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CHAPTER III. ON SOME QUESTIONS OP TRANSLATION. How many questions at once present themselves, many among them of an almost insuperable difficulty in their solution, so soon as it is attempted to transfer any great work from one language into another! Let it be only some high and original work of human genius, the Divina Commedia, for instance, and how many problems, at first sight seeming insoluble, and which only genius can solve, even it being often content to do so imperfectly, to evade rather than to solve them, at once offer themselves to the translator 1 The loftier and deeper, the more original a poem or other composition may be, the more novel and unusual the sphere in which it moves, by so much the more these difficulties will multiply. They can therefore nowhere be so many and so great as in the renderingof that Book which is sole of its kind ; which reaches far higher heights and far deeper depths than any other; which has words of God and not of man for its substance ; while the importance of success or failure, with the far-reaching issues which will follow on the one or the other, sinks in each other case into absolute insignificance as compared with their importance here. Only to few translators, and to them only on rare occasions, is it given to deserve the magnificent praise which Jerome gives to Hilary, and to his translations from the Greek (Ep., 33): " Quasi captives sensits in suam linguam victoris jure transposuit." Thus, the missionary translator, if he be at all aware of the awful implement which he is wielding, of the tremendous crisis in a people's spiritual life which has arrived, when their language is first made the vehicle of revealed truths, willoften tremble at the work he has in hand; tremble lest he should be permanently lowering or ...
