who in his malicious way belittled Freiligrath, in the posthumously published “Gedanken und Einfälle”, on the score alike of his rhymes, his thought, and his rhetoric, not scrupling further to charge him with “plagiarism from Grabbe and Heine”. It was an unfair criticism, indeed a spiteful one if it were not the product of an hour of specially disturbed nerves; and there is a certain satisfying justice in the translation which gives him fair play alongside of his critic. His art was indeed rhetorical, as Heine said, but his rhetoric was very good of its kind; and such pieces as “Revolution”, “The Palace of Ice”, “The Dead to the Living”, and “Hamlet”, make remarkably good declamation in Mr. Joynes’s version. And indeed the song “Red, Black, and Gold,” with its chorus
“Powder is Black
Blood is Red
Golden flares the Flame!”
has a lyric quality beyond rhetoric, sufficient to shake Heine’s dictum that Freiligrath “could manufacture everything, except a song”. By way of sample we can but quote the shortest of the pieces translated from him by Mr. Joynes, which, however, happens to be a good example:
“THE CHANCES OF THE GAME.
“Written when the Author was an exile in Switzerland,
“No better chess-board than the world!
Though square by square I have to yield,
Though here and there my flag be furled,
Ye cannot drive me off the field.
“So is it in the noble strife
Between the tyrants and the free,
Blow after blow for death or life,
And peace to neither side may be.
“It seems that even here as well
I needs must try another bout,
That even from the home of Tell,
The chance of chess will drive me out.
“So be it. Haunts to Freedom dear
By Norway’s breakers yet remain;
A sound from France assails my ear,
The clanking of her broken chain.
“No exiled head has England e’er
Asylum on her shores denied;
A far friend’s message bids me share
His home on bright Ohio’s side.
“From town to town, from State to State,
From land to land, whate’er be fated,
No move of Fate can give me mate,
’Tis Kings alone can be check-mated.
This is well rendered; and so is this other of Heine, which will give an English reader a fair notion of its author’s characteristic mood of sardonic humor:
“1649. 1792. ???.
“The Britons’ behavior was hardly the thing
That it ought to have been, when they killed their king.
Not a wink of sleep could his majesty get
On the night ere he paid his final debt;
For still through the window there rang in his ears,
The noise at his scaffold, the taunts and the jeers.
“And even the Frenchmen were scarce more polite:
In a four-wheeled cab and a pitiful plight
They carried king Capet to meet his fate,
And allowed him no coachman or carriage of state,
Which a king by the rules of the old etiquette,
Whene’er he goes driving, ought always to get.
“But a still more unqueenly, undignified part
Had the fair Antoinette, for she rode in a cart;
And in place of her ladies-in-waiting she got
For her only companion a rough Sansculotte.
The widow of Capet thrust out in her scorn
The thick lip with which ladies of Hapsburg are born.
“But Frenchmen and Britons have never been blessed
With a scrap of good-nature: good-nature’s possessed
By the German alone, who good-natured remains
When the worst and the reddest of Terrors reigns.
The German would always his Majesty treat
With the utmost respect, as is proper and meet.
“In the grandest and royallest chariot-and-six,
Whereto the sad servants black trappings affix,
With the coachman flooding the box with his tears,
Will a German monarch, one of these years,
From all that might ruffle his feelings be screened,
And with loyal politeness be guillotined.”
Space must be found finally for the shorter of the two best of Mr. Joynes’s seventeen renderings from Georg Herwegh, the other being the humorous verses entitled “The Heathen”.
“COLD COMFORT.
“Yes, thou shalt live and see good days;
Eternal joys shall crown thy head,
’Mid happy homes of prayer and praise;
But—thou must first be dead.
“Thou shalt from star to star ascend,
Thyself a star, too, at their side,
In spheres of bliss that knows no end;
But—thou must first have died.
“Thou shalt, like Brutus once, be free,
Like Brutus when the Tarquin fled;
Yea, all thy chains shall fail from thee;
But—thou must first be dead.
“When knaves in hell’s hot pits are laid,
Good angels shall thy footsteps guide;
Thou shalt be kissed and not betrayed;
But—thou must first have died.
“What gain to wrecks on rocky shore
That storms are hushed and clouds have fled?
Larks do not sunward long to soar,
Claw-clutched by hawks, and dead.”
The section of translations from song writers of less reputation is naturally inferior, and contains nothing so well worth quoting.
Our Corner, May 1, 1888, pp. 311-315
Book Reviewed: Songs of a Revolutionary Epoch