find but scanty indication in Dr. Prior's versions. He has merely done
them into English in a somewhat mechanical way, and one scarcely gets
a better notion of the more imaginative ones in his bald reproductions
than of the "Iliad" from the analysis of that poem in the "Epistolae
Obscurorum Virorum." It seems to require almost as peculiar powers to
translate an old ballad as to write a new one.

Dr. Prior complains of Jamieson, that his versions from the Danish are
done in a broad Scotch dialect, almost as unintelligible to ordinary
readers as the language of which they profess to give the meaning. But
if any one compare Jamieson's rendering of "The Buried Mother" with Dr.
Prior's, (Prior, vol. i. p. 368,) he will, we think, see cause to regret
that Jamieson did not do what Dr. Prior has attempted, and that he has
not left us a greater number of translations equally good. Jamieson's
fault was not so much his broad Scotch as his over-fondness for
archaisms, sometimes of mere spelling, which give rise to a needless
obscurity. We think that he was theoretically right; but he should not
have pushed his theory to the extent of puzzling the reader, where his
aim was to give only that air of strangeness which allures the fancy. As
respects ballads dealing with the supernatural, Jamieson's notion of
the duty of a translator was certainly the true one. There is something
almost ludicrous in a ghost talking the ordinary conversational language
of every-day life, which might, to be sure, serve very well for some
of Jung Stilling's spirits in bottle-green hunting-coats with brass
buttons, but hardly for the majesty of buried Denmark. Dr. Prior may
claim that his renderings are more literal; but it is the vice of
literal translation, that the phrases of one language, if exactly
reproduced in another, while they may have the same sense, convey a
wholly different impression to the imagination. It is to such cases that
the Italian proverb, _Tradutiore traditore_, applies. Dryden, citing