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 approvingly Denham’s verses to Fanshawe,

  “They but preserve his ashes, thou his flame,
  True to his sense, but truer to his fame,”

says, with his usual pithiness, “Too faithfully is indeed pedantically.”

In Dr. Prior’s version of the “The Buried Mother” we find a case precisely in point.  The Stepmother says to the poor Orphans,—­

  “In blind-house shall ye lie all night.”

Jamieson gives it,—­

  “Says, ‘Ye sall ligg i’ the mirk all night.’”

Now, the object in all translations of ballad-poetry being to reproduce simple and downright phrases with equal simplicity and force, to give us the same effects and not the same words, we vastly prefer Jamieson’s verse to Dr. Prior’s, in spite of the affectation of ligg for lie.  If blind-house be the equivalent for dark in the original, Dr. Prior should have told us so in a note, giving us the stronger (because simpler) English word in the text.  He might as well write hand-shoe for glove, in a translation from the German.  Elsewhere Jamieson errs in preferring groff to great, and the more that groff means more properly coarse than large.

The following couplet is also from Dr. Prior’s translation of this ballad:—­

  “They cried one evening till the sound
  Their mother heard beneath the ground.”