Translation is a synthetic approach to interpretation and a paradoxical awareness of the crisis of language. Some of the translator's problems, such as rhythms, grammar, lexical layers, syntax, are illustrated with critical reference to the five published English translations of Celan's “Todesfuge”; their resolution leads to creative apprehension. The provenience of the poem is biblical. The devices of oxymoron, surrealist metaphor, disparate rhythms and meter, inversion of time sequence, and the erotic countersubject all function as verbal correlatives to the paradox and absurdity which aie the poem's theme and represent a peculiar combination of esoteric artistry and commitment. The fugue is structured by four voices (statements with contrapuntal variations) and the echoed simultaneity of “poppy” (verbal narcotic) and “remembrance” (of unreal reality). The poem is placed in the frame of Celan's later development.

In his German Culture and Christianity, London, 1882, Joseph Gostwick says apologetically of Schiller: “As regards his unbelief, he must be classed with the more respectable rationalists.” And of his middle life he says: “The poet, naturally a proud man, learned to look down with contempt on everything that in his boyhood had been believed.” And as a sort of final judgment: “When the saying is once more repeated, that for Schiller independent culture takes the place of religion, the truth of the conclusion is obvious, though it may require some qualification.” This qualification is found in the statement at the end of the chapter on Schiller, that “there may be found passages in his later prose writings to support our opinion that near the close of his life he was led to think with reverence of religion.” This judgment of Gostwick's may stand as a fair sample of the conservative view of Schiller's religion, and this by one who is partial to the poet and would fain count him as a fellow-believer.

The meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society with the Modern Language Association of America on the one hand and with the American Anthropological Association on the other in 1938 illustrates very clearly the wide range of interests covered by the term folklore. A century ago no such term existed, but the need for one was greatly felt. Students of the popular ballad, of popular antiquities, and of superstitions all recognized that they had something in common, and, as soon as the word folklore was proposed in the 1840's, it was adopted, not only by the English-speaking public, but by the whole world. It is now as ubiquitous as the Ford car and moves uneasily in Russian or Hungarian texts, not to speak of such familiar literatures as French or German. During the ninety years in which this word has been spreading over the world, it has extended its meaning until no man today can take all folklore for his province.

Much has been written about the influence of the early reviewers on Tennyson. Professor Lounsbury, who has made the only real printed effort at a scholarly analysis of the question, believed the influence to be very slight. I shall attempt here to collect and sift the evidence afresh and to determine as clearly as possible the part which the reviewers played in Tennyson's ten-years' silence after the publication of his first two independent volumes (1830, 1833), in his revisions and suppressions of poems in them, and in his choice of subjects and expression of ideas in the new poems of 1842.

Four years ago I read before this Association a paper upon a single figure of speech,—allegory. In order to make a careful study of that figure, it was necessary to give some attention to other figures, especially to these three,—simile, metaphor, and personification. From time to time during the last four years I have followed up trains of thought that were opened by my earlier study, and thus have been led almost unconsciously to note the various relations of the more important figures, until I have come to feel that the best way to arrive at an understanding of any one figure is to study figurative language as a whole as well as in its parts.1 Each year the subject has been brought anew to my mind by the necessity of presenting it in the class-room.

When a literary critic's judgments are never dull, it is inevitable that they will often be surprising. A more striking example is hardly to be found among the great critics than Dr. Johnson's remarkable comparisons of Fielding and Richardson. Many later judges, unwilling to do justice to Richardson, and contenting themselves with a cool recognition of his historical importance, have nonetheless been willing that Johnson should admire him extravagantly. That his evaluation of the novelist would be less impartial than theirs is easily understood, both because of the two men's friendship and because of eighteenth-century literary tastes, so different from our own. But Johnson's utter obtuseness towards Fielding is annoying to the modern critic, not merely because Fielding's reputation has far outstripped that of his rival, but also because he was immensely admired in Johnson's own lifetime. The Age of Reason gloried in the author of Tom Jones, yet here is the supreme critic of the century delivering himself of the most inflexibly contrary opinion. What are we to think of this?

In recent years Baudelaire has come to be recognized as one of the greatest of French critics, a critic whose judgments have an almost uncanny sureness, and whose principles of art and of criticism have a lasting validity. He was from the beginning a most independent and original critic. But he was also an avid reader, and his mind was full of ideas which he had read or heard. It is from a tangled skein of other people's ideas that he slowly wove a harmonious and original pattern that is unlike any of its single threads. In much of his early critical work, however, some at least of the strands are easily distinguishable. Among these are the works of Baudelaire's two greatest predecessors in art criticism, Diderot and Stendhal.

There is nothing surprising in finding that a part of Edmund Burke's life still remains obscure. With the exception of his political activities within the walls of the House of Commons, almost all of his life is obscure. Such simple vital facts as the date of his birth, the place of his marriage, even the exact place of his burial, are still subjects of doubt. (See N. & Q.,clxxii, 441; 6th ser., v, 274 f.; cxlix, 80).) Almost nothing is known about his first ten years in London. Mr. Dixon Wecter's recent article entitled “The Missing Years in Edmund Burke's Biog-graphy,” PMLA (December, 1938), shows clearly how little is yet known about this period. There are uncertainties as to the times of writing, dates of publication, and even the authorship of works generally considered his. There are uncertainties as to the part he may have taken in several works ascribed to other people. There is a most embarrassing mystery surrounding the sources of his income. Indeed, almost anywhere one looks in his private life, there is some element of mystery.

It is now thirty years ago that three stories, more or less closely related to the Prioresses Tale, were printed in the Chaucer Society's Originals and Analogues. Since that time but little new light has been thrown on the source used by Chaucer for this Tale. The general opinion has been that Chaucer followed some version of the legend not now known, though Professor Skeat in his most recent discussion of the subject takes the view that the Prioresses Tale is the result of a combination, probably by Chaucer himself, of two miracles of Our Lady related by Gautier de Coincy: that of the boy killed by the Jew, and that of the wicked cleric in whose mouth after death a miraculous flower was found.

Scholars are now fairly well agreed that the Latin preposition ab, far from dying out, has remained extremely active in France and that the French à, when denoting separation, origin, causation, manner, means, agent, and accompaniment, is its direct descendant. And yet the theory still persists that in Italy this same preposition disappeared completely in the eighth century after the emergence of da and that the Italian a, regardless of its meaning, always corresponds to Latin ad. E. Richter believed that the use of a in stereotyped phrases like a destra, a malizia, a causa, a bello studio, etc., was borrowed from French or Provençal and that modal a (stare a testa china) and instrumental a (pregare a mani giunte) descended from Latin ad. As Muller says nothing about a, I take it that he, too, sees in it only a representative of ad. Likewise Graur, after stating that apud and ab have not survived in Italian, declares that it is a<ad which, besides denoting locality, introduces the instrument and agent.

One can hardly complain that too few scholars have examined the influence of John Bunyan upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. George Parsons Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne and F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance give excellent if brief discussions, each of which identifies several of Hawthorne's allusions to the English allegorist. The most detailed examination is W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” in which Johnson, after establishing Hawthorne's familiarity with The Pilgrim's Progress, points out several allusions to it in the short stories and romances, discusses Bunyan's influence upon Hawthorne's allegorical techniques, and concludes that “The Pilgrim's Progress is a major source and inspiration for the art of Hawthorne.”

The letters of Dr. Gui Patin (1601–72) are deservedly famous as a source for seventeenth-century medical matters and other contemporary comment. In a letter dated 23 November 1669 to Dr. André Falconet (1612–91) of Lyon, Patin writes that it is rumored Molière wants to do a comedy about a certain Dr. Cressé and his pending court trial. A month later, 25 December 1669, having given details of the affair in previous letters, Patin writes more specifically: “Le procès de M. Cressé est sur le bureau, mais je n'entends point dire qu'il avance; on m'a dit que M. de Molière prétend en faire une comédie ridicule sous le titre du Médecin fouetté et du barbier cocu” (iii, 728). As far as I know, the outcome of this affair has never yet been presented. The Commentaires de la faculté de médecine for 1669–70 (Vol. xv) which gave more exact data led me to discover in the Archives Nationales the hitherto unmentioned final court settlement, dated 4 February 1670.

Pablo Neruda’s first noteworthy lyric was written in 1925, at a time of unrest not only in himself but in Chilean society as well. “Galope muerto” strains the mimetic capacity of poetry. Similes without a referent and present participles without a limiting verb leave the reader reaching for some hidden source, some inner principle of experience. A new verse translation can instigate and inform the close reading of “Galope muerto,” showing what Neruda was after: an image of dynamic form, to catch things consumed yet brimming with energy, contained yet astir with life. He moves from the “dead gallop” of his title toward indigenous American calabashes resting on the earth and yet swelling with life. Twenty years later, in his major poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Neruda reanimated the Andean site, drawing on the image of suspended energy that he first explored in writing “Galope muerto.”

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Howells wrote three books on England: London Films (1906), Certain Delightful English Towns (1906), and Seven English Cities (1909). As with most of his book publication, nearly all of these three had appeared in magazines, with about forty pages of London Films first coming out in the December 1904 issues of Harper's Monthly and the North American Review and with one essay of Seven English Cities printed in Harper's as late as July 1909. The first two books resulted from Howells' visit to England from March to October 1904, and the last partly from a visit in May and June 1908, though it drew also upon his earlier, longer stay. From the beginning he showed an outward reluctance to return to travel literature, his first extended work in the genre since Tuscan Cities in 1886 and A Little Swiss Sojourn in 1892. In a letter of 12 April 1904 to his wife he complained that Colonel George Harvey, of Harper & Brothers, “in spite of our agreement … has told round that I'm going to do a book,” and he went on to ask her to remember “that I have not yet promised any sort of book on England, though probably I shall do one of some sort.” But in the same letter he reported doing “a tentative impression which could be used in the Spectator and Harper's Weekly” (neither did print it); he had already written letters and sent a “diary” to his wife, from which his daughter, who accompanied him to England, has observed he drew upon for his first two books; and he had begun the first of four notebooks soon after his landing at Plymouth in March. At least as early as February 15, as Robert W. Walts has found, Howells had written to F. A. Duneka of Harper's about a proposed travel book; and as Walts remarks, after quoting more extensively than I have from the April 12 letter to Howells' wife: “Nevertheless, after the indignation had been smothered, two books, London Films and Certain Delightful English Towns, were produced from that trip.”

For the past fifteen years scholars have examined many facets of Mark Twain's “Jumping Frog”: its narrative techniques and some of its textual history, its relation to folklore, American humor, and Clemens' theory of humorous gravity, and its political, regional, and cultural bearings. This article, by focussing on the personal background to the tale, tries to cast light on the imagination that created the famous yarn. It first relates some of the tale's narrative elements—episodes, characters, names—to Clemens' prior experience, especially to some activities reflected in newly discovered examples of his San Francisco journalism of 1864 and 1865. Then it relates the tale to strong emotional currents in his life during the fall of 1865. Finally the article proposes a date of composition for the “Jumping Frog” and a reading of the tale that emphasizes the level of personal meaning.

The conviction of Miss Helen Darbishire, to which she has given expression in the Appendix to The Manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book I, and later in Early Lives of Milton (xvi-xxvii), that the anonymous Life of Milton was the work of John Phillips, the poet's nephew, is so strong that, after having stated it and given her reasons therefore, she uses the suggested authorship as a certainty in the title she gives to the Life and elsewhere throughout the Early Lives of Milton. Her argument is two-fold:

1. In a manuscript of John Phillips's poem, “A Satyr against Hypocrites,” is “a page and a half of Dedication signed by John Phillips. This dedication “written in a formal Italian hand,” she believes to be his. She also believes that certain marginal notes and textual corrections are in his hand. Comparing these specimens of what she believes to be John Phillips's handwriting with the handwriting of the anonymous Life, she “was struck at once by the similarity of the handwriting” in the two manuscripts.

Virginia woolf's title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader, has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's “Life of Gray,” in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading “some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as “reader” rather than “critic,” other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favorable and unfavorable com'ments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic. Thus Horace Gregory, while presenting what he feels is a just and favorable estimate of Virginia Woolf as an essayist, tends to ignore her real value as a literary critic.

The aesthetic movement in England (1870–1900) now seems remote, yet since no history repeats itself more faithfully than that of criticism, the historian of ideas may well inquire what relation the Art for Art's Sake movement has to the mental, moral, and social confusion of today, especially when one hears a reviewer warning us that John Crowe Ransom, like other formal aesthetic critics of today, “often sounds like an aesthete of the 'nineties.“