But none save the very
few in this country, who know and can understand the Tuscan poet's
works in the original, can at all conceive the difficulty of
translating him into tolerable English verse. And I have no hesitation
in asserting, that any competent judge, who is such by virtue of
understanding the original, would pronounce her translations of Giusti
to be a masterpiece, which very few indeed of contemporary men or
women could have produced. I have more than once surprised her in
tears occasioned by her obstinate struggles with some passage of
the intensely idiomatic satirist, which she found it almost--but
eventually not quite--impossible to render to her satisfaction.
She published a translation of Niccolini's _Arnaldo da Brescia_, which
won the cordial admiration and friendship of that great poet. And
neither Niccolini's admiration nor his friendship were easily won. He
was, when we knew him at Florence in his old age, a somewhat crabbed
old man, not at all disposed to make new acquaintances, and, I think,
somewhat soured and disappointed, not certainly with the meed of
admiration he had won from his countrymen as a poet, but with the
amount of effect which his writings had availed to produce in the
political sentiments and then apparent destinies of the Italians.
But he was conquered by the young Englishwoman's translation of
his favourite, and, I think, his finest work. It is a thoroughly
trustworthy and excellent translation; but the execution of it was
child's play in comparison with the translations from Giusti.
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