On Translating Homer

Francis William Newman, Matthew Arnold

On Translating Homer

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4066338061980

Table of Contents

I

II

III

Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice A Reply to Matthew Arnold By Francis W. Newman

Last Words on Translating Homer A Reply to Francis W. Newman By Matthew Arnold

I

Table of Contents

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 reproduced 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