Part 6

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.