ry slight
advantage over its predecessor, while the loss of vividness and charm is
unquestionable.

To carry the test yet farther, let us compare the three lines, in their
two successive versions, with the prose version of Professor Norton,
which reads as follows: "I have seen ere now at the beginning of the day
the eastern region all rosy, while the rest of heaven was beautiful with
fair, clear sky." Here the prose translator rightly discards the "oft"
of the earlier Longfellow version, but his "at the beginning" is surely
nearer to the "at the approach" of the first version than to the less
literal "as day began" of the second. The prose "the eastern region"
conforms to the second version "the eastern hemisphere," but surely the
Italian "la parte oriental" is more nearly met by "the orient sky" than
by either of these heavier and more geographical substitutes, which have
a flavor of the text-book. Both the Longfellow versions have "the other
heaven," which is a literal rendering of "l'altro ciel," whereas "the
rest of heaven" is a shade looser in expression, and "fair, clear sky"
also forfeits the condensation of "light serene" or "fair serene," of
which two phrases the first seems the better, for reasons already given.
On the whole, if we take Professor Norton's prose translation as the
standard, Longfellow's later version seems to me to gain scarcely
anything upon the earlier in literalness, while it loses greatly in
freshness and triumphant joyousness.

Nor is this in any respect an unreasonable criticism. For what does a
translation exist, after all, if not to draw us toward that quality in
the original which the translator, even at his best, can rarely reach?
Goethe says that "the translator is a person who introduces you to a
veiled beauty; he makes you long for the loveliness behind the veil,"
and we have in the notes to his "West-Oestliche Divan" the celebrated
analysis of the three forms of translation. He there says, "Translation
is of three kinds: First, the prosaic prose translation, which is useful
in enriching the language of the translator with new ideas, but gives up
all poetic art, and reduces even the poetic enthusiasm to one level
watery plain. Secondly, the re-creation of the poem as a new poem,
rejecting or altering all that seems foreign to the translator's
nationality, producing a paraphrase which might, in the primal sense of
the word, be called a parody. And, thirdly, ... the highest and last