for here again the reader is required, not for any special advantage to
himself, but simply to save Mr Newman trouble, to place the accent on
the insignificant word _wert_, where it has no business whatever. But it
is still a greater fault, when Spenser has (to take a striking
instance):
Wot ye why his mother with a veil hath covered his face?
for a hexameter; because here not only is the reader causelessly
required to make havoc with the natural accentuation of the line in
order to get it to run as a hexameter; but also he, in nine cases out of
ten, will be utterly at a loss how to perform the process required, and
the line will remain a mere monster for him. I repeat, it is advisable
to construct _all_ verses so that by reading them naturally—that is,
according to the sense and legitimate accent,—the reader gets the right
rhythm; but, for English hexameters, that they be so constructed is
indispensable.
If the hexameter best helps the translator to the Homeric rapidity, what
style may best help him to the Homeric plainness and directness? It is
the merit of a metre appropriate to your subject, that it in some degree
suggests and carries with itself a style appropriate to the subject; the
elaborate and self-retarding style, which comes so naturally when your
metre is the Miltonic blank verse, does not come naturally with the
hexameter; is, indeed, alien to it. On the other hand, the hexameter has
a natural dignity which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot
style, to both of which the ballad-measure so easily lends itself. These
are great advantages; and, perhaps, it is nearly enough to say to the
translator who uses the hexameter that he cannot too religiously follow,
in style, the inspiration of his metre. He will find that a loose and
idiomatic grammar—a grammar which follows the essential rather than the
formal logic of the thought—allies itself excellently with the
hexameter; and that, while this sort of grammar ensures plainness and
naturalness, it by no means comes short in nobleness. It is difficult to
pronounce, certainly, what is idiomatic in the ancient literature of a
language which, though still spoken, has long since entirely adopted, as
modern Greek has adopted, modern idioms. Still one may, I think, clearly
perceive that Homer’s grammatical style is idiomatic,—that it may even
be called, not improperly, a loose grammatical style[31]. Examples,
however, of what I mean by a loose grammatical style, will be of more
use to the translator if taken from English poetry than if taken from
Homer. I call it, then, a loose and idiomatic grammar which Shakspeare
uses in the last line of the following three:
He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
_Strong both against the deed_;
or in this:—
Wit, _whither wilt_?
What Shakspeare means is perfectly clear, clearer, probably, than if he
had said it in a more formal and regular manner; but his grammar is
loose and idiomatic, because he leaves out the subject of the verb
‘wilt’ in the second passage quoted, and because, in the first, a
prodigious addition to the sentence has to be, as we used to say in our
old Latin grammar days, _understood_, before the word ‘both’ can be
properly parsed. So, again, Chapman’s grammar is loose and idiomatic
where he says,
Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and _he to field_ doth go,
because he leaves out, in the second clause, the relative which in
formal writing would be required. But Chapman here does not lose dignity
by this idiomatic way of expressing himself, any more than Shakspeare
loses it by neglecting to confer on ‘both’ the blessings of a regular
government: neither loses dignity, but each gives that impression of a
plain, direct, and natural mode of speaking, which Homer, too, gives,
and which it is so important, as I say, that Homer’s translator should
succeed in giving. Cowper calls blank verse ‘a style further removed
than rhyme from the vernacular idiom, both in the language itself and in
the arrangement of it’; and just in proportion as blank verse is removed
from the vernacular idiom, from that idiomatic style which is of all
styles the plainest and most natural, blank verse is unsuited to render
Homer.
Shakspeare is not only idiomatic in his grammar or style, he is also
idiomatic in his words or diction; and here too, his example is valuable
for the translator of Homer. The translator must not, indeed, allow
himself all the liberty that Shakspeare allows himself; for Shakspeare
sometimes uses expressions which pass perfectly well as he uses them,
because Shakspeare thinks so fast and so powerfully, that in reading him
we are borne over single words as by a mighty current; but, if our mind
were less excited,—and who may rely on exciting our mind like
Shakspeare?—they would check us. ‘To grunt and sweat under a weary
load’;—that does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare; but if the
translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound our minds up to the
pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he
has to speak of one of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this
figure of ‘grunting’ and ‘sweating’ we should say, _He Newmanises_, and
his diction would offend us. For he is to be noble; and no plea of
wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being this:
only, as he is to be also, like Homer, perfectly simple and free from
artificiality, and as the use of idiomatic expressions undoubtedly gives
this effect[32], he should be as idiomatic as he can be without ceasing
to be noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of Shakspeare—such
language as, ‘prate of his _whereabout_’; ‘_jump_ the life to come’;
‘the damnation of his _taking-off_’; ‘his _quietus make_ with a bare
_bodkin_’—should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer,
although in every case he will have to decide for himself whether the
use, by him, of Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his
indispensable duty of nobleness. He will find one English book and one
only, where, as in the _Iliad_ itself, perfect plainness of speech is
allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. No one could
see this more clearly than Pope saw it: ‘This pure and noble
simplicity’, he says, ‘is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture
and Homer’: yet even with Pope a woman is a ‘fair’, a father is a ‘sire’
and an old man a ‘reverend sage’, and so on through all the phrases of
that pseudo-Augustan, and most unbiblical, vocabulary. The Bible,
however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator of
Homer; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit
him and what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons
of style.
I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and diction, was plain
in the quality of his thought. It is possible that a thought may be
expressed with idiomatic plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain
thought. For example, in Mr Clough’s poem, already mentioned, the style
and diction is almost always idiomatic and plain, but the thought itself
is often of a quality which is not plain; it is _curious_. But the grand
instance of the union of idiomatic expression with curious or difficult
thought is in Shakspeare’s poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power
of Shakspeare’s idiomatic expression, that it gives an effect of
clearness and vividness even to a thought which is imperfect and
incoherent; for instance, when Hamlet says,
To take arms against a sea of troubles,
the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no means runs on four
legs; but the thing is said so freely and idiomatically, that it passes.
This, however, is not a point to which I now want to call your
attention; I want you to remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that
which we may directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in Shakspeare
the thought is often, while most idiomatically uttered, nay, while good
and sound in itself, yet of a quality which is curious and difficult;
and that this quality of thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For
example, when Lady Macbeth says:
Memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only,
this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt; Mr Knight
even calls it a ‘happy’ figure; but it is a _difficult_ figure: Homer
would not have used it. Again, when Lady Macbeth says,
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man,
the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a
perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought; but it is a _curious_
thought: Homer would not have used it. These are favourable instances of
the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality;
but take stronger instances of this union,—let the thought be not only
not plain in quality, but highly fanciful: and you have the Elizabethan
conceits; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and idiomatic diction,
everything which is most un-Homeric; you have such atrocities as this of
Chapman:
Fate shall fail to vent her gall
Till mine vent thousands.
I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such conceit as that,
must purify themselves seven times in the fire before they can hope to
render Homer. They must expel their nature with a fork, and keep crying
to one another night and day: ‘Homer not only moves rapidly, not only
speaks idiomatically; he is, also, _free from fancifulness_’.
So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness
of thought, that to the preservation of this in his own version the
translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal
fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by
literalness, an odd and unnatural effect. The double epithets so
constantly occurring in Homer must be dealt with according to this rule;
these epithets come quite naturally in Homer’s poetry; in English poetry
they, in nine cases out of ten, come, when literally rendered, quite
unnaturally. I will not now discuss why this is so, I assume it as an
indisputable fact that it is so; that Homer’s μερόπων ἀνθρώπων comes to
the reader as something perfectly natural, while Mr Newman’s
‘voice-dividing mortals’ comes to him as something perfectly unnatural.
Well then, as it is Homer’s general effect which we are to reproduce, it
is to be false to Homer to be so verbally faithful to him as that we
lose this effect: and by the English translator Homer’s double epithets
must be, in many places, renounced altogether; in all places where they
are rendered, rendered by equivalents which come naturally. Instead of
rendering θέτι τανύπεπλε by Mr Newman’s ‘Thetis trailing-robed’, which
brings to one’s mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the
translator must render the Greek by English words which come as
naturally to us as Milton’s words when he says, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy
With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. Instead of rendering μώνυχας
ἵππους by Chapman’s ‘one-hoofed steeds’, or Mr Newman’s ‘single-hoofed
horses’, he must speak of horses in a way which surprises us as little
as Shakspeare surprises when he says, ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed
steeds’. Instead of rendering μελιηδέα θυμόν by ‘life as honey
pleasant’, he must characterise life with the simple pathos of Gray’s
‘warm precincts of the cheerful day’. Instead of converting ποῖόν σε
ἔπoς φύγεν ἔρκος ὀδόντων; into the portentous remonstrance, ‘Betwixt the
outwork of thy teeth what word hath split’? he must remonstrate in
English as straightforward as this of St Peter, ‘Be it far from thee,
Lord: this shall not be unto thee’; or as this of the disciples, ‘What
is this that he saith, a little while? we cannot tell what he saith’.
Homer’s Greek, in each of the places quoted, reads as naturally as any
of those English passages: the expression no more calls away the
attention from the sense in the Greek than in the English. But when, in
order to render literally in English one of Homer’s double epithets, a
strange unfamiliar adjective is invented,—such as ‘voice-dividing’ for
μέρψς,—an improper share of the reader’s attention is necessarily
diverted to this ancillary word, to this word which Homer never intended
should receive so much notice; and a total effect quite different from
Homer’s is thus produced. Therefore Mr Newman, though he does not
purposely import, like Chapman, conceits of his own into the _Iliad_,
does actually import them; for the result of his singular diction is to
raise ideas, and odd ideas, not raised by the corresponding diction in
Homer; and Chapman himself does no more. Cowper says: ‘I have cautiously
avoided all terms of new invention, with an abundance of which persons
of more ingenuity than judgment have not enriched our language but
encumbered it’; and this criticism so exactly hits the diction of Mr
Newman that one is irresistibly led to imagine his present appearance in
the flesh to be at least his second.
A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style, diction, and
quality of thought, without at the same time having what is the result
of these in Homer,—nobleness. Therefore I do not attempt to lay down any
rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness,—the effect, too, of all
others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, and which most
depends on the individual personality of the artist. So I proceed at
once to give you, in conclusion, one or two passages in which I have
tried to follow those principles of Homeric translation which I have
laid down. I give them, it must be remembered, not as specimens of
perfect translation, but as specimens of an attempt to translate Homer
on certain principles; specimens which may very aptly illustrate those
principles by falling short as well as by succeeding.
I take first a passage of which I have already spoken, the comparison of
the Trojan fires to the stars. The first part of that passage is, I have
said, of splendid beauty; and to begin with a lame version of that would
be the height of imprudence in me. It is the last and more level part
with which I shall concern myself. I have already quoted Cowper’s
version of this part in order to show you how unlike his stiff and
Miltonic manner of telling a plain story is to Homer’s easy and rapid
manner:
So numerous seemed those fires the bank between
Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece,
In prospect all of Troy—
I need not continue to the end. I have also quoted Pope’s version of it,
to show you how unlike his ornate and artificial manner is to Homer’s
plain and natural manner:
So many flames before proud Ilion blaze,
And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays;
The long reflections of the distant fires
Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires,
and much more of the same kind. I want to show you that it is possible,
in a plain passage of this sort, to keep Homer’s simplicity without
being heavy and dull; and to keep his dignity without bringing in pomp
and ornament. ‘As numerous as are the stars on a clear night’, says
Homer,
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus,
Between that and the ships, the Trojans’ numerous fires.
In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires: by each one
There sat fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire:
By their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the white barley
While their masters sat by the fire, and waited for Morning.
Here, in order to keep Homer’s effect of perfect plainness and
directness, I repeat the word ‘fires’ as he repeats πυρά without
scruple; although in a more elaborate and literary style of poetry this
recurrence of the same word would be a fault to be avoided. I omit the
epithet of Morning, and whereas Homer says that the steeds ‘waited for
Morning’, I prefer to attribute this expectation of Morning to the
master and not to the horse. Very likely in this particular, as in any
other single particular, I may be wrong: what I wish you to remark is my
endeavour after absolute plainness of speech, my care to avoid anything
which may the least check or surprise the reader, whom Homer does not
check or surprise. Homer’s lively personal familiarity with war, and
with the war-horse as his master’s companion, is such that, as it seems
to me, his attributing to the one the other’s feelings comes to us quite
naturally; but, from a poet without this familiarity, the attribution
strikes as a little unnatural; and therefore, as everything the least
unnatural is un-Homeric, I avoid it.
Again, in the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, Cowper has:
Jove saw their grief with pity, and his brows
Shaking, within himself thus, pensive, said.
‘Ah hapless pair! wherefore by gift divine
Were ye to Peleus given, a mortal king,
Yourselves immortal and from age exempt?’
There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and Mr
Newman, which I have already quoted: but the whole effect is much too
slow. Take Pope:
Nor Jove disdained to cast a pitying look
While thus relenting to the steeds he spoke.
‘Unhappy coursers of immortal strain!
Exempt from age and deathless now in vain;
Did we your race on mortal man bestow
Only, alas! to share in mortal woe?’
Here there is no want either of dignity or rapidity, but all is too
artificial. ‘Nor Jove disdained’, for instance, is a very artificial and
literary way of rendering Homer’s words and so is, ‘coursers of immortal
strain’.
Μυρομένω δ’ ἄρα τώ γε ἰδὼν, ἐλέησε Κρονίων.
And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing,
And he shook his head, and thus addressed his own bosom.
‘Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you,
To a mortal? but ye are without old age and immortal.
Was it that ye, with man, might have your thousands of sorrows?
For than man, indeed, there breathes no wretcheder creature,
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving’.
Here I will observe that the use of ‘own’, in the second line for the
last syllable of a dactyl, and the use of ‘To a’, in the fourth, for a
complete spondee, though they do not, I think, actually spoil the run of
the hexameter, are yet undoubtedly instances of that over-reliance on
accent, and too free disregard of quantity, which Lord Redesdale visits
with just reprehension[33].
I now take two longer passages in order to try my method more fully; but
I still keep to passages which have already come under our notice. I
quoted Chapman’s version of some passages in the speech of Hector at his
parting with Andromache. One astounding conceit will probably still be
in your remembrance,
When sacred Troy shall _shed her tow’rs for tears of overthrow_,
as a translation of ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἰρή. I will quote a few
lines which will give you, also, the key-note to the Anglo-Augustan
manner of rendering this passage and to the Miltonic manner of rendering
it. What Mr Newman’s manner of rendering it would be, you can by this
time sufficiently imagine for yourselves. Mr Wright,—to quote for once
from his meritorious version instead of Cowper’s, whose strong and weak
points are those of Mr Wright also,—Mr Wright begins his version of this
passage thus:
All these thy anxious cares are also mine,
Partner beloved; but how could I endure
The scorn of Trojans and their long-robed wives,
Should they behold their Hector shrink from war,
And act the coward’s part! Nor doth my soul
Prompt the base thought.
_Ex pede Herculem_: you see just what the manner is. Mr Sotheby, on the
other hand (to take a disciple of Pope instead of Pope himself), begins
thus:
‘What moves thee, moves my mind,’ brave Hector said,
‘Yet Troy’s upbraiding scorn I deeply dread,
If, like a slave, where chiefs with chiefs engage,
The warrior Hector fears the war to wage.
Not thus my heart inclines.’
From that specimen, too, you can easily divine what, with such a manner,
will become of the whole passage. But Homer has neither
What moves thee, moves my mind,
nor has he
All these thy anxious cares are also mine.
Ἦ καὶ ἐμοὶ τάδε πάντα μέλει, γύναι· ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἰνῶς,
that is what Homer has, that is his style and movement, if one could but
catch it. Andromache, as you know, has been entreating Hector to defend
Troy from within the walls, instead of exposing his life, and, with his
own life, the safety of all those dearest to him, by fighting in the
open plain. Hector replies:
Woman, I too take thought for this; but then I bethink me
What the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur,
If like a coward I skulked behind, apart from the battle.
Nor would my own heart let me; my heart, which has bid me be valiant
Always, and always fighting among the first of the Trojans,
Busy for Priam’s fame and my own, in spite of the future.
For that day will come, my soul is assured of its coming,
It will come, when sacred Troy shall go to destruction,
Troy, and warlike Priam too, and the people of Priam.
And yet not that grief, which then will be, of the Trojans,
Moves me so much—not Hecuba’s grief, nor Priam my father’s,
Nor my brethren’s, many and brave, who then will be lying
In the bloody dust, beneath the feet of their foemen—
As thy grief, when, in tears, some brazen-coated Achaian
Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended.
Then, perhaps, thou shalt work at the loom of another, in Argos,
Or bear pails to the well of Messeïs, or Hypereia,
Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity’s order.
And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling:
_See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain
Of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city_.
So some man will say; and then thy grief will redouble
At thy want of a man like me, to save thee from bondage.
But let me be dead, and the earth be mounded above me,
Ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity told of.
The main question, whether or no this version reproduces for him the
movement and general effect of Homer better than other versions[34] of
the same passage, I leave for the judgment of the scholar. But the
particular points, in which the operation of my own rules is manifested,
are as follows. In the second line I leave out the epithet of the Trojan
women ἑλκεσιπέπλους, altogether. In the sixth line I put in five words
‘in spite of the future’, which are in the original by implication only,
and are not there actually expressed. This I do, because Homer, as I
have before said, is so remote from one who reads him in English, that
the English translator must be even plainer, if possible, and more
unambiguous than Homer himself; the connection of meaning must be even
more distinctly marked in the translation than in the original. For in
the Greek language itself there is something which brings one nearer to
Homer, which gives one a clue to his thought, which makes a hint enough;
but in the English language this sense of nearness, this clue, is gone;
hints are insufficient, everything must be stated with full
distinctness. In the ninth line Homer’s epithet for Priam is
ἐυμμελίω,—‘armed with good ashen spear’, say the dictionaries;
‘ashen-speared’, translates Mr Newman, following his own rule to ‘retain
every peculiarity of his original’,—I say, on the other hand, that
ἐυμμελίω has not the effect of a ‘peculiarity’ in the original, while
‘ashen-speared’ has the effect of a ‘peculiarity’ in English; and
‘warlike’ is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for ἐυμμελίω, for
fear of disturbing the balance of expression in Homer’s sentence. In the
fourteenth line, again, I translate χαλκοχιτώνων by ‘brazen-coated’. Mr
Newman, meaning to be perfectly literal, translates it by
‘brazen-cloaked’, an expression which comes to the reader oddly and
unnaturally, while Homer’s word comes to him quite naturally; but I
venture to go as near to a literal rendering as ‘brazen-coated’, because
a ‘coat of brass’ is familiar to us all from the Bible, and familiar,
too, as distinctly specified in connection with the wearer. Finally, let
me further illustrate from the twentieth line the value which I attach,
in a question of diction, to the authority of the Bible. The word
‘pre-eminent’ occurs in that line; I was a little in doubt whether that
was not too bookish an expression to be used in rendering Homer, as I
can imagine Mr Newman to have been a little in doubt whether his
‘responsively accosted’ for ἀμειβόμενος προσέφη, was not too bookish an
expression. Let us both, I say, consult our Bibles: Mr Newman will
nowhere find it in his Bible that David, for instance, ‘_responsively
accosted_ Goliath’; but I do find in mine that ‘the right hand of the
Lord hath the _pre-eminence_’; and forthwith I use ‘pre-eminent’,
without scruple. My Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive; and no doubt a
true poetic feeling is the Homeric translator’s best guide in the use of
words; but where this feeling does not exist, or is at fault, I think he
cannot do better than take for a mechanical guide Cruden’s
_Concordance_. To be sure, here as elsewhere, the consulter must know
how to consult,—must know how very slight a variation of word or
circumstance makes the difference between an authority in his favour,
and an authority which gives him no countenance at all; for instance,
the ‘Great simpleton!’ (for μέγα νήπιος) of Mr Newman, and the ‘Thou
fool!’ of the Bible, are something alike; but ‘Thou fool!’ is very
grand, and ‘Great simpleton!’ is an atrocity. So, too, Chapman’s ‘Poor
wretched beasts’ is pitched many degrees too low; but Shakspeare’s ‘Poor
venomous fool, Be angry and despatch!’ is in the grand style.
One more piece of translation and I have done. I will take the passage
in which both Chapman and Mr Newman have already so much excited our
astonishment, the passage at the end of the nineteenth book of the
_Iliad_, the dialogue between Achilles and his horse Xanthus, after the
death of Patroclus. Achilles begins:
‘Xanthus and Balius both, ye far-famed seed of Podarga!
See that ye bring your master home to the host of the Argives
In some other sort than your last, when the battle is ended;
And not leave him behind, a corpse on the plain, like Patroclus’.
Then, from beneath the yoke, the fleet horse Xanthus addressed
him:
Sudden he bowed his head, and all his mane, as he bowed it,
Streamed to the ground by the yoke, escaping from under the collar;
And he was given a voice by the white-armed Goddess Hera.
‘Truly, yet this time will we save thee, mighty Achilles!
But thy day of death is at hand; nor shall _we_ be the reason—
No, but the will of heaven, and Fate’s invincible power.
For by no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours
Did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms from Patroclus;
But that prince among Gods, the son of the lovely-haired Leto,
Slew him fighting in front of the fray, and glorified Hector.
But, for us, we vie in speed with the breath of the West-Wind,
Which, men say, is the fleetest of winds; ’tis thou who art fated
To lie low in death, by the hand of a God and a Mortal’.
Thus far he; and here his voice was stopped by the Furies.
Then, with a troubled heart, the swift Achilles addressed him:
‘Why dost thou prophesy so my death to me, Xanthus? It needs
not.
I of myself know well, that here I am destined to perish,
Far from my father and mother dear: for all that I will not
Stay this hand from fight, till the Trojans are utterly routed
So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle.
Here the only particular remark which I will make is, that in the fourth
and eighth line the grammar is what I call a loose and idiomatic
grammar. In writing a regular and literary style, one would in the
fourth line have to repeat before ‘leave’ the words ‘that ye’ from the
second line, and to insert the word ‘do’; and in the eighth line one
would not use such an expression as ‘he was given a voice’. But I will
make one general remark on the character of my own translations, as I
have made so many on that of the translations of others. It is, that
over the graver passages there is shed an air somewhat too strenuous and
severe, by comparison with that lovely ease and sweetness which Homer,
for all his noble and masculine way of thinking, never loses.
Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that the task of
translating Homer into English verse both will be reattempted, and may
be reattempted successfully. There are great works composed of parts so
disparate that one translator is not likely to have the requisite gifts
for poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of Shakspeare,
and Goethe’s _Faust_; and these it is best to attempt to render in prose
only. People praise Tieck and Schlegel’s version of Shakspeare. I, for
my part, would sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation,
and that is saying a great deal; but in the German poets’ hands
Shakspeare so often gets, especially where he is humorous, an air of
what the French call _niaiserie_! and can anything be more
un-Shakspearian than that? Again; Mr Hayward’s prose translation of the
first part of _Faust_—so good that it makes one regret Mr Hayward should
have abandoned the line of translation for a kind of literature which
is, to say the least, somewhat slight—is not likely to be surpassed by
any translation in verse. But poems like the _Iliad_, which, in the
main, are in one manner, may hope to find a poetical translator so
gifted and so trained as to be able to learn that one manner, and to
reproduce it. Only, the poet who would reproduce this must cultivate in
himself a Greek virtue by no means common among the moderns in general,
and the English in particular,—_moderation_. For Homer has not only the
English vigour, he has the Greek grace; and when one observes the
bolstering, rollicking way in which his English admirers—even men of
genius like the late Professor Wilson—love to talk of Homer and his
poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of
nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm. ‘It is very
well, my good friends’, I always imagine Homer saying to them: if he
could hear them: ‘you do me a great deal of honour, but somehow or other
you praise me too like barbarians’. For Homer’s grandeur is not the
mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the north, of the
authors of _Othello_ and _Faust_; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur.
Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our
ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian
horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.
Footnote 25:
_The Faery Queen_, Canto ii. stanza I.
Footnote 26:
_Odes_, IV. vii. 13.
Footnote 27:
_Odyssey_ iv. 563.
Footnote 28:
_Odes_, III. ii. 31.
Footnote 29:
So short, that I quote it entire:
Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders,
Castor fleet in the car,—Polydeukes brave with the cestus,—
Own dear brethren of mine,—one parent loved us as infants.
Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved Lacedæmon,
Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound through the
waters,
Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?
So said she;—they long since in Earth’s soft arms were reposing,
There, in their own dear land, their Fatherland, Lacedæmon.
_English Hexameter Translations_, London,
1847, p. 242.
I have changed Dr Hawtrey’s ‘Kastor’, ‘Lakedaimon’, back to the
familiar ‘Castor’, ‘Lacedæmon’, in obedience to my own rule that
everything _odd_ is to be avoided in rendering Homer, the most natural
and least odd of poets. I see Mr Newman’s critic in the _National
Review_ urges our generation to bear with the unnatural effect of
these rewritten Greek names, in the hope that by this means the effect
of them may have to the next generation become natural. For my part, I
feel no disposition to pass all my own life in the wilderness of
pedantry, in order that a posterity which I shall never see may one
day enter an orthographical Canaan; and, after all, the real question
is this: whether our living apprehension of the Greek world is more
checked by meeting in an English book about the Greeks, names not
spelt letter for letter as in the original Greek, or by meeting names
which make us rub our eyes and call out, ‘How exceedingly odd!’
The Latin names of the Greek deities raise in most cases the idea of
quite distinct personages from the personages whose idea is raised by
the Greek names. Hera and Juno are actually, to every scholar’s
imagination, two different people. So in all these cases the Latin
names must, at any inconvenience, be abandoned when we are dealing
with the Greek world. But I think it can be in the sensitive
imagination of Mr Grote only, that ‘Thucydides’ raises the idea of a
different man from =Θουκυδίδης=.
Footnote 30:
For instance; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr Lockhart) of
Homer’s description of the parting of Hector and Andromache, there
occurs, in the first five lines, but one spondee besides the necessary
spondees in the sixth place; in the corresponding five lines of Homer
there occur ten. See _English Hexameter Translations_, 244.
Footnote 31:
See for instance, in the _Iliad_, the loose construction of =ὅστε=,
xvii. 658; that of =ἴδοιτο=, xvii. 681; that of =οἵτε=, xviii. 209;
and the elliptical construction at xix. 42, 43; also the idiomatic
construction of =ἐγὼν ὅδε παρασχεῖν=, xix. 140. These instances are
all taken within a range of a thousand lines; anyone may easily
multiply them for himself.
Footnote 32:
Our knowledge of Homer’s Greek is hardly such as to enable us to
pronounce quite confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and what
is not, any more than in his grammar; but I seem to myself clearly to
recognise an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as =τολυπεύειν
πολέμους=, xiv. 86; =φάος ἐν νήεσσιν θήῃς=, xvi. 94; =τιν’ οἴω
ἀσπασίως αὐτῶν γόνυ κάμψειν=, xix. 71; =κλοτοπεύειν=, xix. 149; and
many others. The first-quoted expression, =τολυπεύειν ἀργαλέους
πολέμους=, seems to me to have just about the same degree of freedom
as the ‘_jump_ the life to come’, or the ‘_shuffle off_ this mortal
coil’, of Shakspeare.
Footnote 33:
It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard quantity too
much in constructing English hexameters, we also disregard accent too
much in reading Greek hexameters. We read every Greek dactyl so as to
make a pure dactyl of it; but, to a Greek, the accent must have
hindered many dactyls from sounding as pure dactyls. When we read
=αἰόλος= ἵππος, for instance, or =αἰγιόχοιο=, the dactyl in each of
these cases is made by us as pure a dactyl as ‘Tityre’, or ‘dignity’;
but to a Greek it was not so. To him αἰόλος must have been nearly as
impure a dactyl as ‘death-destined’ is to us; and αἰγιόχ nearly as
impure as the ‘dressed his own’ of my text. Nor, I think, does this
right mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil the run of the
line as a hexameter. The effect of =αἰόλλος= ἵππος (or something like
that), though not _our_ effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the
other hand, κορυθαιόλος as a paroxytonon, although it has the
respectable authority of Liddell and Scott’s _Lexicon_ (following
Heyne), is certainly wrong; for then the word cannot be pronounced
without throwing an accent on the first syllable as well as the third,
and μέγας =κοῤῥυθαιόλλος= Ἕκτωρ would have been to a Greek as
intolerable an ending for a hexameter line as ‘accurst
_orphanhood-destined_ houses’ would be to us. The best authorities,
accordingly, accent κορυθαίολος as a proparoxytonon.
Footnote 34:
Dr Hawtrey also has translated this passage; but here, he has not, I
think, been so successful as in his ‘Helen on the walls of Troy’.
Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice
A Reply to Matthew Arnold
By Francis W. Newman
It is so difficult, amid the press of literature, for a mere versifier
and translator to gain notice at all, that an assailant may even do one
a service, if he so conduct his assault as to enable the reader to sit
in intelligent judgment on the merits of the book assailed. But when the
critic deals out to the readers only so much knowledge as may propagate
his own contempt of the book, he has undoubtedly immense power to
dissuade them from wishing to open it. Mr Arnold writes as openly aiming
at this end. He begins by complimenting me, as ‘a man of great ability
and genuine learning’; but on questions of learning, as well as of
taste, he puts me down as bluntly, as if he had meant, ‘a man totally
void both of learning and of sagacity’. He again and again takes for
granted that he has ‘the scholar’ on his side, ‘the living scholar’, the
man who has learning and taste without pedantry. He bids me please ‘the
scholars’, and go to ‘the scholars’ tribunal’; and does not know that I
did this, to the extent of my opportunity, before committing myself to a
laborious, expensive and perhaps thankless task. Of course he cannot
guess, what is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of
a judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr Arnold’s, have
passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my
translations. I at this moment count eight such names, though of course
I must not here adduce them: nor will I further allude to it, than to
say, that I have no such sense either of pride or of despondency, as
those are liable to, who are consciously isolated in their taste.
Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but
unlearned public is the only rightful judge; and to it I wish to appeal.
Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less have single
scholars, to pronounce a final sentence on questions of taste in their
court. Where I differ in Taste from Mr Arnold, it is very difficult to
find ‘the scholars’ tribunal even if I acknowledged its absolute
jurisdiction: but as regards Erudition, this difficulty does not occur,
and I shall fully reply to the numerous dogmatisms by which he settles
the case against me.
But I must first avow to the reader my own moderate pretensions. Mr
Arnold begins by instilling two errors which he does not commit himself
to assert. He says that my work will _not_ take rank as _the_ standard
translation of Homer, but _other translations will be made_: as if I
thought otherwise! If I have set the example of the right direction in
which translators ought to aim, of course those who follow me will
improve upon me and supersede me. A man would be rash indeed to withhold
his version of a poem of fifteen thousand lines, until he had, to his
best ability, imparted to them all their final perfection. He might
spend the leisure of his life upon it. He would possibly be in his grave
before it could see the light. If it then were published, and it was
founded on any new principle, there would be no one to defend it from
the attacks of ignorance and prejudice. In the nature of the case, his
wisdom is to elaborate in the first instance all the high and noble
parts _carefully_, and get through the inferior parts _somehow_; leaving
of necessity very much to be done in successive editions, if possibly it
please general taste sufficiently to reach them. A generous and
intelligent critic will test such a work mainly or solely by the most
noble parts, and as to the rest, will consider whether the metre and
style adapts itself naturally to them also.
Next, Mr Arnold asks, ‘Who is to assure Mr Newman, that when he has
tried to retain every peculiarity of his original, 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 more
practical directions than these’. The tendency of this is, to suggest to
the reader that I am not aware of the difficulty of rightly applying
good principles; whereas I have in this very connection said expressly,
that even when a translator has got right principles, he is liable to go
wrong in the detail of their application. This is as true of all the
principles which Mr Arnold can possibly give, as of those which I have
given; nor do I for a moment assume, that in writing fifteen thousand
lines of verse I have not made hundreds of blots.
At the same time Mr Arnold has overlooked the point of my remark. Nearly
every translator before me has _knowingly_, _purposely_, _habitually_
shrunk from Homer’s thoughts and Homer’s manner. The reader will
afterwards see whether Mr Arnold does not justify them in their course.
It is not for those who are purposely unfaithful to taunt me with the
difficulty of being truly faithful.
I have alleged, and, against Mr Arnold’s flat denial, I deliberately
repeat, that Homer rises and sinks with his subject, and is often homely
or prosaic. I have professed as my principle, to follow my original in
this matter. It is unfair to expect of me grandeur in trivial passages.
If in any place where Homer is _confessedly_ grand and noble, I have
marred and ruined his greatness, let me be reproved. But I shall have
occasion to protest, that Stateliness is not Grandeur, Picturesqueness
is not Stately, Wild Beauty is not to be confounded with Elegance: a
Forest has its swamps and brushwood, as well as its tall trees.
The duty of one who _publishes_ his censures on me is, to select noble,
greatly admired passages, and confront me both with a prose translation
of the original (for the public cannot go to the Greek) and also with
that which he judges to be a more successful version than mine.
Translation being matter of compromise, and being certain to fall below
the original, when this is of the highest type of grandeur; the question
is not, What translator is perfect? but, Who is least imperfect? Hence
the only fair test is by comparison, when comparison is possible. But Mr
Arnold has not put me to this test. He has quoted two very short
passages, and various single lines, half lines and single words, from
me; and chooses to _tell_ his readers that I ruin Homer’s nobleness,
when (if his censure is just) he might make them _feel_ it by quoting me
upon the most admired pieces. Now with the warmest sincerity I say: If
any English reader, after perusing my version of four or five eminently
noble passages of sufficient length, side by side with those of other
translators, and (better still) with a prose version also, finds in them
high qualities which I have destroyed; I am foremost to advise him to
shut my book, or to consult it only (as Mr Arnold suggests) as a
schoolboy’s ‘help to construe’, if such it can be. My sole object is, to
bring Homer before the unlearned public: I seek no self-glorification:
the sooner I am superseded by a really better translation, the greater
will be my pleasure.
It was not until I more closely read Mr Arnold’s own versions, that I
understood how necessary is his repugnance to mine. I am unwilling to
speak of his metrical efforts. I shall not say more than my argument
strictly demands. It here suffices to state the simple fact, that for
awhile I seriously doubted whether he meant his first specimen for metre
at all. He seems distinctly to say, he is going to give us English
Hexameters; but it was long before I could believe that he had written
the following for that metre:
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus,
Between that and the ships, the Trojans’ numerous fires.
In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires: by each one
There sate fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire.
By their chariots stood the steeds, and champ’d the white barley,
While their masters sate by the fire, and waited for Morning.
I sincerely thought, this was meant for prose; at length the two last
lines opened my eyes. He _does_ mean them for Hexameters! ‘Fire’ ( =
feuer) with him is a spondee or trochee. The first line, I now see,
begins with three (quantitative) spondees, and is meant to be spondaic
in the fifth foot. ‘Bed of, Between, In the’,—are meant for spondees! So
are ‘There sate’, ‘_By_ their’; though ‘Troy _by_ the’ was a dactyl.
‘Champ’d the white’ is a dactyl. My ‘metrical exploits’ amaze Mr Arnold
(p. 23); but my courage is timidity itself compared to his.
His second specimen stands thus:
And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing,
And he shook his head, and thus address’d his own bosom:
Ah, unhappy pair! to Peleus why did we give you,
To a mortal? but ye are without old age and immortal.
Was it that ye with man, might have your thousands of sorrows?
For than man indeed there breathes no wretcheder creature,
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving.
Upon this he apologises for ‘To a’, intended as a spondee in the fourth
line, and ‘-dress’d his own’ for a dactyl in the second; liberties
which, he admits, go rather far, but ‘do not actually spoil the run of
the hexameter’. In a note, he attempts to palliate his deeds by
recriminating on Homer, though he will not allow to me the same excuse.
The accent (it seems) on the second syllable of αἰόλος makes it as
impure a dactyl to a Greek as ‘death-destin’d’ is to us! Mr Arnold’s
erudition in Greek metres is very curious, if he can establish that they
take any cognisance _at all_ of the prose accent, or that αἰολος is
quantitatively more or less of a dactyl, according as the prose accent
is on one or other syllable. His ear also must be of a very unusual
kind, if it makes out that ‘death-destin’d’ is anything but a downright
Molossus. Write it _dethdestind_, as it is pronounced, and the eye,
equally with the ear, decides it to be of the same type as the word
_persistunt_. In the lines just quoted, most readers will be slow to
believe, that they have to place an impetus of the voice (an ictus
metricus at least) on Bétween, In´ the, Thére sate, By´ their, A´nd
with, A´nd he, Tó a, Fór than, O´f all. Here, in the course of thirteen
lines, _composed as a specimen of style_, is found the same offence nine
times repeated, to say nothing here of other deformities. Now contrast
Mr Arnold’s severity against me[35], p. 87: ‘It is a real fault when Mr
Newman has: