"With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned."
But Pope nobly revindicates his unparalleled power of translating
funnily, when, in place of "the walls drip with blood," he writes--
"With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round."
Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what of
that? And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add that the
ghosts "howl"! I tried to make them gibber, but ghosts _do_ gibber in
Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton, Broome, and Co.,
make them howl.
No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator. The
following example, a far-off following of a noted contemporary poet, may
be left unsigned--
"Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your
sin
Sweeps like a shroud o'er the faces and limbs that were gladsome
therein;
And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men are
wet,
And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the
gateway are met,
Ghosts in the court and the gateway are gathered, Hell opens her lips,
And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, and sickens in spasm of
eclipse."
The next is longer and slower: the poet has a difficulty in telling his
story:
"Wretches," he cried, "what doom is this? what night
Clings like a face-cloth to the face of each,--
Sweeps like a shroud o'er knees and head? for lo!
The windy wail of death is up, and tears
On every cheek are wet; each shining wall
And beauteous interspace of beam and beam
Weeps tears of blood, and shadows in the door
Flicker, and fill the portals and the court--
Shadows of men that hellwards yearn--and now
The sun himself hath perished out of heaven,
And all the land is darkened with a mist."
That could never be mistaken for a version by the Laureate, as perhaps
any contemporary hack's works might have been taken for Pope's. The
difficulty, perhaps, lies here: any one knows where to have Pope, any one
knows that he will evade the _mot propre_, though the precise evasion he
may select is hard to guess. But the Laureate would keep close to his
text, and yet would write like himself, very beautifully, but not with an
Homeric swiftness and strength. Who is to imitate him? As to Mr.
William Morris, he might be fabled to render [Greek text] "niddering
wights," but beyond that, conjecture is baffled. {91} Or is _this_ the
kind of thing?--
"Niddering wights, what a bane do ye bear, for your knees in the
night,
And your heads and your faces, are shrouded, and clamour that knows
not delight
Rings, and your cheeks are begrutten, and blood is besprent on the
walls,
Blood on the tapestry fair woven, and barrow-wights walk in the halls.
Fetches and wraiths of the chosen of the Norns, and the sun from the
lift
Shudders, and over the midgarth and swan's bath the cloud-shadows
drift."
It may be argued that, though this is perhaps a translation, it is not
English, never was, and never will be. But it is quite as like Homer as
the performance of Pope.
Such as these, or not so very much better than these as might be wished,
are our efforts to translate Homer. From Chapman to Avia, or Mr. William
Morris, they are all eminently conscientious, and erroneous, and futile.
Chapman makes Homer a fanciful, euphuistic, obscure, and garrulous
Elizabethan, but Chapman has fire. Pope makes him a wit, spirited,
occasionally noble, full of points, and epigrams, and queer rococo
conventionalisms. Cowper makes him slow, lumbering, a Milton without the
music. Maginn makes him pipe an Irish jig:--
"Scarcely had she begun to wash
When she was aware of the grisly gash!"
Lord Derby makes him respectable and ponderous. Lord Tennyson makes him
not less, but certainly not more, than Tennysonian. Homer, in the
Laureate's few fragments of experiment, is still a poet, but he is not
Homer. Mr. Morris, and Avia, make him Icelandic, and archaistic, and
hard to scan, though vigorous in his fetters for all that. Bohn makes
him a crib; and of other translators in prose it has been said, with a
humour which one of them appreciates, that they render Homer into a
likeness of the Book of Mormon.
Homer is untranslatable. None of us can bend the bow of Eurytus, and
make the bow-string "ring sweetly at the touch, like the swallow's song."
The adventure is never to be achieved; and, if Greek is to be dismissed
from education, not the least of the sorrows that will ensue is English
ignorance of Homer.