Note 118 — Chapter XII · THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
Reading edition
The Godfrey of Bulloigne of Fairfax has been praised well beyond the full extent of its merits. The sober fact concerning it is that though the language has a real interest, the translation has not the merit of great accuracy, and it is wanting in those flashes of original power with which Fairfax’s contemporaries seldom failed to redeem their infidelity to their author. He, on the contrary, is too often far below Tasso, and he is addicted to the detestable practice of replacing the simplicity of the Italian by classic commonplaces. Now and then he is inept, or shirks a difficulty which he ought to have faced. Examples of all three vices may be found in the beginning of the fifteenth canto. Tasso opens with the simple and direct words—
“Già richiamava il bel nascente raggio All’ opere ogni animal che ’n terra alberga.”
For this Fairfax writes—
“The rosy-fingered morn with gladsome ray Rose to her task from old Tithonus’ lap”—
the commonplace of a boy doing a copy of Latin verse. In the second stanza, where the Italian has—
“Erano essi già sorti, e l’arme intorno Alle robuste membra avean già messe”—
Fairfax renders—
“They started up, and every tender limb In sturdy steel and stubborn plate they dight.”
The tender limbs of two hardened old soldiers is surely weak.
At the end of the next stanza, we have in the Italian—
“E in poppa quella Che guidar gli dovea, fatal donzella.”
The word “fatal,” an appropriate epithet for Fortune, who sits in the stern to steer the boat, disappears in Fairfax, and we get the colourless line—
“Wherein a damsel sate the stern to guide.”
And these are not exceptions. Fairfax constantly gives the inapplicable adjective, or the vague general term, where Tasso is faultless in his precision.