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 of the puritan party. He urged reformation of the rubric on the following points, namely: the abolition of private baptism and baptism by women; private communion; the vestures ‘which Bishop Ridley had condemned as too bad for a fool in a play;’ the reading of the apocrypha; pluralities, and insufficient ministry. Nothing definite resulted from the conference. Strype wrongly says ‘the ministers were convinced.’ Travers remained a nonconformist until his death.

Alvey, the master of the Temple, on his deathbed (10 May 1583) recommended Travers as his successor. The benchers petitioned for him, and Burghley's opinion was sought by the queen (, Whitgift, i. 342). The appointment of the master lay with the crown. Archbishop Whitgift insisted that Travers must be re-ordained according to the rites of the church of England. Travers refused on the ground that it would invalidate all ordinations of foreign churches, and annul every marriage or baptism at which he had officiated (cf. Lansdowne MSS. xlii. 90, 1. 78, reasons why he will not be reordained, one paper apparently in Travers's hand, with marginal comments by Whitgift; printed by Strype in ‘Life of Whitgift,’ App. bk. iii. No. xxx.). Richard Hooker [q. v.] was appointed on 17 March 1585; but on 4 Nov. 1586 the benchers made an order that ‘Mr. Travers's pension should be continued, and he remain in the parsonage-house’ (‘Register of the Temple,’ in manuscript Chron. Acc. of Nonconformity). Thus Travers remained afternoon lecturer, and in the afternoon confuted ‘in the language of Geneva’ what Hooker had said in the morning, and what he again vindicated on the following Sunday. ‘Some say the congregation ebbed in the morning and flowed in the afternoon’ (, bk. ix. p. 216). The church was crowded by lawyers, who were deeply interested in the controversy between the preachers. One half of Travers's auditors sided with him, and consequently it was said ‘one half of the lawyers in England’ became ‘counsel against the ecclesiastical government thereof’ (ib. p. 218). To bring the debate to a conclusion, a prohibition was served upon Travers as he was ascending the pulpit stairs on a Sunday afternoon in 1586, and he quietly dismissed the congregation. It is noticeable that the disputants, who were connected by marriage—Travers's brother John having married, 25 July 1580, Hooker's sister Alice—throughout esteemed each other ‘not as private enemies, but as public champions of their separate parties.’ Hooker alludes in generous terms to Travers, and attributes to his criticism the reflection and study which resulted in the ‘Ecclesiastical Polity.’ Travers's ‘Supplication’ to the council was privately printed and circulated. It and Hooker's ‘Answer’ were both printed at Oxford in 1612, and are in all editions of Hooker's works.

After his inhibition Travers remained in London, holding meetings, when he dared, at his own house (, Church Hist. bk. ix. p. 207). It was apparently in 1591 that Travers was invited by Andrew Melville [q. v.], the prefect, to occupy a chair of divinity at St. Andrews University (ib. p. 215).

Soon afterwards Burghley procured him the appointment as provost of the newly founded Trinity College, Dublin, where he succeeded an old Cambridge friend, Adam Loftus [q. v.], the first holder of the office. He was sworn in on 5 Dec. 1595, receiving a salary of 40l. a year. He appealed to the queen through Michael Hicks, secretary to Lord Burghley, to supplement the poor endowment with a grant of 100l. a year in concealed lands (Lansdowne MSS. cviii. 59, cxv. 46).

Travers resigned on 10 Oct. 1598 because ‘he doth find he cannot have his health there’ (, Hist. of Univ. of Dublin, App. pp. 20 n., 372), and returned to England. Archbishop Ussher, whose name is erroneously said to have been entered as his first pupil at Dublin, frequently visited him in London, where he lived in great obscurity and, it is said, poverty. On 5 March 1624 he was glad to receive 5l. from a legacy for silenced ministers (, Manuscripts); but on his death in January 1634, unmarried, he appears to have been wealthy. By his will (P. C. C. 7 Sadler), dated 14 (proved 24) Jan. 1634, he bequeathed, besides legacies to his nephews and nieces, 100l. each to Emmanuel and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge, and to Trinity College, Dublin, to educate students for the ministry; his gold plate, harps, globes, compasses, and 50l. for a Latin sermon passed to Sion College, London.

Both the ‘Ecclesiasticæ Disciplinæ’ and the English translation (which was probably printed at Middelburg) are rare, especially with the folding table. The reprint, ‘A Fvl and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline ovt of the Word of God, and of the declining of the Church of England from the same. At Geneva .,’ 8vo, is also rare. It was again reprinted [London], 1617, 4to. This book has been confounded by every writer since Strype and Neal with ‘De Disciplina Ecclesiæ sacra, ex Dei verbo descripta,’ a different work


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 by Travers, although apparently it is not extant, which was translated, probably also by Cartwright, as ‘A Brief and Plaine Declaration concerning the desires of all those faithful ministers that have and do seeke for the discipline and reformation of the Church of England. At London, printed by Robert Walde-graue,’ 1584, 8vo (Brit. Mus.). If this book were not written by Travers, it was at any rate referred to him for revision (, Dangerous Positions, 1693, p. 76), and was being reprinted at Cambridge in 1585 when all the copies at the university press were seized by Whitgift's order and burned. From one remaining in Cartwright's study a brief set of rules was compiled by a provincial synod (which Cartwright attended from Warwick) at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1589; these rules were subscribed in 1590 by five hundred ministers, and reprinted ‘by authority’ of the Westminster assembly as ‘A Directory of Church Government,’ London, 1644, and more recently in facsimile, with a valuable introduction by Peter Lorimer, London, 1872, 4to. It is the latter work which Soames (Elizabethan Relig. Hist.) and Dr. Dexter (Congregat. of Three Hundred Years) refer to as the ‘text-book of presbyterianism.’

(d. 1620), brother of the above, graduated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and was chosen fellow 1569. He died rector of Farringdon, Devonshire, 1620, leaving by his wife Alice Hooker four sons—Elias, Samuel, John, and Walter—who all took orders. The youngest, Walter Travers, chaplain to Charles I, rector of Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire, vicar of Wellington, Somerset, and rector of Pitminster, Devonshire, died 7 April 1646, and was buried in Exeter Cathedral; his son Thomas, M.A. of Magdalen College, 1644, lecturer at St. Andrews, Plymouth, was ejected from St. Columb Major, Cornwall, in 1662 (, Noncon. Mem. i. 349).

[Besides the authorities already given, see Wood's Fasti, i. 204; Nares's Life of Burghley, iii. 355; Heylyn's Hist. of Presbyterians, pp. 314 seq.; Strype's Annals, vol. iii. pt. i. pp. 179, 352–4, 413, 632, 493–4, vol. ii. pt. i. p. 277, pt. ii. p. 174; Elrington's Life of Usher, i. 15, 16; Soames's Elizabethan Relig. Hist. pp. 382, 395, 443, 444–5, 456; Borlase's Reduction of Ireland, pp. 147–9; Bagwell's Ireland under the Tudors, p. 471; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1628–9, p. 542; Killen's Eccl. Hist. of Ireland, i. 452; Urwick's Early Hist. of Trin. Coll. Dublin, p. 17; Hunt's Religious Thought in England, i. 61–73. A valuable account of the ‘Disciplina’ is given in App. C. p. 631 of Mullinger's Hist. of Cambridge, but the edition of 1644 of the Directory of Church Government is treated as a new translation of the earlier work. Roger Morrice's manuscript Account of Nonconformity, in three folio volumes with index, in Dr. Williams's Libr.; cf. arts. , and .]  TRAVIS, GEORGE (1741–1797), archdeacon of Chester, only son of John Travis of Heyside, near Shaw, Lancashire, by Hannah his wife, was born in 1741, and educated by his uncle, the Rev. Benjamin Travis, incumbent of Royton, Lancashire, and at the Manchester grammar school, which he entered in January 1756. He matriculated from St. John's College, Cambridge, as a sizar in 1761, and graduated B.A. in 1765 and M.A. in 1768. He was fifth senior optime and chancellor's senior medallist in 1765. He was ordained in that year, was appointed vicar of Eastham, Cheshire, in 1766, and rector of Handley in the same county in 1787, and he held both benefices till his death. In 1783 he was made a prebendary of Chester Cathedral, and in 1786 archdeacon of Chester. He is described as a ‘gentleman and scholar,’ and is said to have been ‘familiarly acquainted with the law of tithes.’ He came into prominence in 1784 by the publication of his ‘Letters to Edward Gibbon,’ in defence of the genuineness of the disputed verse in St. John's First Epistle, v. 7, which speaks of the three heavenly witnesses. The first edition was printed at Chester, the second in London in 1785, and the third and enlarged edition in 1794. He is remembered chiefly by having called forth Porson as an antagonist. The great critic's famous ‘Letters to Archdeacon Travis in Answer to Defence of the Three Heavenly Witnesses’ appeared in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ in 1788–9, and were republished in 1790. An additional letter is given by Kidd in his edition of Porson's ‘Tracts, &c.’ (1815). Gibbon himself said ‘the brutal insolence of Mr. Travis's challenge can only be excused by the absence of learning, judgment, and humanity.’ Porson's answer to the ‘wretched Travis’ is justly described by Gibbon as ‘the most acute and accurate piece of criticism which has appeared since the days of Bentley.’ Travis was also attacked by Herbert Marsh in his ‘Letters to Mr. Archdeacon Travis,’ 1795 (cf., St. John's College, ed. Mayor, 1869, ii. 757).

Travis married, in 1766, Ann, daughter of James Stringfellow of Whitfield, Derbyshire, and died without issue on 24 Feb. 1797 at Hampstead. A monument, with a profile portrait, was erected to him in Chester Cathedral. Two miniature portraits of Travis were in the possession of

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 the late Rev. Thomas Corser of Stand in 1866.

[Manchester School Register (Chetham Soc.), i. 67; Gent. Mag. 1797, i. 351, 433; Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, ix. 79; Gibbon's Autobiographies, ed. Murray, 1896, p. 322; Watson's Life of Porson, 1861, p. 57; Ormerod's Cheshire, 2nd edit. i. 292; Wirral Notes and Queries, 1892, i. (with engraving of monument at Chester); Kilvert's Memoirs of Bishop Hurd, 1860, pp. 153, 318.]  TREBY, GEORGE (1644?–1700), judge, son of Peter Treby of Plympton St. Maurice, Devonshire, by his wife Joan, daughter of John Snellinge of Chaddlewood in the same county, was born about 1644. He matriculated at Oxford from Exeter College on 13 July 1660, but, leaving without a degree, was admitted in 1663 a student at the Middle Temple, where he was called to the bar in 1671, and elected a bencher in January 1680–1. He was returned to parliament on 5 March 1676–7 for Plympton, which seat he retained, being then recorder of the borough, at the ensuing general election on 24 Feb. 1678–9 and throughout the reign of Charles II. Having proved his zeal for the protestant cause as chairman of the committee of secrecy for the investigation of the ‘popish plot,’ and as one of the managers of the impeachment of the five popish lords (April 1679–November 1680), he succeeded Jeffreys as recorder of London on 2 Dec., was knighted on 20 Jan. 1680–1, and placed on the commission of the peace for the city in February. He took the preliminary examination of Edward Fitzharris [q. v.], who afterwards, without apparent reason, accused him of subornation. He ably defended Sir Patience Ward [q. v.] on his prosecution for perjury by the Duke of York, and proved himself a stout champion of immemorial rights of the corporation of London during the proceedings on the quo warranto. He also pleaded for the defendant Sandys in the great case which established the monopoly of the East India Company (Trinity term 1683). Dismissed from the recordership in consequence on 12 June 1683, he appeared in the high commission court on 17 Feb. 1685–1686 to justify the rejection by Exeter College of the proposed new Petrean fellow, and was one of the counsel for the seven bishops (29–30 June 1688); otherwise he took hardly any part in public affairs, declining even the reinstatement in the recordership proffered on the restoration of the city charter, 11 Oct. 1688, until the landing of the Prince of Orange, when he accepted it (16 Dec.). On the approach of the prince to London the recorder headed the procession of city magnates who went out to meet him, and delivered a high-flown address of welcome (20 Dec. 1688). In the Convention parliament he sat for Plympton, which he continued to represent until his elevation to the bench. He supported the resolution declaring the throne vacant by abdication, but resisted the proposal to commute the hereditary revenues of the crown for an annual grant.

Appointed solicitor-general in March 1688–9, Treby took a prominent part in the discussions of the following month on the oaths bill. On 4 May he was made attorney-general, in which capacity he piloted the bill of rights through the House of Commons. Retaining the recordership, he was placed on the commissions appointed 1 and 9 March 1689–90 to exercise the office of deputy-lieutenant and lieutenant of the city of London. In the parliamentary session of 1691 he gave a qualified support to the treason procedure bill. On 16 Nov. the same year he conveyed to the king at Kensington the assurances of the support of the corporation of London in the struggle with Louis XIV. On 3 May 1692, having first qualified (27 April) by taking the degree of serjeant-at-law, he was appointed chief justice of the common pleas, upon which he resigned the recordership (7 June). He attended with his colleagues the trial of Lord Mohun in Westminster Hall (31 Jan.–4 Feb. 1692–1693), and concurred in advising the acquittal of the prisoner. His exchequer chamber judgment in the bankers' case, on 4 June 1695, anticipated the principal arguments upon which Somers afterwards reversed the decision of the court of exchequer. He was a member of the special commission before which Charnock, King, Keyes, and other members of the assassination plot were tried at the Old Bailey (11–24 March 1695–6), and presided (9–13 May) at the trial of Peter Cook, another of the conspirators, who was found guilty but was afterwards pardoned. By virtue of successive royal commissions Treby sat as speaker of the House of Lords during the frequent illnesses of Somers, 31 Jan.–9 March, 16 June, 28 July, 1 Sept., 23 Nov.–13 Dec. 1696, 3–18 and 25 Feb., 18–19 May, 23 June 1698, 16–18 Jan., 1–18 April, 20 April–2 May, 13 July, 28 Sept. 1699, and 15–17 Jan. 1700. He was also one of the commissioners of the great seal in the interval (17 April–31 May 1700) between its surrender by Somers and its delivery to Sir Nathan Wright [q. v.] He died early in the following December at his house in Kensington Gravel-pits. His remains were interred in the Temple church.


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Works

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 Engraved portraits of him are at Lincoln's Inn and in the National Portrait Gallery.

Treby married four times. He had issue neither by his first wife (married by license dated 15 Nov. 1675), Anna Blount, a widow, born Grosvenor; nor by his second, whose maiden name was Standish. His third and fourth wives were respectively Dorothy, daughter of Ralph Grainge of the Inner Temple (license dated 14 Dec. 1684), and Mary Brinley (license dated 6 Jan. 1692–3), who brought him 10,000l. By his third wife he had a son, who survived him, and a daughter who died in infancy. By his fourth wife he had a son. His son by his third wife, George Treby, M.P. for Plympton 1708–34, appointed secretary at war 24 Dec. 1718, and teller of the exchequer 25 April 1724, was father of George Treby, M.P. for Dartmouth 1722–47, and lord of the treasury in 1741. The last-mentioned George Treby purchased the estate of Goodamoor, Plympton St. Mary, which remained in his posterity until the present century.

Sir George Treby's   Steady temper, condescending mind, Indulgent to distress, to merit kind, Knowledge sublime, sharp judgment, piety, From pride, from censure, from moroseness free— with other excellent qualities, are lauded to the skies by Nahum Tate, who had probably tasted of his bounty (Broadside in British Museum). He is also panegyrised in a ‘Pindaric’ ode printed in ‘Poems on State Affairs’ (1707, iv. 365–8). Evelyn (Diary, 8 Dec. 1700) mourned him as one of the few learned lawyers of his age, and this character is amply sustained by his arguments and decisions (see, State Trials, vii. 1308, viii. 1099, ix. 312, x. 383, xii. 376, 1034–47, 1248, 1379, xiii. 1, 64, 139, 386, 451, xiv. 23; Modern Reports, iii–iv.; Pleadings and Arguments of Mr. Heneage Finch, Sir Robert Sawyer, and Mr. Henry Pollexfen, &c., London, 1690, fol.; and The Arguments of the Lord-keeper, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Baron Powell, when they gave judgment for the Earl of Bath, London, 1693, fol.). He is understood to have contributed the notes to Dyer's ‘Reports’ [see ].

Treby edited ‘A Collection of Letters and other Writings relating to the horrid Popish Plot, printed from the Originals,’ London, 1681, 2 pts. fol.; and he was reputed to be the author of ‘Truth Vindicated; or a Detection of the Aspersions and Scandals cast upon Sir Robert Clayton and Sir George Treby, Justices, and Slingsby Bethell and Henry Cornish, Sheriffs, of the City of London, in a Paper published in the name of Dr. Francis Hawkins, Minister of the Tower, intituled “The Confession of Edward Fitzharris, Esq.,”’ London, 1681, 4to.

His ‘Speech to the Prince of Orange, Dec. 20th, 1688,’ is among the political tracts in the British Museum, and in ‘Fourth Collection of Papers relating to the present Juncture of Affairs in England,’ 1688. Two certificates on petitions referred to him in 1689, and his learned opinion on the incidence of the cider tax, dated 30 March 1691, are in Addit. MSS. 6681 pp. 460–3 and 492, and 6693 p. 463.

[Le Neve's Pedigrees of Knights (Harl. Soc.), p. 343; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500–1714; Boase's Hist. of Exeter Coll. (Oxford Hist. Soc.) p. cxxxi; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iv. 499; North's Lives, i. 211; Official List of Recorders of the City of London, 1850; Evelyn's Diary, 30 Nov. 1680, 4 Oct. 1683, 4 July 1696; Luttrell's Brief Relation of State Affairs; Clarendon and Rochester Corresp. ii. 296; Commons' Journals, ix. 582, 601, 663, 708; Official Returns of M.P.'s; Parl. Hist.; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1689–90, pp. 11–12, 487; Burnet's Own Time, fol. pp. 497–8; Clarke's Life of James II, ii. 299; Lords' Journals, xv. 656–98, 748–50, xvi. 172–9, 206–13, 218, 289–92, 326, 360, 430–441, 443–61, 470, 473, 493, 495, 531; Genealogist, ed. Selby, p. 84; Marriage Lic. Vic.-Gen. Cant. 1660–79 (Harl. Soc.); Marriage Lic. Vic.-Gen. Cant. 1679–87 (Harl. Soc.); Marriage Lic. Fac. Offic. Cant. (Harl. Soc.); Noble's Continuation of Granger's Biogr. Hist. of England, 1806, i. 166; Mackintosh's Hist. of the Revolution in 1688, p. 555; Hist. MSS. Comm. 2nd Rep. App. p. 22, 5th Rep. App. p. 383, 7th Rep. App. p. 205, 9th Rep. App. i. 282, 12th Rep. App. vii. 230; Polwhele's Devonshire, p. 452; Cotton's Account of Plympton St. Maurice; Burke's Landed Gentry, 1863; Foss's Lives of the Judges.]  TREDENHAM, JOHN (1668–1710), politician, was the elder surviving son of Sir Joseph Tredenham of Tregonan, St. Ewe, Cornwall (M.P. for St. Mawes in that county, and for Totnes), who died on 25 April 1707, and was buried in the south aisle of Westminster Abbey. Sir Joseph married, about 9 May 1666, Elizabeth (d. 1731, aged 96), only daughter of Sir Edward Seymour, third baronet, of Berry Pomeroy, near Totnes, and sister of Sir Edward Seymour [q. v.], the speaker of the House of Commons.

John was baptised on 28 March 1668, and admitted as student of the Inner Temple in 1682. He matriculated from Christ Church, Oxford, on 6 May 1684, and in the following year contributed a set of verses to the university's collection of poems on the accession of James II, but he left Oxford without taking a degree. The family was


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 attached to tory principles, controlled the Cornish borough of St. Mawes, and exercised great influence in the adjoining boroughs. John contested the constituency of Truro in 1689, and petitioned the House of Commons against the return of the two whig members, but did not succeed in obtaining the seat. When his relative, Henry Seymour, elected to sit for their family borough of Totnes, the vacancy at St. Mawes was filled by Tredenham (9 April 1690), and he represented it until the dissolution in 1705. He was then out of parliament for a time, but on 21 Nov. 1707 he succeeded his father at St. Mawes, and sat for it continuously until his death. The Cornish historian, Tonkin, describes him as an ornament to the lower house.

The father had been displaced by William III early in 1698 from the governorship of the castle of St. Mawes, and the son declined to sign the voluntary association of loyalty to William III (1695–6). A story is told in the life of John Mottley that the officers of the Earl of Nottingham were on one occasion upon the look-out for Colonel John Mottley, father of the play-writer and a well-known Jacobite spy; Mottley used frequently to dine with John Tredenham at the tavern of the Blue Posts, and when the officers made a raid upon that inn, Tredenham got arrested instead of his friend. He was brought before Nottingham, and his papers, which he asserted to be the groundwork of a play, were examined. In a short time Tredenham was set at liberty by the earl, with the remark that he had ‘perused the play and heard the statement,’ but could find no trace of a plot in either.

In 1701, after the death of James II and the recognition by Louis XIV of his son as the new king of England, orders were given that Poussin, the French agent, should be instructed to leave this country. He was not at home, but was found at supper (Tuesday, 23 Sept.) at the Blue Posts with Tredenham, Anthony Hammond (1668–1738) [q. v.], and Charles Davenant [q. v.] This incident formed the subject of much discussion, and cost the tory party dear. The Jacobites in parliament were called ‘French pensioners’ and ‘Poussineers,’ and the two other culprits tried to put the blame on Tredenham. It was reckoned that at the following general election this supper lost the tories thirty seats, and those of Hammond and Davenant among them (, Hist. of England, v. 299, 303; Corresp. of Clarendon and Rochester, 1828 ed. ii. 398; Coke MSS., Hist. MSS. Comm. 12th Rep. App. ii. 428, 436).

Tredenham died ‘by a fall from his coach-box’ on 25 Dec. 1710. He married in 1689 Anne, daughter and sole heiress of Sir John Lloyd, bart., of the Forest, Carmarthenshire.

TREDGOLD, THOMAS (1788–1829), engineer, was born at Brandon, near the city of Durham, on 22 Aug. 1788. After receiving a slight elementary education at the village school he was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a cabinet-maker at Durham. He remained with him six years, devoting his leisure to the study of mathematics and architecture, and taking advantage of the holidays granted on race days to acquire a knowledge of perspective. In 1808, after his apprenticeship had expired, he proceeded to Scotland, where he laboured for five years as a joiner and journeyman carpenter. To gratify his desire for knowledge he denied himself sleep and relaxation, and thereby permanently impaired his health. On leaving Scotland he went to London, where he entered the office of his relative, William Atkinson, architect to the ordnance, with whom he lived for six years, and whom he served for a still longer period. At this time ‘his studies combined all the subjects connected with architecture and engineering; and in order that he might be able to read the best scientific works on the latter subject, he taught himself the French language. He also paid great attention to chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, and perfected his knowledge of the higher branches of mathematics.’

In 1820 he published ‘Elementary Principles of Carpentry’ (London, 4to), in which he considered the problems connected with the resistance of timber in relation to making floors, roofs, bridges, and other structures. He also appended an essay on the nature and properties of timber. With the exception of Barlow's ‘Essay on the Strength of Timber and other Materials’ in 1817 [see ], Tredgold's work was the first serious attempt in England to determine practically and scientifically the data of resistance. Before his time engineers relied chiefly on the formulæ and results attained by Buffon and by Peter van Musschenbroek in his ‘Physicæ Experimentales


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 et Geometricæ’ (Leyden, 1729, 4to). Some of Tredgold's results were taken from Dumont's ‘Parallèle’ (Paris, 1767, fol.). Several editions of Tredgold's work have been published, and it remains an authority on the subject. The latest edition, by Edward Wyndham Tarn, appeared in 1886 (London, 4to). This work was followed in 1822 by ‘A Practical Essay on the Strength of Cast Iron and other Metals’ (London, 8vo; 5th edit., by [q. v.], London, 1860–1, 8vo), which is mainly founded on the works of  (1773–1829) [q. v.] Though they were long the standard text-books of English engineers, the scientific value of both these works is seriously impaired by Tredgold's lack of sufficient mathematical training, and more particularly by his ignorance of the theory of elasticity, which often leads him into error and always renders his reasoning obscure.

In 1823 the increase of business and the demands of literary labour led him to resign his position in Atkinson's office and to set up on his own account. In 1824 he published ‘Principles of Warming and Ventilating Public Buildings’ (London, 8vo), which reached a second edition in the same year (3rd edit., with appendix by Bramah, 1836). In 1825 appeared ‘A Practical Treatise on Railroads and Carriages’ (London, 8vo; 2nd edit. London, 1835), which was followed by a pamphlet addressed to [q. v.], president of the board of trade, and entitled ‘Remarks on Steam Navigation and its Protection, Regulation, and Encouragement’ (London, 1825, 8vo), which contained several suggestions for the prevention of accidents. His last important work, ‘The Steam Engine,’ appeared in 1827 (London, 8vo). A new edition, greatly enlarged, by Westley Stoker Barker Woolhouse, was published in 1838 (London, 4to); a third edition appeared in 1850–3 (London, 4to), and a French translation by F. N. Mellet in 1838 (Paris, 4to).

Tredgold died, worn out by study, on 28 Jan. 1829, and was buried in St. John's Wood chapel cemetery. He left in poor circumstances a widow, three daughters, and a son Thomas, who held the post of engineer in the office of stamps of the East India Company at Calcutta, where he died on 4 May 1853. The elder Tredgold's portrait and autograph are prefixed to the later editions of his ‘Steam Engine.’ Besides the works mentioned, Tredgold edited Smeaton's ‘Hydraulic Tracts’ (1826, 8vo; 2nd edit. 1837), added notes and articles to Robertson Buchanan's ‘Practical Essays on Millwork’ (ed. Rennie, London, 1841, 8vo), and revised Peter Nicholson's ‘New Practical Builder’ (London, 1861, 4to). He also contributed the articles on joinery and stone masonry to the supplement of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ (ed. 1824), and contributed numerous technical articles to the ‘Philosophical Magazine’ and to Thomson's ‘Annals of Philosophy.’

TREDWAY, LETICE MARY (1593–1677), English abbess in Paris, was the daughter of Sir Walter Tredway of Beckley, Buckinghamshire, and afterwards of Northamptonshire, by Elizabeth Weyman. Born in 1593 at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and losing her father in 1604, she took the veil in 1615 at the Augustinian convent, Douai, which in 1624 was removed to the neighbouring village of Sin-le-Noble, and took the title of Notre-Dame de Beaulieu. At Douai she made the acquaintance of [q. v.], and they conceived the idea of establishing an English scholastic nunnery in that town. Pending its erection English girls were to be received at Sin, and in 1632 two accordingly arrived, escaping from Dover, where they had been arrested. In the following year Carre returned from London with two others; but meanwhile [q. v.], president of Douai College, had persuaded Lady Tredway, as she was styled, to fix on Paris as the site. Carre consequently went thither to consult [q. v.], bishop of Chalcedon, who by his influence with Richelieu, and notwithstanding the opposition of Archbishop Gondi, obtained royal sanction for the scheme, letters patent being granted in 1633. A house was hired in the Rue d'Enfer, and was opened in 1634 with five pupils. The numbers increased, and in 1635 the convent was transferred to the Faubourg St.-Antoine; but that site proved unhealthy, and in 1638 four houses were purchased in the Rue du Fossé St.-Victor, one of which had been occupied by De Baïf, whose musical and literary gatherings were the nucleus of the French academy. The buildings were remodelled, and a chapel was erected, which was consecrated by Smith in 1639. The chief English catholic families began sending their daughters as pupils, and lady boarders, mostly French, were also admitted; but till 1655 the convent was debarred from taking French pupils. During


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 the civil war, the nuns' dowries having been invested in England, the payment of interest was suspended, and the nunnery was in great straits, until the painter Le Brun, a neighbour, obtained pecuniary assistance from Chancellor Séguier. In 1653 Carre, who was resident chaplain, dedicated to Lady Tredway his English translation of Thomas à Kempis. In 1644 her religious jubilee was celebrated; in 1674 she resigned, and in 1677 she died. She was buried in the chapel, which, with the rest of the building, was demolished in 1860. The convent was then removed to Neuilly, where her portrait is still preserved.

Humphrey Tredway, rector of Little Offord, Buckinghamshire, and author of Latin verses on Sir Philip Sidney (, Athenæ Cantabr. ii. 530), was of the same family.

TREE, ANN MARIA (1801-1862), actress and vocalist. [See .]

TREE, ELLEN (1805-1880), actress. [See .]

TREGELLAS, WALTER HAWKEN (1831–1894), miscellaneous writer, born at Truro, Cornwall, on 10 July 1831, was the eldest son of John Tabois Tregellas (1792–1863), merchant at Truro, purser of Cornish mines, and author of many stories written in the local dialect of the county; John Tabois Tregellas married at St. Mary's, Truro, on 23 Oct. 1828, Anne (1801–1867), second daughter of Richard Hawken. Walter was educated under his uncle, John Hawken, at Trevarth school, Gwennap, from 1838 to 1845, and from 1845 to 1847 at the grammar school of Truro.

Tregellas was from youth fond of drawing, and won prizes as an artist at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, Falmouth, from 1846 to 1848. He began his active life as a draughtsman in the war office on 10 July 1855, was promoted to be second draughtsman on 28 Feb. 1860, rose to be chief draughtsman on 24 May 1866, and retained the post until 1 Aug. 1893. He died at Deal on 28 May 1894, and was buried in its cemetery on 30 May. He married at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, on 2 Nov. 1861, Zoe, third daughter of (1808–1869) [q. v.] His wife survives him; they had no issue.

Tregellas was the author of an anonymous volume on ‘China, the Country, History, and People,’ published by the Religious Tract Society (1867). He compiled Stanford's ‘Tourists' Guide to Cornwall’ (1878; 7th edit. revised by H. M. Whitley, 1895); two excellent volumes on ‘Cornish Worthies’ (London, 1884, 8vo); and ‘A History of the Horse Guards,’ 1880. A work on the history of the Tower of London is still in manuscript. He contributed papers to the ‘Archæological Journal’ (1864–6), the ‘Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall’ (1883, 1891), and to other periodicals.

His ‘Historical Sketch of the Defences of Malta’ was printed for the Royal Engineers’ Institute at Chatham in 1879, and ‘Historical Sketch of the Coast Defences of England’ appeared in the ‘occasional paper series’ of the engineers (xii. paper ii, 1886). A paper by him on ‘County Characteristics, Cornwall,’ came out in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ November 1887. The lives of many eminent Cornishmen were written by Tregellas in the first thirteen volumes of this dictionary.

TREGELLES, EDWIN OCTAVIUS (1806–1886), civil engineer and quaker minister, seventeenth and youngest child of Samuel Tregelles (1765–1831), by his wife Rebecca, daughter of Thomas Smith, a London banker, was born at Falmouth on 19 Oct. 1806. Leaving school at thirteen, he went to learn engineering at the Neath Abbey ironworks of his uncle, Peter Price, in South Wales. For some years after his marriage, in 1832, he was employed in superintending the introduction of lighting by gas into many towns in the south of England.

In 1835 Tregelles was appointed engineer of the Southampton and Salisbury railway, and was later engaged in surveying for the West Cornwall railway. He published in 1849 reports on the water supply and sewerage of Barnstaple and Bideford. He was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers on 5 March 1850, and resigned in 1861.

When only twenty-one Tregelles began to preach, and thenceforward in the intervals of professional engagements made several ministerial journeys. In 1844, during a long visit to the West Indies, he visited, in spite of a severe attack of yellow fever,


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Translation:Philosophical Writings of the Years 1860-1865/Translators

The tomb always ends up being right. Quite recently, an opportunity arose to render Shakespeare the highest appraisal and to obliterate the past. It was the glorious birthday of the Stratford poet, April 23rd, which came back around for the 300th time. After 300 years, humankind has something to say to a spirit long dishonored; it seems that Shakespeare showed up at France’s door. Paris rose up, poets, artists, historians extended a hand to this ghost around whom the poets spotted Hamlet, the artists, Prospero and the historians, Julius Caesar; the drunken savage, the barbarian buffoon, William Shakespeare showed up and the only thing noticed was the light; two centuries of mockery ended up as fascination and France said: welcome, you genius! Glory became real.

There has been a feeling in the shadow of something like the concurrence of our esteemed deceased; Moliere was supposedly seen smiling, Corneille, waving; no old detestations, no old injustices at all, not a protest, not a murmur, unanimous enthusiasm; and, at the same time, those who definitely value what underlies things, those who double their aversion for despots out of love for smartness, those who, wanting justice to be done also want justice to be rendered, those who contemplate, thoughtful loners concerned about the ideal, dreamers, all overcome, marvel at the pacification that has occurred regarding this majestic entry.

Shakespeare is the drunk savage. Yes, savage! He lives in the forest primeval. Yes, drunk. He is the imbiber of the ideal. He is the giant under the enormous branches. He is the one who holds the great gold cup and whose eyes are ablaze with all that he has imbibed. Shakespeare, like Aeschylus, like Job, like Isaiah, is one of the almighty ones of thought and of poetry, who, so to speak, can deal with anything mysterious and have the very depth of creation and who, like creation, externally transpose and present that depth through a prodigious profusion of forms and images, tossing out the darkness on flowers, on foliage, and on animate sources. Like Aeschylus, Shakespeare has the prodigality of what can’t be plumbed. What can’t be plumbed is inexhaustible. The more thought, the more animated is expression. Color emerges from blackness. Abyssal life is not unheard of. The fire in the center makes the volcano produce lava, the lava breeds oxide, the oxide looks for, finds and fertilizes the root, the root creates the flower; in this way the rose comes from the flame. The image likewise comes from the idea. Deep-seated work goes on in the brain of a genius. Idea, abstraction in the poet, becomes marvel and reality in the poem. What shadow there is inside the earth. What swarming on the surface. Absent that shadow, you wouldn’t have swarming. That blossoming of images and forms has its roots in all the mysteries. Those flowers prove the depth.

Like all such poets, Shakespeare has an absolute personality. He has a manner of his own for imagining, a manner of his own for creating, a manner of his own for producing; imagination, creation, production, three concentric phenomena mingled together in genius. Genius is the sphere of those bright flashes. Imagination invents, creation organizes, production realizes. Production is when matter is introduced into the idea, giving it solidity, rendering it palpable and visible, giving it shape, sound and color, fashioning for it a mouth to speak, feet to walk and wings to take flight, in a word, externalizing the poet’s idea while it simultaneously remains inside him, clinging through idiosyncrasy, the umbilical cord that links creations with their creator.

Among all the great poets, the phenomenon of inspiration is identical, but the difference of brain faculties varies it infinitely.

The idea springs from the brain: conception; the idea takes form: gestation; the form turns human: infancy; the human turns active and passive: work.

Idea into form, form into human, human into activity, with Shakespeare, as with Aeschylus, as with Plautus, as with Cervantes, this is the phenomenon that is summarized concretely as follows: life into drama.

In a masterpiece, all is an act of will. Shakespeare wills his subject, such a one and no other. Shakespeare wills its development, Shakespeare wills its characters, Shakespeare wills its passions, Shakespeare wills its philosophy, Shakespeare wills its action, Shakespeare wills its style, Shakespeare wills its humanity; he creates it to resemble humanity – and himself. Frontwards, it’s a human being; sideways, it’s Shakespeare. Do a name change, put Aristophanes, put Moliere, put Beaumarchais, the formula remains inviolate.

Such people have originality, meaning the huge gift of a personal starting point, whence their supreme power. Virgil derives from Homer: note the drop-off in reflections; Racine derives from Virgil; Voltaire derives from Racine; Chenier (Marie-Joseph) derives from Voltaire; Luce de Lancival derives from Chenier; zilch derives from Luce de Lancival. The wipeout occurs progressively. Progressive diminution is the most perilous course of action. Whoever engages in it is lost. No rolling mill produces such a flattening out.

For example, take a look at Hector where he takes his start in Homer, and then check him out in Luce de Lancival, his final destination.

The name in France for progressive diminution was classical schooling. The result was a faint-colored literature. Around 1804, poetry was wracked with coughing. At the start of that century, under the empire that came to its end at Waterloo, such literature had its final say. It achieved its perfection at that time. Our parents witnessed its apogee, meaning its agony.

The original spirits, the direct and immediate poets never have such chloroses. The sickly pallor of imitation is out of their ken. They have no one else’s poetry in their veins. Their blood is their own. For them, to produce is a way to be alive. They create because they are. They breathe and what do you know, a masterpiece.

Their style is wholly identical with their selves. For the genuine critic who is a chemist, their totality is compressed into the least detail. This word is Aeschylus; that word is Juvenal; that word is Dante. All of Lady Macbeth is contained in this word: unsex, that is peculiar to Shakespeare. There is not an idea in the poet, just as there isn’t a leaf on the tree, that doesn’t have its root therein. Where it originates isn’t visible, it’s underground, but it does exist. The idea comes out of the brain when it’s expressed, that is, fused with a word, analyzable, but concrete, a blend of the poet and his timeframe; simple in appearance, composite in reality. Issuing like that from a deep source, every idea of the poet, one with the word, sums up in its microcosm, the poet’s entire element. A single drop, it’s all water. So that every detail of style, every term, every word, every expression, everything spoken, every meaning, every extension, every construction, every turn of phrase, often even the punctuation itself is metaphysical. The word, as we’ve said elsewhere, is the embodiment of the idea, but that body is alive. If, like the old school of criticism that separated the substance from the form, you separate the word from the idea, you are bringing about death. As in death, the idea, meaning, the soul, vanishes. Your war on the word is an attack on the idea. Indivisible style is what characterizes the most exalted writer. A writer such as Tacitus, a poet like Shakespeare, puts his organizing, his intuiting, his passion, his gain, his loss, his illusion, his fate, his being, his innateness, in very line of his book, in every sigh of his poem, in every cry of his drama. The domineering role of awareness and no knowing what absolute thing that smacks of need-to-do, show up in the style. To write it is to do; the writer engages in an action. The idea expressed is an accepted responsibility. That’s why the writer holds close to the style. He doesn’t set forth anything haphazardly. Responsibility entails solidarity.

The detail adjusts to the entirety and itself is an entirety. Everything is comprehensive. One word is a tear, another one is a flower, another word is brilliance, yet another is a piece of filth. The tear burns, the flower muses, the brilliance laughs, and the filth enlightens. Muck and sublimeness blend together. One entire poem proves it: Job. Masterpieces are mysterious formations, the infinite squeezes in, here and there; that one expression that astonishes you is, amid all these human emotions, these real heart throbs, and all this living pathos, an abrupt eruption of the unknown. Style has something of the pre-existent. It always retains its species. It springs from every writer, from his hair roots as well as from the depths of his intelligence. All genius, its earthy side as well as its cosmic facet, its humanity as well as its divinity, poet as well as prophet, are in the style. The style is soul and blood; it wells up from that deep human location where the organism harbors love; style is the innards.

There is no contesting that it is fated, while at the same time nothing has greater liberty. That is why it is prodigious. No hindrance, no problem, no constraint. It is impossible not to smile when, for example, there is mention of difficulties with the rhyme; why not also obstructions in the syntax. Such proposed difficulties are the necessary forms of language, whether in verse or in prose, originating on their own and lacking prior combination, they have their counterparts in external facts; an echo is nature’s rhyme. We know a poet who never in his life opened a work of Richelet and who, as a small child, made up verses, first without form, then less and less imprecise, and finally proper, and who, all by himself, step by step, one after another, discovered all the laws, caesura, alternate feminine rhyme, etc,, whence emerged instinctively, fully complete prosody.

Style has a chain, idiosyncrasy, the umbilical cord we mentioned earlier, that keeps it connected to the writer. In the vicinity of this connection, which is the source of its life, it cuts across, with utter freedom, all the alembics of grammar; it is indispensable, its origin which is none other than the author is embodied in it, and in all the filtration gear whence it derives phrase for prose or verse for poetry, it doesn’t lose a single atom of its source. In the very interior of general rhythm, which it accepts, it has its own rhythm which it imposes. Whence, from an absolute point of view, such surprising elasticity of style, able to encompass all, from the chastely subtle to the sublimely obscene, from Petrarch to Rabelais. Occasionally Petrarch and Rabelais are in the same human being. Style’s range extends from Romeo to Falstaff. In the meantime the universe holds humans, angels, fairies; the grave appears with its worker at one end and its occupant at the other, the gravedigger and the ghost; cynical night displays some other thing besides its face, a “buttock of the night”; the witch stands up, Eumenides is rough and ready, a caricature sketched on the vague wall of a dream with a piece of coal from hell, and bent over this world willed by him, contemplating his premeditation, the great poet looks, lists, tallies, sobs, sniggers, loves, muses. Now translate that.

Struggle with that style to express it, with that thought to extract it, with that philosophy to grasp it, with that poetry to embrace it, with that will to comply with it. To comply, that is what manifests the translator’s power. Brumoy, Bitaube, Artaud, Poinsinet de Sivry, Florian are all noncompliant. They know much more than the instructors. They are more mischievous than genius, such imbeciles. The true translator, the overwhelmingly definitive translator, being intelligence itself, subordinates him- or herself to the original and subordinates him/herself with authority. Superiority is clearly shown in such sovereign compliance. The best translator complies with the poet the way the mirror complies with the light, reflecting the light back to you. Being such a living mirror is the rare honor Moliere was looking for when dealing with Plautus and Chateaubriand, when dealing with Milton. Greater faithfulness yields greater brilliance.

Is it appropriate, at the point where we are in the 19th century, to afford Shakespeare such a mirror in France? To condense into a translation all the radiance of such a great hearth, to have such flamboyance converge on our literature alongside the splendors of our homebred poets, to introduce into French light and clarity and, what is more, a fraternal flash of light, is that something doable today? Do current prejudices allow it? Is our rhetoric sufficiently tamped down to consent to it? Has the old classic blindness been cured? Is the French eye wide open? Are Ducis and Le Tourneur done and over with? For translations as for religions a moment appears when absolute truth is possible. Taste begins to improve just as philosophy regains strength. Has such a moment arrived for Shakespeare?

The current translator thought so. We believe he was right.

With all due reservations and to a certain degree, we favor all translations just as we favor all religions. Religions and translations, things that are more similar than one first supposes, are always suited to states of mind. They are all bad and they are all good, until the moment when it is possible to acknowledge definitive truth, on the one hand in art, on the other in philosophy.

Translators, revealers of a sort, provide you with all the just-about-right stuff that you can handle. They do not work on the infinite as does the founder of a religion, but their work is similar. What they ponder, what they study, what they translate, isn’t beyond the pale of humankind, but merely beyond the pale of a people. It isn’t the Spirit, it’s a spirit, it isn’t the Word, it’s an idiom, it’s not heaven, it’s a book. It’s not the universe with its soul, God, it’s the masterpiece with its soul, the poet.

It’s hard work. They do what they can. If they don’t tell you everything, it’s less their fault than your own. It isn’t the public that makes the poet, but it is the public that makes the translator. Translators have an illustrious ancestor, Moses. We accept this contested fact the way we accept all history, it too open to challenge, virtually everywhere. Moses is a revealer of two sorts; on Horeb he is God’s translator. In the Bible he is Job’s translator. And wouldn’t you know it, this powerful translator is not free; although he is Moses and because he is Moses. He can’t provide the Jewish people the entire fearsome stage play of heaven, of God and of Satan, as Job had imagined it. The translator softens, abridges and retrenches, the Arab allowing himself what the Hebrew dares not risk. Job is expurgated by Moses. The translator, in effect, is influenced by his surroundings. The translator’s collaborator is the given moment. He makes semi-translations for minds not yet fully open, just as they require semi-religions. Adult and fully grown minds require the entire text just as in religion they require the whole logos. Isis’ skirt is not lifted for small kids. When you are grown up, when you are real men, when you are people knowing who you are, you will be told everything.

Due to a poor system of education, it is possible for some Herculean nation that is flagrantly uppermost in war, in revolution, in progress, to end up as a literary hokey. As long as that persists, one of its flanks remains undersized. Civilization wins its crown by means of full literary intelligence. A people is formed when taste reigns supreme.

Taste is a stomach. It has weaknesses that it takes for delicacies. It comes to really like sweet things, Julia’s Garland, Little lent, Berenice, sometimes even sweet nothings, Kind Bernard, Moncrif, Florian. There was a time when it puked up Shakespeare. Boileau in the 17th century and in the 18th, Voltaire, so bold alongside Jesus, so timid alongside Racine, had given this lack of taste to literature. In such a lack of appetite, treated as “good taste,” an unadulterated, complete and generous translation, minus siding with and minus undercutting any poet, was not possible in France; not even a translation of Horace or of Virgil. There was something called “refined language” and “noble style” wherein everything was watered down. Such watering down was necessary. Poetry didn’t get through unless it was thinned out in water. For “water,” read paraphrase or circumlocution. Even in our time, there is no doubt but that for the minds of many Homer still has to be downsized.

In Homer, Minerva takes Achilles by the hair. Bitaube’s translation is: “the goddess grabs the hero’s blond hair.”

He does so meaning well. Bitaube is unaware that what is cute turns ugly when applied to Homer.

Pope also livens up Homer. Like the orator (canto III of the Iliad) that is so admirably and so amply translated by Andre Chenier: “His mouth was full of divine words, just as hilltops abound with snow in the winter.” Pope tosses in this pleasant verse: “Melting they fall, and sink into the heart.”

Sensitive translators are uneasy with ancient Greek poetry. It is wavy enough to cause such unease. Aeschylus makes them seasick. Throughout Prometheus or Orestes, translation is constantly nauseous. The retching doubles when dealing with Aristophanes. In the Iliad, Harpaliotes, pierced by Merion’s javelin, coils down to the ground “like a snake”; Mrs. Dacier refuses to translate it and states quite frankly that it goes beyond the limits of our language. Anacreon himself is disgusting. Can you believe that he attributes to the lion “a widely gaping mouth”? Mrs. Dacier translates such a mouth as “courage.” And her grin is noted at the bottom of the page. “I believe,” she says, “that I will be forgiven for not having followed the Greek.” And that kind of note, anyhow, is a constant reoccurrence. It reoccurs nonstop in translations of ancient materials. You constantly read in the margin: “The text contains this, etc.” In other words: I am taking this opportunity to let you know that I am a translator who does not translate. Bitaube goes Mrs. Dacier one better. Mrs. Dacier ventures to write (Iliad, canto XIX): “Agamemnon speaks from his place without getting up. “Without getting up” is down; Bitaube rectifies this: “Without stepping into the midst of the assembly.”

Where Homer says: “Pallas speaks,” Bitaube translates:”She accompanies him with her fearsome voice.” Teucer’s arrow that strikes Clitus “catches him from behind.” Behind is appalling; Bitaube says: “hits him in the head.” Plutarch notes that the hide of a slaughtered bull is firmer than the hide of a dead bull, and that’s why Homer fitted Paris’ helmet with a strap “made from the hide of a slaughtered bull.” Such preciseness is a beautiful thing. But Bitaube doesn’t see it that way and he translates it as: “strong strap.” In canto XXI of the Iliad, Juno, tenderly picking at a sore spot she got from a hug, which Plutarch rightly admires, she calls Vulcan “my gimp.” Bitaube’s translation is “Oh, my son!” Neptune tells Apollo: “Laomedon swore he would cut off our ears.” Bitaube translates this: “that his sword would leave us with a sign of disgrace that can’t be eliminated.” The stone hurled at Hector by Ajax falls, and, in Homer, spins on the ground “like a top.” So, what’s Bitaube going to say? He writes: “spins rapidly.” Homer reveals the double source of the Scamander, hot and cold, where prior to the siege, the women of Troy used to come to wash their clothes; Oof! Bitaube words this as: “…where, during the happy, peaceful days, the Trojan ladies, and their charmingly dressed daughters, would purify their splendid clothing.” Homer says: “Apollo’s untrimmed hair.” Macrobius actually asks with what sort of scissors the sun’s rays could be clipped. It is Bitaube who has such clippers. He gets rid of untrimmed. He shaves Phoebus. A translator is a barber. A translator is a censor. Given this kind of translation, “a sacred fish,” (Iliad, canto XVI) becomes“a mighty inhabitant of the watery empire.”A spindle turns into “a dart”; the thighs become “the parts consecrated to the gods.” Bitaube, nonstop.

Sometimes a waning of taste produces unusual effects. Have a look at Racine’s Iphigenia, which is a translation. The subject matter of Iphigenia is just ferocious. It involves a father who kills his daughter to secure some wind. A leader of Hellas wages war on a leader of Troas; he assembles his fleet of small vessels in a small port, Aulis; there’s no wind to make the crossing. Aeolus isn’t blowing. It’s necessary to get the god to blow. The leader, Calchas, asks a diviner. The diviner’s response to the leader is: the god wants to feast on your daughter. That’s the gist of the tale. It is all literally true; half of the Greek army was tattooed. If you stick with such old Homeric savagery (already somewhat watered down by Euripides), that’s the best there is; the subject and the characters are in tune with one another. The epic is blood-soaked; the cruelly executed splicings of throats are just right for it. A kind of awful harmony issues forth from the poem. We believe we’re hearing the sacred hymn of the old idiotic murder. The entire Orient counters such a bloody Greece. From out of the shadow of Abraham, the sacrificer of his son, comes the echo of Agamemnon, the sacrificer of his daughter. The God strikes a bargain; he simply has to open up a girl’s belly and give the gods her heart, liver and lungs, and to examine her entrails. Do that and the wind will kick up. Iphigenia, stunned but accommodating, goes along with it. In the year 1200 BC a woman had little worth. In the games in canto XXIII of the Iliad, a tripod is the first prize; a woman is the second prize. Iphigenia, overcome with resignation and used to such beastly handling of women according to savage customs, her neck bent, awaits the moment she will be seized “like a goat,” says Aeschylus, by two hands, one holding a blade. Nothing could be more ferocious, nothing more atrocious, nothing more terribly horrifying. As for the rest, it all fits together. A fearsome subject, repugnant characters. It’s a tussle between lions. Now, fashion and serve up a tragedy based on this barbaric subject. In other words, lose your taste. Make those Greek savages speak in a fine courtly style. Substitute elegant poetry for primitive poetry. Instead of, as in Homer, having them insult and call one another “wine bag,” “dog eye,” “hart heart,” they will say “Sir” to each other, Achilles will be a marquis, poor Iphigenia will be addressed as “lady,” and, “adorable princess,” the lack of correspondence grows monstrous, the contrast between action and characters is revolting, interest evaporates along with belief in the subject, and it conjures up something like his majesty Louis XIV having the archbishop of Paris slit the throat of Miss de Blois so that his highness, the count of Toulouse, duke and peer of Anville, acknowledged by the parliament of Paris as an admiral of France, might have a favorable wind; and what was fearsome in Greece turns into an absurdity at Versailles. Why? Quite simply, because the translator altered the tone of the style. Taste varies.

Whose fault is it? Racine’s? Of course not. Excluded from direct view and from today’s poetry, Racine deserves the ranking he holds in the 17th century, and, if it is a matter of plying a kingdom with tragedies, it is undoubtedly the same for those magnificent decorators, Le Notre, Mansard and Lebrun, scaling back their inventiveness and adding feeling, while the style remains the same. The fault pertains to the epoch; some centuries of refinement loathe great things and great works. Hardly grasping what is sublime, they don’t grasp what is bare-boned. Louis XIV, who told de Teniers: “get rid of those maggots,” found Homer despicable, and shouted out the following to Fenelon:”Mister de Cambray, couldn’t you render Homer refined for the duke of Bourgogne?” Fenelon could have answered the way Euclid did in reply to Ptolemy who asked him to simplify Geometry for him: “There’s no special way in for kings.”

We did say: “half the Greek army bore tattoos,” and we are aware that this assertion can be challenged. There is strong backing for it. Not to be overlooked is the fact that Homer postdates by three centuries the matters he relates. He leaves out the tattoo business, although he does very frequently manage to toss in “some local color.” Consider, for instance, the cavalry, a force that existed in Homer’s time, but that didn’t exist in Achilles’ time. Homer makes not the least mention of cavalry in the Iliad; the soldiers wage war on foot, the heroes do so in chariots.

The Iliad is a legend, and Homer is legendary. Still, we are among those who believe in Homer, and in just one Homer. At what time was he alive? Although some say so, we do not think he was a contemporary of the currier Tychius whom he mentions in connection with Ajax’s shield. Herodotus, who followed closely after Homer, had to have known more at length about him than we do. Herodotus states that young Homer knew old Mentor who, when young, had known old Ulysses. Given the century-long lifespan, often cited in those times, that covers the three centuries after Troy that we mentioned. As regards the tattooing of warriors in the Iliad, the Caucons, a nomadic people that wandered from the Peloponnese into Cappadocia, knew for sure about it in the Greek army, and the same holds true about the Trojan army for the Hippomolgues, Scythians who drank mare’s milk. The Thracians bear tattoos. Likewise, the Mysians. As we insist, savagery is rampant in these august poems. Ships’ anchors were large heavy stones as they were for a century on the Sandwich Islands. A wound was bandaged with a sling tied over the injury. That’s how Agenor bandages Helenus’ wound and it’s what the Botocados still do at this time. Try and figure out this type of building: for walls, fir-tree trunks tied together with cords of tree bark, for roofing, a rack of bulrush, surrounded by a narrow strip of land enclosed by a spiky palisade. What is it? It’s the cabin of a Toucouleur chieftain. Yes, and it’s also Achilles’ tent. The palisade enclosure had one closed door consisting of a single beam, a beam that could be lifted only by three men, or by Achilles. In the games the heroes engaged in brutal fighting. Ulysses trips up Ajax. As for Achilles, over a period of 12 days he drags dead Hector by the feet every morning around Patrocles’ tomb. Callimachus says it’s a Thessalian custom. On that same tomb of Patrocles, Achilles decapitates the handsomest of the Trojan captives, selecting the young and the hefty ones, just like a Caribbean sachem. Later, Pyrrhus will lop off Polyxene’s head on the tomb of Achilles. Achilles puts his prisoners up for sale, in particular, several of Priam’s sons whom he sends off to the market in Lemmos. Achilles is on the verge of biting into Hector; Pope says he is quite content to envy that. Hecuba would, in turn, really have liked to eat a bit of Achilles. Check canto XXIV. As for Priam, Achilles softens up but it’s a questionable and rather disturbing softening up. “All at once he calls out to the captives to hide Hector’s body from Priam, since if the old guy did too much weeping Achilles himself would be forced to kill him.” It’s obvious that this Achilles is far removed from the Achilles of Versailles. Perhaps at this point the defenders of the Great Century will let us see that the Great Century too has been atrocious at times. Yes, atrocious, but they’ll have to be satisfied with that concession. I’ll explain myself. Atrocious, yes, ferocious, no. The savage is ferocious, the civilized person is atrocious. We don’t say: an atrocious beast. Atrocity combines mind and refinement. An example will help bring out the difference in meaning between ferocious, which means coarse, and atrocious, meaning cultivated. Atrocity is ferocity that has been refined. It entails being upgraded. In Homer as in the Bible, small children are smashed against a rock [1]. In the Arts Century, under Louis XIV, “they are put on a spit.” Now, that is progress. We just said atrocity is refined. It is so to the point of elegance. Hear what Mrs. De Sevigne has to say: “ At the Rocks, Sunday, 5 January 1678)…’our soldiers would have a lot to gain if there were some friars. They have fun plundering. The other day they put a little kid on a spit. However, there’s no news of any other disorders.’” Small kids put on a spit, “disorders!” What exquisite refinement! Speaking of Russia’s Peter the First, Voltaire says: “…the wheels were covered with broken body parts of his son’s friends, he had his own son-in-law, Count Laprechin’s head cut off, the uncle of Prince Alexis. The prince’s confessor also was decapitated.” If Moscow was civilized, it must be admitted that such refinement cost it dearly. Supporters of the Great Century are insistent. We exaggerate the lack of compatibility between Homer and Racine. The differences between Homeric customs and the customs of the Bull’s Eye are not as obvious as they claim. There’s more than a single similarity. For instance, the bond existing between Menesthes and Anchialus, Sarpedon and Thrasymeles, Polydamas and Clitus, Ajax and Lycophron of Cythera, Diomedes and Sthenelus, Achilles and Patrocles, also exists between the gentleman and the knight of Lorraine. So, where is this huge difference in customs? They are basically the same thing. Sorry. Patrocles doesn’t poison Briseis.

What is more, semi-translators are useful initiators. They gradually accustom the eye. Every slight shift of dawn brings daylight. Bit by bit, such is the rule for translations. Poets of one stock can’t be presented in one fell swoop into the mind of a nation that hasn’t borne them. It’s smart at first to profile their introduction. One transition at a time is the way the public ends up accepting them. Anyone wanting in one fell swoop to heap Boileau’s taste on Aeschylus’ genius would fail. He would strike a blow as brutal as the sun abruptly shining into a room lacking curtains. (“Ah! My knight,” wrote the marquess of Joux to her brother the knight of Breve. “The scary sun rising up! How it unfairly awoke me! That dumb thing!”) The public itself is also the pupil of an eye, sometimes near-sighted, sometimes far-sighted, and quite easily subject to irritation. It has to be made accustomed to the light of superior writers, who are always straightforward and direct, a string of successive interventions that are increasingly transparent. Bit by bit and by degrees what is modeled on translations ends up conforming to the originals. One thing is too far south, another thing is too far north; our temperate zone, our mid-season literary taste does not at all at once admit such whole minds, such overpowering standards of universal poetry. Getting geniuses acclimated calls for attentiveness. For example, in the center of his town of Yahweh-Schamash, Ezechiel erected a temple; he kept the tombs of kings out of it. He calls out: “Get the carcasses of kings out of here. Carcass is a harsh word. The first translator, who belongs to the Great Century and the Beautiful World, translates: spoils. The second translator, from Geneva, ventures to say: bones. A third translator boldly says: skeletons. Now a fourth translator can come along, expound Ezechiel’s entire thought, remove the humanity from those dead kings, lower their esteem by unearthing them and saying: “Get those carcasses out of here!”A skeleton is something human; a carcass belongs to an animal. Ezechiel, a prophet with claws, devours the kings in his cave, and since he’s sunk his teeth into them, he knows what’s what. It can be said about translation itself, what Cicero has to say about a story: “No matter how it’s written, it’s enjoyable.” We do not refuse to put up with any translator, even those who are, unwittingly, virtually parodists. They too have their own justification. A grimace gives shape to the face. Those flat valves will end up forming a speaking mouth. If something ridiculous imposes itself upon something sublime, it mars it, no question about that, but it also makes it known. It’s the start of a revelation. You are made aware that there is someone back of such barely transparent opaqueness. Massieu introduces Pindar, Le Franc de Pompignan does so for Aeschylus, Toureil for Demosthenes, Larcher for Herodotus, Longpierre for Atheocritus, Bergier for Hesiod, Levesque for Thucydides, Desfontaines for Virgil, La Bletterie for Tacitus, Guevin for Titus Livius, Tarteron for Juvenal, Bauvee for Sallust, Du Ryer for Cicero, des Coutures for Lucretius, Amelot de la Houssaye for Machiavelli, Artaud for Dante, Macpherson for Ossian, Dupre de St. Maur for Milton, Filleau de St. Martin for Cervantes, Fueudeville for Plautus, Lemonnier for Terence, Poinsinet de Sivry for Aristophanes, Grou for Plato, Brumoy for Sophocles, Le Tourneur for Shakespeare, almost the way the monkey introduces the human being.

Some give as well as some kindness is due, plus encouragement, via the accumulation of start-ups that gradually take on form; preparations are what lead to the result; these kinds of gestations end up by being delivered; a day comes when the definitive translator appears on the scene.

There is nothing about such early gestations that should cause astonishment. Translation is a tough job. The struggle between the translator and the writer being translated is practically always uneven; it’s a one-on-one between two individuals of unequal rank. Usually, the one is just talented, while the other is often a genius. Such is the case of Delille compared to Virgil. Still, to be all inclusive, Delille is a poet of Virgil’s lineage, on the bastard side. Rhetoric, a fake Muse, encountered Virgil in a corner of a forest, and forced herself upon him, and from him she gave birth to these little ones: Statius, Claudian, Pope, Dryden, Gray, Gessner, St. Lambert, Roucher, Lemierre, Esmenard, Delille. Racine too belongs to the family, but on a better side.

As a matter of course, it is the very core of languages that offers resistance, while in certain cases, it’s the surface meaning. Sometimes the dictionary intervenes to make things difficult. For instance, the dictionary says: “Vafritia is not Latin.” But “vafritia” is in Valerius Maximus. In all the Latin vocabularies, the word “induperator” is flagged as “low Latin.” Open up Lucretius, one of its greatest writers, and you will find there in magnificent verses [2] this word “induperator.”

What is low Latin for pedants is the beautiful Latin of poets. As for the core of a language, its resistance is serious in a different way. Spanish ser and estar cannot be sharply distinguished in French. Ser signifies essential being, estar, contingent being. We have just a single verb etre for both meanings. Even more untranslatable is mucho as an interjection. ( El rey se ha marchado? – Mucho. Le roi est parti? Beaucoup. Has the king gone off? Indeed he has.) The French word baron does not translate Spanish varon, which has preserved the dual meaning of lord and of hero. Varon relates more closely to vir than to baron. In Perseus’ verse “cum benedicinto, etc. ozyma signifies insults, unless it signifies tripe fricassee. And then consider the wealth of meanings. Meanings are a labyrinth. If you can, translate “Virginibus bacchata lacoenis.” Translate “Uxorius amnis.” In Latin, a father abdicates his son; Suetonius says “Augustus Agrippam abdicavit”; the bay tree that refuses to burn abdicates the fire; Pliny says: “laurus manifesto abdicat ignes crepitu”; A river that breaks off from another river abdicates it: “Amnem Eurotam brevi spatio portatum abdicat.” Other expressions are in some way gathered together; if you sort them out, you weaken them. Virgil says “A vulnere recens.” Florus says “Nuper a silva elephanti.” Strip away the strength and you strip sway the grace. Now and then, to render a single word might require an entire phrase. In the temple of Jupiter and to spend the night there so as to have a dream that contains an oracle. What a complex group of ideas but Plautus uses just one word to express it: “incubare Iovi.” Struggle with that condensation. Translate the conciseness of Paul Jove’s “aridus atque jejunus” based on Calchondylus. What could be more charming than the prose expression “on an empty stomach”! Calchondylus was a sober writer. He pushed temperance all the way to the point of starvation. By virtue of putting his style on a diet he attained the meagerness of the idea. All that is contained in “jejunus.” Translate “reparabilis absonat echo” in Nero’s four unusual verses quoted by Perseus. Translate some ellipses; Sometimes an ellipse is simple, as in Racine’s beautiful verse: “I loved you on and off, should I have done so faithfully?” Complicate an ellipse with a metaphor as in Saint Simon’s “He was bombarded as head of the camp.”

The translator’s relation to the author is typically one of inferiority, as already stated. This is true for the most part. But there are exceptions. Once in a while the translator measures up. Like Moses compared to Job. Like Newton compared to the Apocalypse. Moliere matches the power of Plautus. Chateaubriand is able to compete with Milton. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while totally falling short of Tacitus, does not do him any dishonor. Corneille is David’s inferior, while La Fontaine is superior to Aesop. What is more, Corneille, a translator of the Psalms, even though ridiculously so, remains the great Corneille. As for La Fontaine, he mimics Aesop so well, that he overwhelms him. The rule for such a special exception is: steal but be the only one alive after the theft. In a social setting, killing the person who is robbed is a serious offense. In a literary setting, it blanks out the crime. Amyot neither steals from nor kills Plutarch; he transforms him, changing from subtle to simplistic. Keeping due measure between a person of first rank and one of second rank, La Mennais, a sharp and solid intelligence, even if his translation isn’t the best, is able, without any shortcoming, to approach Dante. Horace, who’s always possessed happiness, has just met up with Jules Janin, who has the same sprite charm as Horace and, over and above Horace, a generous heart.

Translators have a part to play in civilization. They serve as bridges between peoples. They pass along what’s in the mind of human beings from one to another; they provide the transmission of ideas. By means of them one nation’s wisdom gets to mingle with another nation’s wisdom. Productive encounters. Interbreedings are just as necessary for thought as for bloodlines.

Another activity of translators is that they superimpose idioms on top of others and occasionally, by straining hard to transfer and to stretch the meaning of words into meanings in other languages, they enhance the elasticity of language. Provided it doesn’t reach the breaking point such an extension of the idiom helps it evolve and broaden itself.

The human mind outsizes all idioms. Not all languages express the same amount. From such an ocean, each draws what it can. Dialects use their receptacle to draw from it. Great writers are the ones who provide the bulk of such enormity. The upshot is that sometimes something that can’t be grasped often is something untranslatable. “Sunt lachrymae rerum” is one drop of this immense amount. The expression contains utter depth. At the time he voiced it, Virgil equals and maybe even surpasses Dante.

Of all such expressions, this one can’t be rendered for translation. It clings to its concrete sublimity, consisting of a summing up of all ancient fatalism and a glimpse of all modern melancholy. It’s something that appears extraordinary to those who just don’t spend time thinking about such enormous linguistic problems. Translated literally into French, Virgil’s wording makes no sense at all. No woman will understand “they are tears of things,” while every woman does bear within herself “Sunt lachrymae rerum.”

The philological issue is in fact a metaphysical issue. Translators shed a lot of light on it. There is no philosophical study that is more useful and more surprising than such superimposition of languages. Languages do not adjust themselves. They don’t have the same configuration at all; they don’t have the same limits in the human mind. The mind exceeds them in all regards; they are immersed in it with different promontories thrusting more or less forward in different directions. Where one idiom halts, another goes on. What one expresses, another fails to. Beyond all idioms we spot what hasn’t been expressed. And beyond what is not expressed is what can’t be expressed. The translator is forever weighing meanings and equivalents. There is no scale more delicate than the one on which synonyms are balanced. The tight link between word and idea shows up in such comparisons of human languages. The well-known distinction between form and substance that constituted the basis 30 years ago for broad criticism that has collapsed at present shows up here its childishness. Form and substance blend together to such a degree that in many instances the substance dissolves if the form changes. We just saw an example of that in “Sunt lachrymae rerum.” Are we going to say it’s the thought that falls short? There never was a more exalted thought. In other instances, the substance doesn’t dissolve but it does become distorted. The idea, translated by rigorously matching words turns into something else. Make a literal French translation of “plenus rimarum sum hac atque iliac per fiuo,” and the idea undergoes change as it switches to another language; in Latin, it’s your choice, comical indiscretion or lyrical inspiration; in French, it’s the purulent sweat of a leper covered with ulcers. Every language possesses a certain number of meanings. Some it has, others it doesn’t. This deep realization is concealed in the following trite saying: one language is rich, another is poor. Great writers are those who enrich languages. Writers create words; the throng of ordinary folk come up with sayings; the people and the poet work in common. Homer and La Halle fling out metaphors. Shakespeare’s trivial and sublime bravado rivals that of John Bull.

But do what they will, they cannot fully tap the human mind and put it all in language. What is all pertains only to the Word. It is here that the identity of the human mind and of the divine mind shines forth. Thought has no limits. Expressing what has no limits can’t be done. When faced with this inherent enormousness languages falter. One picks up on one thing, another on something else. Such patched together scraps, such combined bits and pieces are what constitute human knowledge and what people think. Living languages follow upon dead languages and they continue the same job, trying to get hold of more and more of the human mind and put it into human speech. Idioms do require an effort.

This explains the inherent difficulty of translations: The idioms of the languages and the idiosyncrasies of the writers. The writer obstructs the translator in every regard. A good translation relies on a full blend of the most cordial understanding and the most relentless struggle. With whom are you dealing? Horace? It’s the very grace of the twist that resists: “O matre pulchra filia pulchrior.” Lucretius? It’s the irresistible breadth of the style: “nihilo fertus minus ad vada leti.” Catullus? It’s a vigor permeating the charm: “Funestet sese suosque. To lose is shorter; to bear unhappiness is more correct. Lucan? It’s the energetically compressed wording: “Si cives, huc usque licet.” Tibullus? It’s the gentility in the reality: “In uno corpore servato, restituisse duos.” Seneca? It’s the wording that is occasionally downsized to greatness: “Aperto aethere innocuus errat. Neither “open sky” nor “open air” render “aperto aethere.” Perseus? It’s transparency in obscurity: Nescio quod certe est, quod me tibi temperat astrum.” Juvenal? It’s the majesty of the verse full of a dissatisfied exalted thought: “Famosos equitum cum dictator magistros.” Add to that the fact that every writer has his or her own enigma; the enigma of his or her own time, his or her own personal enigma. The translator is forced to penetrate that enigma; the price for doing so is intimacy with the original writer; and often enough that enigma bares itself. And then, it’s not at all rare that the translator doesn’t get inside the writer; he can’t open him up, he’s missing the key, and he’s reduced to saying as Terence’s slave belonging to Andrienne said: “Davus sum, non Oedipus.”

Add external difficulties to the inner difficulties; to the obstacles in the language and to the obstacles in the writer, add the complications surrounding the translator; factor in the prejudices of the day, national dislikes, issues infected by rhetoric, scruples, timidities, silly modesties, local taste’s resistance to universally widespread taste. How, translating Plautus, for example, do you get around: “Potavi, atque accubui scortum”? How, translating Horace, do you get around: “Quantum displosa potest vesica, pepedi”? Particularly in France, watch out for yourself. We French are a nation of young ladies. You have to watch your behavior in our boarding school. Cambronne was recently expelled from one.

And I’ll add that he hadn’t stolen anything.

He came up with a way to use the grossest word to express the greatest thing. Such a misuse of language blemished history. He was kicked out. Well done.

Following that, he was provided a translator, mister de Rougemont, to suitably correct his word. De Rougement, who penned: “The guard dies and doesn’t surrender,” continued serving the public and later came up with other terms for princes, including Trocadero’s: “I will be dead in good company.” Bitaube de Cambronne had a large belly and lots of spirit. One astounded passerby said to him: “Ah! Mister de Rougemont, how fat you are. But you well deserve to be so.”

Great writers enrich languages, good translators slow down their impoverishment.

The dying off of tongues is a remarkable metaphysical phenomenon that warrants study.

A language doesn’t take its leave until it has created another one, sometimes a number of others. Its death throes are mingled with giving birth. For certain insects, death consists in the laying of eggs. So it is likewise for languages.

Languages start dying as a result of a thickening of the idiom which takes away their transparency. Words become opaque, matching this, pronunciation turns cumbersome and the way syllables are paired is switched around. Such a thickening of language depends on the amount of elapsed time that turns the language senile, and it does not depend, as frivolously asserted, on the introduction of new ideas. New ideas, being young, are healthy, they impart their freshness to the tongue and far from spoiling it they preserve it. Sometimes they rescue it. Still, if a language is bound to disappear, thickening increases, obscurity overtakes certain areas of language, the logic of the language is altered, analogies vanish, etymologies underlying the words stop showing up, sloppy spelling is applied to long-standing roots of words, shabby usage distorts what’s left of the language’s fine original structure. Then come the death throes. Vowels are the first to perish. The consonants hang in there. Consonants are the skeleton of a word. They will later help uncover its etymology. A word finally loses its consonants the way an animal does its bones. The carcass suffices to come up with the word just as it does to reconstruct the animal.

Gradually, the growing obsolescence of the doomed language brings about an embryonic, barely organized, semi language that inserts itself between the old one that is going to die and the new one slated to be born; the semi-language is a lichen, a parasite, a worm, a disease, that makes a place for itself on the old language and sinks its roots into it. The bottom lining, so to speak, becomes its sore and its leper; it feeds on it and wears it out. It’s miniature, has no form, is misshapen; there’s something of a monster in this dwarf; the little runt’s sucking action wears out the giant. That’s how old Vulgar Latin drew on Latin. Such heavy draining eventually kills even the hardiest language. The parasite language, just being provisional, likewise dies. It can’t live without support. The acorn doesn’t keep living on the oak tree. It’s like the time when Latin breathed its last. Old Vulgar Latin decomposed, and then room was made for new complete and viable languages, daughters of the deceased great grandmother. Then Italian showed up on the same spot. Then, to the south, Spanish, and to the north, French. Human thought, equipped with new organs, could now resume speaking.

It does so without diminution. Dante’s Italian equals Tacitus’ Latin. Shifts from one language to another, from the past to the future, from dusk to dawn, from death to life, are laborious. Translations help there, they extend a helping hand, reducing their toughness, making them easy. Every translation contains an amalgamation. Transformations of languages require a previous mixture. Such a blending of languages’ common basis is a preparation.

The human mind, while essentially one, turns into various minds through corruption. Geographic borders and antipathies truncate and localize the mind. Once a person loses union with others, the human mind loses unity. It could be said there are a number of human minds. The Chinese human mind is not the Greek human mind.

Translations breach the walls, eliminate the confinements and allow dissimilar human minds to intercommunicate.

While needed for this interchange of ideas, they are also of further use, first for preserving and, then, for transforming languages.

I’ve mentioned the enigma contained in every writer. It is this enigma that lures the translator on and shuts him down if he can’t come to terms with it. It is always a tough thing to deal with and requires the translator to be a historian as much as a philologist, a philosopher as much as a grammarian, mind as much as intelligence. So, what is it when the writer is a poet? And what is it when the poet is a prophet?

Check out the Bible where philosophical, chronological, historical, and even religious questions have the power to give rise to the Elohim bit and the Yahweh bit that are so inextricably combined in the Pentateuch. At first God is just the All Powerful one, then he turns into the Eternal one, and the switch from Elohim to Yahweh occurs in the burning bush (See Exodus, ch. III and VI): “I appeared to Abraham as Elohim and I am appearing to you as Yahweh.” This is the point where the Bible takes a turn. Translators have hardly noticed it, giving rise to lots of confusion, fierce arguments, a number of heresies, and some burnings at the stake.

No less than the Bible, Homer, too, is material for controversies. Homer’s translators can be nothing but nerve-wracked. What is the actual text? Where is the real meaning? There is no writer who is more clear. But hear what Horace says: “grammatici certant.”

Initially, Homer was oral. He was recited. He wasn’t written down. Only a century later did a rhapsodist get the idea to write down something of Homer’s. If the legend is to be believed, the first library had already been established by Osymandias who named it “Pharmacy of the Mind.” Preceding Homer, Linus had written his poems in Pelagian characters, and as told by Diodorus of Sicily, Homer did have a teacher, Pronapides, who was familiar with Linus’ alphabet. Pronapides is called Phemius by others. Linus’ alphabet was evidently syllabic, maybe even hieroglyphic. The earliest copies of Homer, just like the Erse and Celt poems and the short epics of Ossian, were written in fragments, with each rhapsodist writing his own fragment, and they were written in that syllabic alphabet that is barely manageable and not as exact as a single-letters alphabet. It also gives rise to double meanings and to contrary meanings. Pisistratus made some adjustments in the fragments and that led to a lot of indecision regarding the actual text. It led to possible choices of meaning in Homer. Pausanias has his own variations. Cynethus has his own touch-ups. The scholiast Pindar alters some passages that Eustathius corrects. Klotz, the 1758 critic, hesitates between Eustathius and the scholiast. On the other hand he does point out Aristarchus’ parings down of the text.

A passage of canto IV of the Iliad presents four meanings, which just delights Mrs. Dacier. Where the scholiast sees a comet, Clarke just sees a flying star. The scholiast scales down the capturing of cranes and of pygmies to the dimensions of just a plain old pillaging of crops. Achilles’ vulnerable heel does not occur in the Iliad just the way we have it today. Was it there prior to the cuts and linkages made by Pisistratus?

Hubert Goltzius says yes; Raimondo Cuiniccio from Ragusa, who translated the Iliad into Latin, says no. Bianchini stipulates that the Iliad is a quarrel over thassalocracy, meaning freedom of the seas, and that it’s not about Helen but about sailing in the Euxine Sea and in the Aegean Sea. For Bianchini, Mars is Armenia, Minerva is Egypt and “white-armed” Juno is White Syria. For Camoens, Mars is Jesus Christ and Venus is the church. Then there is Homer, presented to supporters of orthodoxy as the Song of Songs. For Apollodorus the big deal is that Homer is likely an Ionian, since the Iliad hardly serves any purpose except to point out the hatred of the Ionians for the Carians. Because of the following verse in canto XV of the Iliad: “we are Saturn’s three sons,” Plato, in Gorgias attributes to Homer a sort of invention of a trinity, which Lactantius does not totally reject. Etc., etc., etc. Issues involving linguistics, religion, philosophy, geography, mythology, theogony, legislation, history, legend. What’s to be said in response to all these subjects being asked about? A 10th century manuscript, with notes by 60 scholiasts, and found by Villoison in Venice, doesn’t provide any resolution. Drelincourt’s Homericus Achilles scarcely clears up anything. Those who provide glosses pass along their lantern. Ernesti, a commentator on Homer hands his over to Heyne, a commentator on Virgil. Hesychius’s commentary gets bogged down in the Phrasai of Calchas; he sometimes favors “tu die,” sometimes “tecum expende,” and never gets out of the bog. Some critics use deletions to avoid difficulties. That’s why so many editions are lacking the nine charming and lugubrious verses by Andromachus regarding Astyanax. Wood, an English traveler, takes on Aristotle, Pausanias and Strabo. Appian, a grammarian, is perplexed by the divergent texts and the various meanings and wisely elects to summon Homer’s ghost to find out what he should go with.

And now, one final remark.

A translation is annexation.

It helps to factor in a poet as well as a philosopher. It’s a good neighborly type of advice. Even the freest nations occasionally run into certain moral and intellectual situations where they need a revitalization of philosophy. Theocracy is tricky and slippery. Luther denounced it in Christianity, grabbing hold of it, bringing it into full view, and driving it away. That was the moment when, thanks to Luther who initiated the matter, that theocracy began making its way out of Rome. But theocracy does know how to work its way back in. Luther gets it out of Rome and, so, it gets into Luther. What it loses in Italy, it gets back in England. It was a papal matter, it will become a bishop’s thing; will you wipe out episcopacy? It will become a priestly matter. Will you get rid of the priesthood? It will turn into fanaticism, pure and simple. The Quaker’s hat shades the human head about as much as a Tiara does. The shade isn’t as bad, to be sure, but it is still dangerous.

Setting aside England’s enormous and majestic politics, the country lives a life that is simultaneously material and mystical. In England matter is sovereign; and, let us add, it is sovereign in a useful and splendid way; names by which it is called include: bank, stock market, industry, commerce, production, circulation, exchange, wealth, prosperity; in England matter hampers progress wile goading it on; it is massive and tumultuous; it overwhelms a person and gains the upper hand; it fills him full of lead and covers him with wings; the wings are power, the lead is gold. Engaging in business, that’s the fixed will of the English brain. “Time is money.” Hence the fever. England (and we do praise it) sends out its merchant marine in all directions over the ocean routes. London is all hustle and bustle, getting around is virtually dreadful; the mob on London Bridge is like an endless chain, and the entire mob runs and dashes about; no stopping and looking; that’s what a daydreamer does; no one strolling. A busy throng and matters requiring haste everywhere. The Thames vanishes beneath the swarm of steamboats. London’s carriage horses for public transportation keep at it on average for 21 hours a day. Now, it’s a weird thing to say, but it’s absolutely true, material life is preparation for a fanatical life. The Bible is well situated atop this matter. In a word, we are born and we die. Something obscure is over us. There above our heads is the infinite, blue by day and starlit at night; a mysterious pressure; such an obsession calls for a solution. Virtually eliminating someone’s distress is the way all religions end up successful. Once rid of concern about what’s above, the mind is then more alert in computing and negotiating things. We rather quickly quit believing something once and for all and we are at rest internally. Such is what we see in England. Theocracy requires no more than that. It has a talent for amazingly splicing a person in two. Egoism is a cordial understanding with God; it excels in such good pairings. It leaves business to the outer person and takes hold of the inner person. It’s on the inside that it cleans out the sepulcher. Religion is an outpouring of the infinite that soaks through a person; but religions are a whitewashing. One layer of faith over vices is all that’s needed. It’s obvious among Catholics as well as Protestants. The one insists slightly more on the New Testament, the other on the Old Testament. All cults contain a Jesuitical streak. Theocracy, particularly in England, just so long as it is in control, is a good ruler; it’s happy with causing some stupefaction. On the inside, it plies the person with vain imaginings and prejudices; it gets inside the head to catch hold of every truth passing through, the extensive spider web of false ideas. Now you are free. Deal, contract, sell, buy, dig up, toil, sail, spend, save, arrange, enjoy, take charge of the rest. It is skilled at trapping you inside a circle that it knows how to hide from you. You will believe a lot and you will barely do any thinking. It let’s someone move about freely on the outside but blocks him in his mind; the material man can do what seems good to him, while the conscientious man is blockaded; while freedom of conscience does exist, still, its freedom is being manipulated beyond any doubt and it unwittingly turns upon itself, always on the other side of an invisible obstacle; certain religious habits get ingrained, quite distinct from political habits; an enormous imposition of articles of faith and intolerant beliefs come upon the nation, bigotry really taking shape; the flood of prejudices swells unnoticed and nonstop; fanaticism, with increasing thickening of the sort belonging to fanaticism, gradually obstructs their intelligence, the text gives commands, the undebatable letter gives orders and prohibits reason, denounced and suspect it withdraws a step at a time faced with everybody’s unyielding obedience. When everyone looks askance at him, it perturbs and sometimes intimidates the thinker, and, if needed, there are strange special tribunals, the court of the Arches, and don’t overlook bishop Collengo, and that’s the way the tyranny of a book gets to take over a free people. It’s a formidable tyranny. Puritanism includes some stiffness. A nation that has too many dogmas in its blood ends up having those dogmas in its enactments, bothersome bumps along the way for the nimble strides of progress. A conformist is afflicted with gout. The Bible, like gout, can infect you. Oh, great people, it’s a matter of going forward, not of heading backwards. A theocracy attains that kind of result, a real achievement for it: freezing up thought. Civil liberty itself suffers from it. Thou shalt not open thy shop on Sunday. Thou shalt not go to the museum on Sunday. Thou shalt not go to a show on Sunday. Hey, writer, you who teach and who clarify, thou shalt not teach nor shalt thou clarify on Sunday. No newspaper either on that day. Censorship of the press done by divine right flares up in England one day out of seven. One Sunday in Guernesey a poor woman is caught by surprise pouring a glass of beer on a passerby; she was fined and put in jail. Some other Sunday a steamboat comes in carrying travelers enjoying a trip, when a millenialist preacher publicly casts an anathema upon them from high above the wharf, cursing such nighttime troublemakers. They find all the inns are closed, so they get back on board the ship without having anything to eat or drink. And it’s natural, since there’s logic even in absurdity, such as reproving poetry and poets, birds who always know a way to slip out of their cages. Turkish hatred of art. Iconoclasm. In England the entire Bible becomes a matter of discipline. The Bible has its seat in parliament, and Moses has control of Cobden. There are as many chapels per square measure of land in England as in Spain. England undergoes a sort of obscurantism. Its Puritanism interjects itself between it and liberty the way its fog does between it and the sun. So, keep your eyes open where you are, liberties are sprouting up all over the place, but superstitions as well. Such chaff threatens the wheat. Bramble is vivacious, it turns everything to sap; it is cumbersome, and up to no good. It piles up at the same time as it rubs the wrong way English prejudices are definitely given too warm a welcome; what England needs is a de-weeder. An alert de-weeder, strong, not easily worn out, out and about day and night, good humored, laughing out loud at the bad things growing, a mischief maker when needed, and with claws to tackle thorns. Irony versus weedy. France, placed on a diet, from an artistic perspective, for two centuries more literary than poetic, developed a thirst for poetry. Shakespeare is one of those who largely squelch such a thirst. England also needs something: philosophy; and now that France has a translation of Shakespeare, it’s its neighbor’s turn, and it is important that England have a translation of Voltaire.

FOOTNOTES:

1. David threatening Babylon. Priam weeping over Troy (Iliad, ch. XXII)

2. Summa etiam quum vis violerai per mare venti Non divum pacem votis adit, ac prece quaesit Induperatorem classis super aequora verrit, Ventorum pavidus paces animasque secundas? Cum validis pariter legionibus atque elephantis: Nequidquam.