... Nunquamne reponam?
I
It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate
Homer. That is a task for which I have neither the time nor the courage;
but the suggestion led me to regard yet more closely a poet whom I had
already long studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer were
seldom out of my hands. The study of classical literature is probably on
the decline; but, whatever may be the fate of this study in general, it
is certain that, as instruction spreads and the number of readers
increases, attention will be more and more directed to the poetry of
Homer, not indeed as part of a classical course, but as the most
important poetical monument existing. Even within the last ten years two
fresh translations of the _Iliad_ have appeared in England: one by a man
of great ability and genuine learning, Professor Newman; the other by Mr
Wright, the conscientious and painstaking translator of Dante. It may
safely be asserted that neither of these works will take rank as the
standard translation of Homer; that the task of rendering him will still
be attempted by other translators. It may perhaps be possible to render
to these some service, to save them some loss of labour, by pointing out
rocks on which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on
which a translator of Homer should fix his attention.
It is disputed what aim a translator should propose to himself in
dealing with his original. Even this preliminary is not yet settled. On
one side it is said that the translation ought to be such ‘that the
reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and
be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original
work—something original’ (if the translation be English), ‘from an
English hand’. The real original is in this case, it is said, ‘taken as
a basis on which to rear a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the
original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers’. On the
other hand, Mr Newman, who states the foregoing doctrine only to condemn
it, declares that he ‘aims at precisely the opposite: to retain every
peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, _with the greater
care the more foreign it may happen to be_’; so that it may ‘never be
forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material’.
The translator’s ‘first duty’, says Mr Newman ‘is a historical one, to
be _faithful_’. Probably both sides would agree that the translator’s
‘first duty is to be faithful’; but the question at issue between them
is, in what faithfulness consists.
My one object is to give practical advice to a translator; and I shall
not the least concern myself with theories of translation as such. But I
advise the translator not to try ‘to rear on the basis of the _Iliad_, a
poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived
to have affected its natural hearers’; and for this simple reason, that
we cannot possibly tell _how_ the _Iliad_ ‘affected its natural
hearers’. It is probably meant merely that he should try to affect
Englishmen powerfully, as Homer affected Greeks powerfully; but this
direction is not enough, and can give no real guidance. For all great
poets affect their hearers powerfully, but the effect of one poet is one
thing, that of another poet another thing: it is our translator’s
business to reproduce the effect of Homer, and the most powerful emotion
of the unlearned English reader can never assure him whether he has
_re_produced this, or whether he has produced something else. So, again,
he may follow Mr Newman’s directions, he may try to be ‘faithful’, he
may ‘retain every peculiarity of his original’; but who is to assure
him, who is to assure Mr Newman himself, that, when he has done this, he
has done that for which Mr Newman enjoins this to be done, ‘adhered
closely to Homer’s manner and habit of thought’? Evidently the
translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can
tell him how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell
him how Homer affects _them_. These are scholars; who possess, at the
same time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling.
No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the
original; but they alone can say whether the translation produces more
or less the same effect upon them as the original. They are the only
competent tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are dead; the unlearned
Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide
in his own single judgment of his own work. Let not the translator,
then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought
of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the
ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for
his guide. Let him not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may
be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those
who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it gives
the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor
Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the
original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope’s
translation, ‘It was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer’, the
work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.
Ὡς ἂν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν, ‘as the judicious would determine’, that is a
test to which everyone professes himself willing to submit his works.
Unhappily, in most cases, no two persons agree as to who ‘the judicious’
are. In the present case, the ambiguity is removed: I suppose the
translator at one with me as to the tribunal to which alone he should
look for judgment; and he has thus obtained a practical test by which to
estimate the real success of his work. How is he to proceed, in order
that his work, tried by this test, may be found most successful?
First of all, there are certain negative counsels which I will give him.
Homer has occupied men’s minds so much, such a literature has arisen
about him, that every one who approaches him should resolve strictly to
limit himself to that which may directly serve the object for which he
approaches him. I advise the translator to have nothing to do with the
questions, whether Homer ever existed; whether the poet of the _Iliad_
be one or many; whether the _Iliad_ be one poem or an _Achilleis_ and an
_Iliad_ stuck together; whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement
is shadowed forth in the Homeric mythology; whether the Goddess Latona
in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary, and so on. These are questions
which have been discussed with learning, with ingenuity, nay, with
genius; but they have two inconveniences,—one general for all who
approach them, one particular for the translator. The general
inconvenience is that there really exist no data for determining them.
The particular inconvenience is that their solution by the translator,
even were it possible, could be of no benefit to his translation.
I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with constructing a special
vocabulary for his use in translation; with excluding a certain class of
English words, and with confining himself to another class, in obedience
to any theory about the peculiar qualities of Homer’s style. Mr Newman
says that ‘the entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that
of a translator ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as
little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical
learning’. Mr Newman is unfortunate in the observance of his own theory;
for I continually find in his translation words of Latin origin, which
seem to me quite alien to the simplicity of Homer,—‘responsive’, for
instance, which is a favourite word of Mr Newman, to represent the
Homeric ἀμειβόμενος:
Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her _responsive_.
But thus _responsively_ to him spake godlike Alexander.
And the word ‘celestial’ again, in the grand address of Zeus to the
horses of Achilles,
You, who are born _celestial_, from Eld and Death exempted!
seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feeling as too
bookish. But, apart from the question of Mr Newman’s fidelity to his own
theory, such a theory seems to me both dangerous for a translator and
false in itself. Dangerous for a translator; because, wherever one finds
such a theory announced (and one finds it pretty often), it is generally
followed by an explosion of pedantry; and pedantry is of all things in
the world the most un-Homeric. False in itself; because, in fact, we owe
to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and
clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the German,
and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome: so that to limit
an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon origin is to deprive
him of one of his special advantages for translating Homer. In Voss’s
well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his
German language itself, something heavy and trailing both in the
structure of its sentences and in the words of which it is composed,
which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters, in spite of
the fidelity, from creating in us the impression created by the Greek.
Mr Newman’s prescription, if followed, would just strip the English
translator of the advantage which he has over Voss.
The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our
correctness of appreciation of him; and Homer should be approached by a
translator in the simplest frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment
tries to make the ancient not less than the modern world its own; but
against modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the translator, if
he would feel Homer truly—and unless he feels him truly, how can he
render him truly?—cannot be too much on his guard. For example: the
writer of an interesting article on English translations of Homer, in
the last number of the _National Review_, quotes, I see, with
admiration, a criticism of Mr Ruskin on the use of the epithet φυσίζοος,
‘life-giving’, in that beautiful passage in the third book of the
_Iliad_, which follows Helen’s mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux
as alive, though they were in truth dead:
ὣς φάτο· τοὺς δ’ ἤδη κατέχεν φυσίζοος αἶα
ἐν Λακεδαίμονι αὖθι, φίλῃ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ.[1]
‘The poet’, says Mr Ruskin, ‘has to speak of the earth in sadness; but
he will not let that sadness affect or change his thought of it. No;
though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother
still,—fruitful, life-giving’. This is a just specimen of that sort of
application of modern sentiment to the ancients, against which a
student, who wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot too resolutely
defend himself. It reminds one, as, alas! so much of Mr Ruskin’s writing
reminds one, of those words of the most delicate of living critics:
“Comme tout genre de composition a son écueil particulier, _celui du
genre romanesque, c’est le faux_”. The reader may feel moved as he reads
it; but it is not the less an example of ‘le faux’ in criticism; it is
false. It is not true, as to that particular passage, that Homer called
the earth φυσίζοος because, ‘though he had to speak of the earth in
sadness, he would not let that sadness change or affect his thought of
it’, but consoled himself by considering that ‘the earth is our mother
still,—fruitful, life-giving’. It is not true, as a matter of general
criticism, that this kind of sentimentality, eminently modern, inspires
Homer at all. ‘From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more
clearly’, says Goethe, ‘that in our life here above ground we have,
properly speaking, to enact Hell’[2]:—if the student must absolutely
have a keynote to the _Iliad_, let him take this of Goethe, and see what
he can do with it; it will not, at any rate, like the tender pantheism
of Mr Ruskin, falsify for him the whole strain of Homer.
These are negative counsels; I come to the positive. When I say, the
translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four
qualities of his author;—that he is eminently rapid; that he is
eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in
the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that
he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that
is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally that he is eminently noble;—I
probably seem to be saying what is too general to be of much service to
anybody. Yet it is strictly true that, for want of duly penetrating
themselves with the first-named quality of Homer, his rapidity, Cowper
and Mr Wright have failed in rendering him; that, for want of duly
appreciating the second-named quality, his plainness and directness of
style and dictation, Pope and Mr Sotheby have failed in rendering him;
that for want of appreciating the third, his plainness and directness of
ideas, Chapman has failed in rendering him; while for want of
appreciating the fourth, his nobleness, Mr Newman, who has clearly seen
some of the faults of his predecessors, has yet failed more
conspicuously than any of them.
Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the
human soul with the divine essence, that this takes place
Whene’er the mist, which stands ’twixt God and thee,
Defecates to a pure transparency;
and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator with his
original, which alone can produce a good translation, that it takes
place when the mist which stands between them—the mist of alien modes of
thinking, speaking, and feeling on the translator’s part—‘defecates to a
pure transparency’, and disappears. But between Cowper and Homer—(Mr
Wright repeats in the main Cowper’s manner, as Mr Sotheby repeats Pope’s
manner, and neither Mr Wright’s translation nor Mr Sotheby’s has, I must
be forgiven for saying, any proper reason for existing)—between Cowper
and Homer there is interposed the mist of Cowper’s elaborate Miltonic
manner, entirely alien to the flowing rapidity of Homer; between Pope
and Homer there is interposed the mist of Pope’s literary artificial
manner, entirely alien to the plain naturalness of Homer’s manner;
between Chapman and Homer there is interposed the mist of the
fancifulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the plain
directness of Homer’s thought and feeling; while between Mr Newman and
Homer is interposed a cloud of more than Egyptian thickness,—namely, a
manner, in Mr Newman’s version, eminently ignoble, while Homer’s manner
is eminently noble.
I do not despair of making all these propositions clear to a student who
approaches Homer with a free mind. First, Homer is eminently rapid, and
to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is
alien. The reputation of Cowper, that most interesting man and excellent
poet, does not depend on his translation of Homer; and in his preface to
the second edition, he himself tells us that he felt,—he had too much
poetical taste not to feel,—on returning to his own version after six or
seven years, ‘more dissatisfied with it himself than the most difficult
to be pleased of all his judges’. And he was dissatisfied with it for
the right reason,—that ‘it seemed to him deficient _in the grace of
ease_’. Yet he seems to have originally misconceived the manner of Homer
so much, that it is no wonder he rendered him amiss. ‘The similitude of
Milton’s manner to that of Homer is such’, he says, ‘that no person
familiar with both can read either without being reminded of the other;
and it is in those breaks and pauses to which the numbers of the English
poet are so much indebted, both for their dignity and variety, that he
chiefly copies the Grecian’. It would be more true to say: ‘The
unlikeness of Milton’s manner to that of Homer is such, that no person
familiar with both can read either without being struck with his
difference from the other; and it is in his breaks and pauses that the
English poet is most unlike the Grecian’.
The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or Dante are,
doubtless, most impressive qualities of style; but they are the very
opposites of the directness and flowingness of Homer, which he keeps
alike in passages of the simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest
emotion. Not only, for example, are these lines of Cowper un-Homeric:
So numerous seemed those fires the banks between
Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece
In prospect all of Troy;
where the position of the word ‘blazing’ gives an entirely un-Homeric
movement to this simple passage, describing the fires of the Trojan camp
outside of Troy; but the following lines, in that very highly-wrought
passage where the horse of Achilles answers his master’s reproaches for
having left Patroclus on the field of battle, are equally un-Homeric:
For not through sloth or tardiness on us
Aught chargeable, have Ilium’s sons thine arms
Stript from Patroclus’ shoulders; but a God
Matchless in battle, offspring of bright-haired
Latona, him contending in the van
Slew, for the glory of the chief of Troy.
Here even the first inversion, ‘have Ilium’s sons thine arms Stript from
Patroclus’ shoulders’, gives the reader a sense of a movement not
Homeric; and the second inversion, ‘a God him contending in the van
Slew’, gives this sense ten times stronger. Instead of moving on without
check, as in reading the original, the reader twice finds himself, in
reading the translation, brought up and checked. Homer moves with the
same simplicity and rapidity in the highly-wrought as in the simple
passage.
It is in vain that Cowper insists on his fidelity: ‘my chief boast is
that I have adhered closely to my original’:—‘the matter found in me,
whether the reader like it or not, is found also in Homer; and the
matter not found in me, how much soever the reader may admire it, is
found only in Mr Pope’. To suppose that it is _fidelity_ to an original
to give its matter, unless you at the same time give its manner; or,
rather, to suppose that you can really give its matter at all, unless
you can give its manner, is just the mistake of our pre-Raphaelite
school of painters, who do not understand that the peculiar effect of
nature resides in the whole and not in the parts. So the peculiar effect
of a poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words taken
separately. It is well known how conscientiously literal is Cowper in
his translation of Homer. It is well known how extravagantly free is
Pope.
So let it be!
Portents and prodigies are lost on me;
that is Pope’s rendering of the words,
Ξάνθε, τί μοι θάνατον μαντεύεαι; οὐδέ τί σε χρή·[3]
Xanthus, why prophesiest thou my death to me? thou needest not at
all:
yet, on the whole, Pope’s translation of the _Iliad_ is more Homeric
than Cowper’s, for it is more rapid.
Pope’s movement, however, though rapid, is not of the same kind as
Homer’s; and here I come to the real objection to rhyme in a translation
of Homer. It is commonly said that rhyme is to be abandoned in a
translation of Homer, because ‘the exigencies of rhyme’, to quote Mr
Newman, ‘positively forbid faithfulness’; because ‘a just translation of
any ancient poet in rhyme’, to quote Cowper, ‘is impossible’. This,
however, is merely an accidental objection to rhyme. If this were all,
it might be supposed, that if rhymes were more abundant Homer could be
adequately translated in rhyme. But this is not so; there is a deeper, a
substantial objection to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is, that
rhyme inevitably tends to pair lines which in the original are
independent, and thus the movement of the poem is changed. In these
lines of Chapman, for instance, from Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus, in
the twelfth book of the _Iliad_:
O friend, if keeping back
Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack
In this life’s human sea at all, but that deferring now
We shunned death ever,—nor would I half this vain valor show,
Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance;
But since we _must_ go, though not here, and that besides the chance
Proposed now, there are infinite fates, etc.
Here the necessity of making the line,
Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance,
rhyme with the line which follows it, entirely changes and spoils the
movement of the passage.
οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,
οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·[4]
Neither would I myself go forth to fight with the foremost,
Nor would I urge thee on to enter the glorious battle,
says Homer; there he stops, and begins an opposed movement:
νῦν δ’—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο—