John Payne (poet)

For other people named John Payne (disambiguation)|John Payne, see John Payne (disambiguation).

John Payne
A photograph of John Payne, 1904
Born	23 August 1842 Bloomsbury, London, England
Died	11 February 1916 (aged 73) South Kensington, London, England
Occupation	Poet, translator, solicitor

John Payne (23 August 1842 – 11 February 1916) was an English poet and translator. Initially he pursued a legal career, and associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later he became involved with limited edition publishing, and the Villon Society.

He is now best known for his translations of Boccaccio's Decameron, The Arabian Nights and the Diwan Hafez. Payne once said that Hafez, Dante and Shakespeare were the three greatest poets of the world.

Poetry

"The early poems, reproduced with but slight verbal alterations and few additional lines in the ^^ Poetical Works,'* consisted of " The Masque of Shadows, and Other Poems," 1870; "Intaglios,'* 1871 ; "Songs of Life and Death,'* 1872; "Lautrec," 1878; "New Poems,'* 1880. Among the first to feel the charm of the new singer — who was born in London, August 23rd, 1842 — were Matthew Arnold and the aged poet Home — the former highly commending his work; the latter protesting almost fiercely against the reading world's apparent indifference to it. Indeed, it was the established men of the period — Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, above all Swinburne and Theodore Watts- Dunton — who gave to John Payne the unhesitating reception his first ventures deserved; whereas, to a certain extent, the men of his own generation have stood aloof, as if conscious of having little in common with a writer unaccustomed by nature or habit to " the sweet uses of advertisement,** and shrinking irresistibly from the electric glare cast by cheap journalism. At a period when an author*s personality seems of more importance than anything he may utter, we do not hesitate to say that, could the poetry and personality of John Payne be no less vigorously advertised than were Rossetti's, the "Intaglios** and "Ballad of Isobcl** would become, to say the least, as familiar to readers far and wide as the sonnets and "Blessed Damozel" of the latter poet.

But while Mr. Payne's lack of acquaintance with journalists and journalism has been such as to keep his work in the background, nevertheless the leading journals and critics, not only of England but of France, accorded him from the first an appreciation genuine and discrimi- nating as it was unstinted. The tVestminster Review^ one of the most independent and self-centred of English literary organs, observed at different periods : —

• • Mr. Payne belongs to that small body of cultivated

men who will probably be the glory of Victorian literature. . . . We gladly welcome Mr. Payne amongst that select number of poets that already comprises such names as Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris. . . . The art of ballad-writing has long been lost in England, and Mr. Payne may claim to be its restorer. ... He may not be popular with the blind multitude, but he is sure to be so with all lovers of poetry, both to-day and to-morrow. . . . Posterity will place him between Tennyson and William Morris, side by side with Swinburne and D. G. Rossetti."

The Athenaum declared : —

^^ There can be no question that Mr. Payne is a poet. Even in these da]rs, when the accomplishment of verse is so common, the poet is just as distinguishable as he ever was from the prose- writer who has Mearned the trick.* The power of looking at the world through the glamour that floats before the poet's eyes is not to be taught, and it cannot be denied that herein Mr. Payne's endowment is exceptional."

The Academy said of "New Poems": "Mr. Payne has proved himself to be a master of his art. The present volume is an advance in power upon its pre- decessors, even as each one of them had been upon its forerunner."

From The Spectator we quote : ** Really beautiful verse, modulated ^with quite exquisite skill, and adorned with a marvellous wealth of the richest word-painting, of varied imagery and delicate &ncy. The power shown in ^ Salvestra ' it would be difficult to exaggerate."

La Renaissance reviewed " Songs of Life and Death " at length, declaring that, to borrow the poet^s own language : ^^ II a press6 son cceur comme une grappe mArc, et il en est coul6 dc la po&ie— de la vraic po6sie." Doubtless, the reviewer had in mind the despairing protest in " Shadow-Soul " : —

• • There was great love In this nuuCs soul!

Ay, bitter, cnuhed-out wine of love Pressed out upon his CTcry word."

In an extended review in Le National Theodore de Banville exclaimed : ^^ Mr. John Payne a public trois livres d^licieux," and dwelt upon the ^^ chant magnifique compost pour la France pendant Thiver de 1870-71. Quel courage il y avait alors k Clever, seul, la voix pour nous, seul dans TAngleterre et peut-6tre dans TEurope." The paragraph refers to seven stanzas written shortly before the capitulation of Paris, and published under the title of " France," in " Songs of Life and Death," but in the complete edition restored to their original place, as part of the long poem " Salvestra " : —

• ^ Ah, land of roses ! France, my love of lands !

How art thou fallen from thy high estate ! Bending, thou writhest in the Vandals' hands, And the crowned spoiler sitteth in thy gate. My heart is sore for thee."

Of " Sleepers and One that Watches," Mr. Swinburne wrote in "The Dark-Blue" :—

"Mr. Simeon Solomon's sketch has been translated into verse of kindred strength and delicacy, in three fine sonnets of high rank, among the exquisite and clear-cut * Intaglios * of Mr. John Payne."

Mr. Watts-Dunton has somewhere written : —

"There is more imagination, more romance, and more of what / call beauty in Mr. Payne's work than in that of any living man, save one " — meaning, of course, Swinburne.

In the field of translation, according to Richard Garnett, Mr. Payne is " literally without a rival." The TVestminster Review asserts that " As past-master in the difficult and ungrateful art of translation from widely differing languages, he stands practically alone." The paths of poet and translator often lie close together : the poet is always, in one sense or another, and some- times to an extraordinary degree, a linguist. The author of the following translations, published in twenty-seven volumes by the Villon Society, is a passionate linguist, who has done noble work in the cause — if not in the name — of comparative literature : —

At present the reputation of John Payne rests largely upon his "Arabian Nights" and metrical translation of Villon's "Greater and Lesser Testaments" and minor poems. Even owners and readers of the aforesaid translationsy who know them too well to confound their author with John Howard Payne, the native of New York City, who wrote the song, " Home, Sweet Home," have expressed surprise on being told that the English translator is the author of more than thirty thousand lines of original verse.

In 1881, just as Mr. Payne was putting the last stroke to the first of the nine volumes of "Nights," Mr. Robinson passed a delightful evening with him in his solitary London quarters. He had found a rare spirit Soon after returning to America he undertook to secure the publication of the poems in the United States, by showing them to the late Charles Dudley Warner, as well as to many others. Mr. Warner re- sponded heartily; he made repeated efforts to interest publishers in the proposition, but, meeting with no encouragement, was compelled reluctantly to abandon it. His urgent request, in 1897, that Mr. Payne would write the Villon article for ** A Library of the World's Best Literature," never reached hincL To a friend in America he wrote : " Have had several very kind letters from Mr. Warner, who has taken a great deal of trouble to no purpose." With the exception of the group of selections, mainly from "Thorgerda" and the sonnets, given in Stedman's "Victorian Anthology," we are aware of no other attempt, on this side of the water, to place John Payne's original work on the footing It unquestionably merits. The copious collection of "Ballads and Rondeaus" by Gleeson White (Walter Scott, London), includes a greater number of the more sparkling lyrics than are to be found in the "Victorian Anthology" ; and in William Sharp's "Sonnets of this Century" we detect the glimmer of three of the "Intaglios." But the English collections, owing to their prescribed limits, convey no idea of the poet's range as a thinker and scholar. The bent of his mind was scholarly from childhood; and though his youth was passed in uncongenial pursuits amidst unlovely sur- roundings, he seems ever to have been like a delicate instrument played upon by the kindred harmonies of poetry and music In the latter a few violin lessons in boyhood were all the instruction ever received ; yet they fell on such soil that, had the child been reared among musical people, we are tempted to believe that his passion for production would have found its outlet in sonatas rather than sonnets — in symphonic poems rather than sea-voyages in verse. Self-instruction on the piano (not altogether unlike the solitary methods by which Mr. Payne has preferred to master more than half of the languages at his command) has made it possible — incredible as it may seem — for him to inter- pret, not by ear, but from the piano score, the most complicated orchestral works of Liszt, Berlioz and Wagnen The precise effect of so persistent an absorp- tion of musical ideas — which must have been carried on for many years to reach a like result — ^may be diffi- cult to determine; but the existence of the habit or need is sufficient to account for the poet's complete — we had almost said unique — ^mastery of metrical form. More than the half-century of delving into poetry ancient and modem, it explains what we venture to regard as the ^^ musical content" of his admirably modulated verse, embracing elements more definite than mere sweetness and £u:ility.

In literature his earliest attempt was made at school, when, a boy of nine or ten, he translated into English verse, no longer preserved, a number of the odes of Horace. Before he was twelve he had celebrated Caesar's conquest of Britain in lays more or less inspired by Macaulay's. Not only were these outpourings and those of succeeding years allowed to perish, but by far the greater number of the various translations made between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one were con- denmed to oblivion. Among these were a metrical translation of Dante's entire work in verse ; the second part of Goethe's "Faust," also his "Hermann und Dorothea " ; Lessing's " Nathan der Weise," and Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso." Innumerable shorter poems were rendered into English from the German, old and modern French, Provengal, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese ; but of the total mass only nine lyrics of Goethe and Heine, given in the Villon edition, have been thought worthy of preservation. Wishing to lay stress upon Mr. Payne's inventive faculty, we have in- cluded no translations in this volume. On the other hand, we have selected, in further proof of his versa- tility, as well as of his hold upon foreign tongues, whether acquired in the closet or elsewhere, three original effusions, two in French, the third in Italian, &shioned, like nearly every stanza he has composed in his native tongue, not in cold blood, but at white heat, without labour and with the minimum of correction.

Acting upon a nature thus alive to the things of the intellect, thus sufficient to itself, the opposite tendencies of his fiamily — of his father, in particular — could not fail to add flame to fiiel. The nine-year-old boy, drawn to the dictionary by the witchery of word-analysis, is warned that literature will never bake bread; and the omnivorous reader's allowance is withheld lest any part of it should be spent for books. In winter he is for- bidden to "segregate himself" for purposes of study; to enforce the decree, fire and light are denied him. At the age of fourteen the Mozart of letters, with the sensi- tive ear and intuitive gra^p of a born philologist, and with all his ambitions now turned in the direction of language, is taken once for all out of school, to fill various positions — as printer's devil in a provincial news- paper establishment, as usher in two schools, then as clerk in a solicitor's office. Everywhere extreme diffi- dence engenders suffering, until in those phases of the law lying nearest to literature — namely, chancery and conveyancing — his brain and temperament find an occu- pation in which they no longer appear at a disadvantage. Enabled finally, with the assistance of friends, to found the well-known Villon Society, he succeeded in bringing the work of his strenuous later years before a cosmo- politan and keenly appreciative public. In his own words, in ** The Building of the Dream " : —

, Mr. Payne's family name, as borne by his father, Mr. Hawkins Payne, was knightly enough, for the Paynes are descended from the bold navigator and admiral of Elizabeth's England and Kingsley's " Westward Ho ! "—Sir John Hawkins. The old Devonshire fiunily bore the name of Hawkins until marriage with an heiress induced a remote ancestor to add the name of Payne to Hawkins. In revolt against affectation, the present generation has dropped the name of Hawkins altogether.

Early and late in the heart of the minstrel the passion for translation has come near superseding the poetic faculty. In youth, no less than under the pressure of a task like that of turning the whole of Hafiz into English, it threatened to take full possession of him. It will not be unpleasing to Americans to know that a minute volume of the first twelve essays of Emerson, still treasured among Mr. Payne's dearest books, rekindled in the youth of nineteen the smouldering flame of ideality, in- clining him definitely toward creative work. As a poet, Emerson, like Byron, failed to make the faintest impres- sion upon him. Keats and Shelley appealed to him, and

No estimate of Mr. Payne's work, either as scholar or poet, would be complete without reference to the spell that the intellect and atmosphere of France — her language, her scenery, her great writers and foster- children, from Rabelais to Gltlck, and from Gautier to Auguste de Gobineau, have laid upon him. The newly edited poems bear the inscription : —

"

This spontaneous tribute is ofiset, in another letter, by one equally glowing to his mother-tongue : —

" My life is given up now to the building up of enormous monuments of English prose, like the '^ Nights," all that I can now do for that noble English language that I love with an irrepressible affection and reverence, so much so that I might wish my epitaph to be Linguam Anglicam dilexit (He loved the English tongue)."

Like many another Londoner, engrossed until near life's summit with toil more or less uncongenial, Mr. Payne constantly betrajrs a pathetic worship of nature in her every mood and manifestation; as in ^London City Poems'*: —

Payne has — in Schumann's elastic phrase — no kinder^ scenen is remarkable, in view of his intense love for children and animals, which — according to a saying of Charles Alston Collins, Dickens's son-in-law — borders upon insanity.

In touching upon a few of the poems most salient features, if we mention first their melodious sweetness it is equally because, when all is said, we believe the singing faculty to be a poet's chief requisite, and because, in the verse under consideration, the musical element already noted is, upon the whole, the most constant and characteristic.

Nor would it be easy to ignore the high finish of Payne's work, no less sustained in his earliest than in his latest poems, and somehow conveying a sense of elaboration unspoilt by conscious effort. ^^The Masque

Mr. Payne seems always to have written with ease, and to have avoided lapses like those of Wordsworth, Swinburne and Rossetti into laboured and cumbrous phraseology. That one or more of his critics should have been misled into making the charge of artificiality is matter for wonder to at least two readers, who know the history of the poems, and are satisfied that however methodical the scholar^s mental processes, the poet's own utterances are nothing more nor less than wild- flowers, whose purity and spontaneity are due to the fertile soil whence they sprang. As well say of the According to the Westminster Review : —

• • Mr. Payne still goes to the store-house of our elder

English poets for their old expressive words which we have forgotten, and sets them with fresh beauty to modern thought."

To the charge of habitual melancholy the poet him- self pleads guilty in many places, as in the sonnet " Ignis Fatuus": —

Apparently the main reason for the undercurrent of sadness encountered in the poems is to be found in the pathetic outpouring, " The Grave of my Songs ; " but there are other clues to the poet's life of mediaeval seclusion and contemplation. Setting aside the question of temperament, loss of health and of a beloved com- panion {vide " A Christmas Vigil "), above all, the after- effects of early repression, have cast a shadow calling irresistibly to mind the bitter complaint of Deumier : —

• • L'on meurt en plein bonheur de son malheur pasae."

It is no doubt in some such spirit that the poems of John Payne must be approached to be appreciated. Like their author, they make slow headway against the hurry and discord of modern existence. In conununion less intimate they are hardly of a kind to yield up their true aroma. " (From SELECTIONS FROM THE POETRY OF JOHN PAYNE MADE BY TRACY AND LUCY ROBINSON WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LUCY ROBINSON JOHN LANE CO., THE BODLEY HEAD 67 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. MCMVI)

Arabian Nights Translation

Since the publication of Burton's translation there has been an ongoing debate between scholars as to how much and if Burton stole from Payne's translation. For years Payne kept quiet on the matter. Now those scholars who say Burton's translation is better and any similarities between the two translation is just due to the fact that working from the same sources is bound to lead to similarities. These scholars don't seem to have read much of Payne's works, for if they did they would see that their conclusions are just plain wrong. Payne's views on this matter of translation will upset those fanatics of Burtons translation. In essence Payne notes Burton only had command of colloquial Arabic, not a literary one, and this led him to give a poor translation and steal or plagarise Payne's work. Those scholars who support Burton against plagarisim don't seem to have read his "Supplemetal Nights" and compared them to Payne's "Tales From The Arabic" for if they had they would seen full-blown plagiarism from Burton. All one has to do is open to the first story in vol 1 of Burton's "Supplemental nights" and Payne's first tale in Vol.1 of his "Tales From The Arabic" to see great chunks of plagiarism by Burton.

John Payne says about his and Richard Burton's translations of the Thousand and One Nights

"I need hardly my, with much reluctance that I bring myself to break the silence which 1 have hitherto, under circumatances of great provoca• tion, maintained upon this point, out of respect for the memory of one who wu my intimate and esteemed friend ; but there is a limit to all things and the assumption, (founded upon no technical knowledge nor indeed upon any other ground than that of Capt. Burton's great reputation u a traveller in the Eut and a man ... well acquainted with Oriental languages,) which is becoming daily more prevalent among journalist~ and other, that his translation of the Arabian Ni(hts must of necessity be more correct than my own, no lea than the mendacious spirit which is abroad in these u in many other matters, ... made it imperative upon me to speak out, thus tardily, both in my own defence and in the interest of the reading public. I should perhaps even now have hesitated to do so (from one's enemies one can defend oneself and I have ever been accustomed to overpass, with silent contempt, " the gross inventions of malignant dulness" and "the harebrained chatter of irresponsible frivolity") ; but it is hard to put up with misjudgment and mil&pprehension from one's friends, and especially at the bands of so sincere and loyal a well-wisher and admirer u Dr. Richard Gamett, whose remark, (made in all honesty and innocence,) in voL viii of Milea's Poets and Poetry of the Century, that " considering Sir Richard Burton's long practice 1n the Arabic, his version of the Arabian Nights must in all probability be more accurate than Mr. Payne's," wu the lut &tn.w that broke the back of the camel of my patience. Dr. Garnett's argument might have some cogencuin reference to the translation of a newspaper or a modem novel, but is altogether inapplicable to the case of a collection like the Night&, which contains many thousand linea of verae, some more than a thousand years old,and the average age of whose contents is at leut five centuries. The fact is,indeed, exactly the contrary of that which Dr. Garnett and others assume. Capt. Burton's knowledge of literary Arabic, the qualification moat needed for the successful accomplishment of the task in question, was, (as be himself, like the high-minded and honourable man be was, freely admitted on becoming acquainted with my work,) much inferior to my own and consequently his translation, and especially that part in which, u above 1tated, he bad not the advantage of being able to guide himself by my previoua version, is far lu1tUnwflk than mine. No one is of c:oune exempt from liability to error and mi&takes must of necessity oc:cur in the translation of an excea&ively difficult work like the Nights, executed pioneer-fashion, without any kind of U&istanceand at a time when Arabic dictionaries were both rare and miserably incomplete ; but I have no hesitation in asserting, without fear of authoritativecontradiction, that my wrlitm i1 for mort «n~ralti!Ja" a"y 6/Mr ill msl~t, French, English or German, and that, for every mi&take which can be discovered in my work, it were easy to point out at leut a dozen in those of Lane and Burton. I may add that I shall probably one day publish, u a curioua chapter of literary history, the detailed story of my translation of the Night& and of the desperate and unsaupuloua efforts of certain clique&, wboee interests it threateaed, to suppress, or at least to crush, it, efforts which happily, thanks to some remnant of discernment on the part of the reading public, provedentirely futile ; u well u of my connection with Sir Richard Burton and the circumstances which led him, consequently upon the brilliant success of my veersion, to undertake a new one on his own account."

(Footnote 1 page LX THE QUATRAINS OF' OMAR KHEYYAM OF NISHAPOUR, BY JOHN PAYNE.LONDON: MDCCCXCYIII: PRINTED FOR THE VILLON SOCIETY BY PRIVATE SUBSCRIPTION AND FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY.)

Works

• The Masque of Shadows and other poems (1870)
• Intaglios; sonnets (1871)
• Songs of Life and Death. (1872)
• Lautrec: A Poem (1878)
• The Poems of François Villon.(1878)
• New Poems (1880)
• The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (1882–4) translation in nine volumes
• Tales from the Arabic (1884)
• The Novels of Matteo Bandello, Bishop of Agen (1890) translation in six volumes
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1886) translation in three volumes
• Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp; Zein Ul Asnam and The King of the Jinn: (1889) editor and translator
• The Persian Letters of Montesquieu (1897) translator
• The Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam of Nisahpour (1898)
• Poems of Master François Villon of Paris (1900)
• The Poems of Hafiz (1901) translation in three volumes
• Oriental Tales: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night [and other tales]. (1901) verse and prose translation in 15 volumes, edited by Leonard C. Montesquieu Smithers
• The Descent of the Dove and other poems (1902)
• Poetical Works (1902) two volumes
• Stories of Boccaccio (1903)
• Vigil and Vision: New Sonnets (1903)
• Hamid the Luckless and other tales in verse (1904)
• Songs of Consolation: New Poems (1904)
• Sir Winfrith and other poems (1905)
• Selections from the Poetry of John Payne (1906) selected by Tracy and Lucy Robinson
• Flowers of France: Romantic Period (1906)
• Flowers of France, The Renaissance Period (1907)
• The Quatrains of Ibn et Tefrid (1908, second edition 1921)
• Flowers of France: the Latter Days (1913)
• Flowers of France: The Classic Period (1914)
• The Way of the Winepress (1920)
• Nature and Her Lover (1922)
• The Autobiography of John Payne of Villon Society Fame, Poet and Scholar (1926)

External links

• Works by John Payne at Project Gutenberg
• Arabian nights (Volume 1-13), translated by John Payne can be found online at Archive.org