as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. She
has, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictory
episodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into a
cycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When Lady
Gregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something more
of her own than a "connecting sentence." Although she has labored
carefully to keep herself out of the stories, and although, if you have
read only her versions of them, you may feel that she has succeeded in
keeping herself out of them, you will recognize, if you turn to her
originals in O'Curry or in Whitley Stokes or in Standish Hayes O'Grady,
that she has added that all-important thing, a personality. Some
scholars object to this as "too literary." And some literary men would
rather have the old stories, they say, "just as they are" There is the
crux. How can we get them, even in an exact translation, "just as they
are"? We cannot. This is not the place to discuss this most vexed
question of translation, but I must go into it so far as to point again
to the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by an
interpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made upon
the listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than if
the translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obvious
fact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort or
that, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenth
century, will make a very different effect on the reader of to-day. As
Lady Gregory points out, the description of the contortion of Cuchulain
in his fight with Ferdiad seems very unheroic to us, and is therefore
best left out of the translation, or, if retained, conveyed in terms
that will make an effect on us similar to the effect the detailed
description had on the audience of the old bards. Here again, however,
is trouble. How can we get that effect? We cannot surely, but an
imaginative translation by one who is scholar and _litterateur_ both
will take us nearest to it. We want, as a matter of fact, both kinds of
translations, the interpretative and artistic translation of Lady
Gregory and the literal translation of Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady. The
one is needed to check the other. We would have a gauge by which to
measure how much such such a translator as Lady Gregory has taken from
and added to the old story. We would know