The Odyssey of Homer - Done Into English Prose - Paperback

THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE - 1929 - PREFACE - THERE would have been less controversy about the proper method of Homeric translation, if critics hsd recognised that the question is a purely relative one, that of Homer there can be no final translation. The taste and the literary habits of each age demand different qualities in poetry, and therefore a different sort of rendering of Homer. To the men of the time of Elizabeth, Homer would have appeared bald, it seems, and lacking in ingenuity, if he had been presented in his antique simplicity. For the Elizabethan age, Chapman supplied what was then necessary, and the mannerisms that were then deemed of the essence of poetry, namely, daring and luxurious conceits. Thus in Chapmans verse Troy must shed her towers for tears of overthrow, and when the winds toss Odysseus about, their sport must be called the horrid tennis. In the age of Anne, dignity and correctness had to be given to Homer, and Pope gave them by aid of his dazzling rhetoric, his antitheses, his nettete, his command of every conventional and favourite artifice. Without Chapmans conceits, Homers poems would hardly have been what the Elizabethans took for poetry without - Popes smoothness, and Popes points, the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemed tame, rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great translations must always live as English poems. As transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a lost point of view. Chaque sikcle depuis le xvie a eu de ce cztk son belvlder diflrent. Again, when Europe woke to a sense, an almost exaggerated and certainly uncritical sense, of the value of her songs of the people, of all the ballads that Herder, Scott, Lonnrot, and the rest collected, it was commonly said that Homer was a ballad-minstrel, that the translator must imitate the simplicity, and even adopt the formulae of the ballad. Hence came the renderings of Maginn, the experiments of Mr. Gladstone, and others. There was some excuse for the error of critics who asked for a Homer in ballad rhyme. The Epic poet, the poet of gods and heroes, did indeed in herit some of theformulae of the earlier Volks-lied. Homer, like the author of The Song of Roland, like the singers of the Kalevala, uses constantly recurring-epithets, and repeats, word for word, certain emphatic passages, messages, and so on. That custom is essential in the ballad, it is an accident not the essence of the epic...