Part 7

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:

Infátuáte! óh that thou wért | lord to some other army—

for here 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_’. Thus to the flaw which Mr Arnold admits nine times in thirteen pattern lines, he shows no mercy in me, who have toiled through fifteen thousand. Besides, on _wert_ we are free at pleasure to place or not to place the accent; but in Mr Arnold’s _Bétween_, _Tó a_, etc., it is impossible or offensive.

To avoid a needlessly personal argument, I enlarge on the general question of hexameters. Others, scholars of repute, have given example and authority to English hexameters. As matter of curiosity, as erudite sport, such experiments may have their value. I do not mean to express indiscriminate disapproval, much less contempt. I have myself privately tried the same in Alcaics; and find the chief objection to be, not that the task is impossible, but that to execute it _well_ is too difficult for a language like ours, overladen with consonants, and abounding with syllables neither distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every intermediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to keep even Greek or Roman poetry to true _time_; to the English language it is of tenfold necessity. But if _time_ is abandoned (as in fact it always is), and the prose accent has to do duty for the ictus metricus, the moral genius of the metre is fundamentally subverted. What previously was steady duplicate time (‘march-time’, as Professor Blackie calls it) vacillates between duplicate and triplicate. With Homer, a dactyl had nothing in it _more tripping_ than a spondee: a crotchet followed by two quavers belongs to as grave an anthem as two crotchets. But Mr Arnold himself (p. 55) calls the introduction of anapæsts by Dr Maginn into our ballad measure, ‘a detestable dance’: as in:

And scarcely hád shĕ bĕgún to wash, Ere shé wăs ăwáre ŏf thĕ grisly gash.

I will not assert that this is everywhere improper in the Odyssey; but no part of the Iliad occurs to me in which it is proper, and I have totally excluded it in my own practice. I notice it but once in Mr Gladstone’s specimens, and it certainly offends my taste as out of harmony with the gravity of the rest, viz.

My ships shall bound ĭn thĕ morning’s light.

In Shakspeare we have _i’th’_ and _o’th’_ for monosyllables, but (so scrupulous am I in the midst of my ‘atrocities’) I never dream of such a liberty myself, much less of avowed ‘anapæsts’. So far do I go in the opposite direction, as to prefer to make such words as _Danai_, _victory_ three syllables, which even Mr Gladstone and Pope accept as dissyllabic. Some reviewers have called my metre _lege solutum_; which is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning Pindar. That, in passing. But surely Mr Arnold’s severe blow at Dr Maginn rebounds with double force upon himself.

To Péleus whý dĭd wĕ gíve you?— Hécŭbă’s griéf nor Príăm my fáther’s— Thoúsănds ŏf sórrows—

cannot be a _less_ detestable jig than that of Dr Maginn. And this objection holds against every accentual hexameter, even to those of Longfellow or Lockhart, if applied to grand poetry. For bombast, in a wild whimsical poem, Mr Clough has proved it to be highly appropriate; and I think, the more ‘rollicking’ is Mr Clough (if only I understand the word) the more successful his metre. Mr Arnold himself _feels_ what I say against ‘dactyls’, for on this very ground he advises largely superseding them by spondees; and since what he calls a spondee is any pair of syllables of which the former is accentuable, his precept amounts to this, that the hexameter be converted into a line of six accentual trochees, with free liberty left of diversifying it, in any foot except the last, by Dr Maginn’s ‘detestable dance’. What more severe condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this mere description gives? ‘Six trochees’ seems to me the worst possible foundation for an English metre. I cannot imagine that Mr Arnold will give the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me; but I do advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba, Kehama, and Shelley’s works, for the phenomenon.

I have elsewhere insisted, but I here repeat, that for a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is most unnatural and vexatious in English, because so large a number of our sentences begin with unaccented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line eminently depends on the purity of its initial trochee. Mr Arnold’s feeble trochees already quoted (from _Bétween_ to _Tó a_) are all the fatal result of defying the tendencies of our language.