Page:The Pharsalia of Lucan; (IA cu31924026485809).pdf/18
Jonson's powerful blank verse might possibly have given us a more adequate rendering of the terse and pointed style of Lucan than even Dryden's heroics. But the fact remains that there is no good English version of the work.
Marlowe's translation of Book I. has dignity and force; but the movement is slow, and it wants dash. The Elizabethan poet seems to have thought it necessary to limit the number of his lines by those of the original; the result is that some of the ideas are not reproduced. Among many powerful lines there are weak ones, and he does not always rise to the level of the stronger passages. The famous line
has not yet been well translated, and perhaps never will be; but when Marlowe wrote
The gods abetted, Cato liked the other,
he was hardly equal either to Lucan or himself. I quote a short passage as a fair specimen of the whole:
With crack of riven air and hideous sound,
Filling the world, leaps out and throws forth fire,
Affrights poor fearful men, and blasts their eyes
With overthwarting flames, and raging shoots
Alongst the air, and not resisting it
Falls and returns and shivers where it lights.
Lines 151–157.
Sir Thomas May's translation (published about 1631) is in the heroic metre. It contains passages of some merit; but it is extremely unequal and is disfigured by diction frequently obscure, and by a fashion of rhyming which to modern readers is uncouth and almost repulsive. He keeps, generally speaking, fairly close to the original, yet shrinks from some of the passages, particularly from those which are harder and more abstruse. I will give some short extracts illustrative of my meaning: