The Press SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1933. Sir Thomas Urquhart

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20956, 9 September 1933, Page 12

The Press SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1933. Sir Thomas Urquhart

Few things are more striking in modern letters than the number and excellence of translations from foreign languages. In a field where such as Aylmer Maude, Constance Garnett, and William Archer were once eminent among few regular and skilful workers, there are now many; and the standard set by the best . of them is admirable. Bar-; busse, Maurois, Capck, Selma; Lagerlof, Ibanez, and Feuchtwanger, to name only a few foreign authors, and popular ones, have all been exceedingly well served by their translators. But such service is seldom much noticed, still more rarely praised as it ought to be, and hardly ever remembered. That is as it has always been. Famous English translators have for the most part been men like Chapman and Dryden and Pope, famous also as original writers. Few translators have been remembered merely for their art in preserving the literary atmosphere of a foreign book and in displaying mastery of their own language. The translator is regarded at the worst as a bodysnatcher, at the best as an intelligent journeyman. The name of Charles Jarvis is forgotten, although it was he who in 1742 published his translation of Don Quixote, which by its vividness and feeling has enraptured many generations of Englishmen. A few generations hence little will be heard of the name of Charles Scott-MoncriefL The most distinguished translator of our age by reason of his Prou?t and Pirandello and his almost unknown Beowulf and Chanson de Roland, he deserves commemoration as well for his self-discipline and command of English. The poverty that did not allow him to develop his original genius recalls the hardships that depressed eighteenth century writers. Sir Thomas Urquhart, first English translator of Rabelais, is not forgotten like Jarvis, and in spite of debts and imprisonment he had little of Scott-Moncrieffs difficulty in doing what he wanted. The extraordinary career of this man is the most entertaining chapter in the history of English translation. He was a Scotsman. The record of his strange life begins in 1637, when he was 26. Incensed by his spendthrift father's incompetent handling of the family estate, Thomas and a younger brother kept the old man under forcible restraint in an upper room of their house till they were forced by the law to liberate ! him. His next exploit, two years later, was to display his martial prowess for the first time in the Trot of Turriff, an abortive Royalist rising. In his spare time Urquhart explored Europe, and in his explorations collected a fine library which had later to be sacrificed to his creditors. He amassed an unusual store of knowledge of which the show-pieces were odds and ends of rare classical writings and fragments of semitheological scholarship. Round this learning played his fantastic imagination and his astonishing facility in compounding and coining grotesque words. Pantagruel once examined the books in the library of Saint Victor. On the shelves he saw Stratagemata Francharchier de Baniolet and Tarrabalationes. These titles might have been chosen for his own works by Urquhart himself, for, after the publication of a forgotten book of epigrams, his next work, 1645, was Trissotetras, a treatise on logarithms. The technical terms of this volume will defeat all but the most learned mathematicians: "The axioms of "plane triangles are four, viz., "Rulerst, Eproso, Grediftal, and " Bagrediffiu." This was written in his heyday when he was a "quaint " Romancealist" with as much ribbon and moustache as the age allowed and a pedantry that would have dumbfounded Peacock and that enabled Urquhart to refer casually to such things as " dis"ergetic loxogonosphericals." Four years later Urquhart was a prisoner in the Tower, rebel and traitor. He suffered little discomfort, was transferred soon to Windsor, and not long after was released by Cromwell. Probably his extravagant enthusiasm for outlandish names inspired his next work, Pantochronocanon, a genealogy from himself to Adam. Any gaps in the table of ascent were readily supplied by his pedantic humour. He was working hard at this time and next wrote Ekskabalauron, which celebrated the magical virtues of a jewel miraculously found in the streets of Worcester. This whimsical allegory is less interesting as a tribute to himself, always an absorbing subject to Urquhart, than as a celebration of Admirable Crichton, that great, injured name, first popularised by Sir Thomas. (The Knighthood had come after the Trot.) Urquhart's next contribution to human knowledge was an elaboration of his theories of a universal language, Logopandecteision. But his place in the hierarchy of English literature was established in 1653 when he produced, the first two

parts of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The legend of Urquhart's death is too appropriate to be questioned. He died of a fit of laughter brought on by news of the Restoration. Rabelais was known to Elizabethans, but no translation was made till Urquhart's, which ap- . peared exactly a century after t Rabelais's death. Urquhart's Rabe- 1 lais is most remarkable for its ren- * dcring of the spirit rather than the j word of the original. Indeed his ( very faults were recommendations , for his task, as were his knowledge ; of Scots dialectalisms and his sym- 1 pathy with Rabelais's erudition. No j doubt Englishmen formed from , Urquhart an exaggerated impression ( of the grotesquerie and robustious- j ness of Gargantua and Pantagruel; ' but in the matter of representing < Rabelais's ideals and exuberance it ] is hard to think of anyone, even j Sterne, who could have done the , work half so well. Urquhart was indeed Rabelais's Limosin from "Alme, inclyte and celebrate " academy which is vocitated "Lutetia," " cauponisating goodly " vervecine spatulcs perforaminaled "with petrociic." Urquhart must have enjoyed his jargon, " ring jalcl "de vins ders cordelis bur jocst "stzampenard." He must have repeated with relish "jocst stzam- " penard!" Urquhart, enthusiastic and eccentric, seems to sum up the comic Elizabethan spirit. He caught in his net not only Rabelais but the quaint learning of Burton, the wide-ranging ideas of the Elizabethan dramatists, and the fine, disordered frenzy of English prose before it was reduced to calmness and regularity. A Labour Circular A circular being issued to Lyttclton electors by the Labour party may best be described as an attempted fraud upon the public, and a cowardly one. It opens with a series of heavy headlines, of which two consecutive ones read: "The truth " about unemployment" and " Government's policy responsible for "widespread distress." The impudent lie with which these two lines are loaded is a little softened in the smaller type which follows, where the Government is said to be "largely responsible"; but it remains a lie, the mischievous intent of which is pursued in the device of reprinting the Business Men's Committee's statement of June 3, with some of the specific examples of poverty and distress then quoted. To make quite sure that nobody shall mistake their meaning, which ! is that the Government made these homes wretched, and to make quite sure that it shall have the utmost effect, the authors of the circular declare that the Government has not dealt effectively with unemployment but " has made conditions worse." It is disagreeable to think that any party, to win an election, would capitalise misery by charging its opponents with creating it, a charge which those who utter it cannot believe, it is so wholly false, but expect to deceive. But if there are electors simple enough to be deceived by it, to believe that the Government really has " at- " tacked the well-being of yourselves and your families, has "plunged the people into poverty, " ruined business, and increased the " number of unemployed by tens of "thousands," only the very simplest will be undeceived when they come to read, on the last page of the circular, inconspicuous in position and type, the Labour party's statement of its own way of going about things. What would Labour have done, or do? It would restore wages, it would give work to all unemployed at standard rates and conditions, it would guarantee stabilised prices for primary products, it would control banking, currency, and credit, it would increase purchasing power, it would " enable "you to buy what you require," it would " restore prosperity." This is too modest. It would not restore prosperity, if it did all this; it would raise prosperity beyond anything ever known. It would restore all that ever was and that everybody ever had, and give more. But who would pay for it? And what with? If there is one fact that everybody in the Dominion is capable of grasping, and most have grasped, it is that the Dominion is poorer, because its chief commodities are cheaper in the only market where they wilLsell. But the Labour party says it makes no difference; all may take a larger share than ever out of a pool with less in it. The only answer to that is that the Labour] party's prosperity policy must be the fool's policy of a note-printing press working overtime, or the j knave's policy of a bluff. j