“He said, and from his car, accoutred, sprang;
Patroclus saw and he too leaped to earth.
As on a lofty rock, with angry screams,
Hook-beaked, with talons curved, two vultures fight,
So with loud shouts these two to battle rushed.”
Chapman has made his first line out of two in Homer, but, granting the
license, how rapid and springy is the verse! Lord Derby’s “withs” are
not agreeable, his “shouts” is an ill-chosen word for a comparison with
vultures, “talons curved” is feeble, and his verse is, as usual, mainly
built up of little blocks of four syllables each. “To battle” also is
vague. With whom? Homer says that they rushed each at other. We shall
not discuss how much license is loyal in a translator, but, as we think
his chief aim should be to give a feeling of that life and spirit which
makes the immortality of his original, and is the very breath in the
nostrils of all poetry, he has a right to adapt himself to the genius of
his own language. If he would do justice to his author, he must make up
in one passage for his unavoidable shortcomings in another. He may here
and there take for granted certain exigencies of verse in his original
which he feels in his own case. Even Dante, who boasted that no word had
ever made him say what he did not wish, should have made an exception of
rhyming ones, for these sometimes, even in so abundant a language as the
Italian, have driven the most straightforward of poets into an awkward
_détour_.