Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll, But universal night usurps the pole."Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far from his matchless original? "Wretches!" cries Theoclymenus, the seer; and that becomes, "O race to death devote!" "Your heads are swathed in night," turns into "With Stygian shade each destined peer" (peer is good!) "impending fates invade," where Homer says nothing about Styx nor peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of Erebus, and "the burning coasts" are derived from modern popular theology. The very grammar detains or defies the reader; is it the sun that does not give his golden orb to roll, or who, or what?
The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter himself that he rivals Pope at his own game is -"What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!"
This is, if possible, MORE classical than Pope's own -"With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned."But Pope nobly revindicates his unparalleled power of translating funnily, when, in place of "the walls drip with blood," he writes -"With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round."Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what of that? And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add that the ghosts "howl"! I tried to make them gibber, but ghosts DOgibber in Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton, Broome, and Co., make them howl.
No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator. The following example, a far-off following of a noted contemporary poet, may be left unsigned -"Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your sin Sweeps like a shroud o'er the faces and limbs that were gladsome therein;And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men are wet, And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the gateway are met, Ghosts in the court and the gateway are gathered, Hell opens her lips, And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, and sickens in spasm of eclipse."The next is longer and slower: the poet has a difficulty in telling his story:
"Wretches," he cried, "what doom is this? what night Clings like a face-cloth to the face of each, -Sweeps like a shroud o'er knees and head? for lo!
The windy wail of death is up, and tears On every cheek are wet; each shining wall And beauteous interspace of beam and beam Weeps tears of blood, and shadows in the door Flicker, and fill the portals and the court -Shadows of men that hellwards yearn--and now The sun himself hath perished out of heaven, And all the land is darkened with a mist."That could never be mistaken for a version by the Laureate, as perhaps any contemporary hack's works might have been taken for Pope's. The difficulty, perhaps, lies here: any one knows where to have Pope, any one knows that he will evade the mot propre, though the precise evasion he may select is hard to guess. But the Laureate would keep close to his text, and yet would write like himself, very beautifully, but not with an Homeric swiftness and strength. Who is to imitate him? As to Mr. William Morris, he might be fabled to render [Greek text] "niddering wights," but beyond that, conjecture is baffled. {2} Or is THIS the kind of thing? -"Niddering wights, what a bane do ye bear, for your knees in the night, And your heads and your faces, are shrouded, and clamour that knows not delight Rings, and your cheeks are begrutten, and blood is besprent on the walls, Blood on the tapestry fair woven, and barrow-wights walk in the halls.
Fetches and wraiths of the chosen of the Norns, and the sun from the lift Shudders, and over the midgarth and swan's bath the cloud-shadows drift."It may be argued that, though this is perhaps a translation, it is not English, never was, and never will be. But it is quite as like Homer as the performance of Pope.
Such as these, or not so very much better than these as might be wished, are our efforts to translate Homer. From Chapman to Avia, or Mr. William Morris, they are all eminently conscientious, and erroneous, and futile. Chapman makes Homer a fanciful, euphuistic, obscure, and garrulous Elizabethan, but Chapman has fire. Pope makes him a wit, spirited, occasionally noble, full of points, and epigrams, and queer rococo conventionalisms. Cowper makes him slow, lumbering, a Milton without the music. Maginn makes him pipe an Irish jig:-"Scarcely had she begun to wash When she was aware of the grisly gash!"Lord Derby makes him respectable and ponderous. Lord Tennyson makes him not less, but certainly not more, than Tennysonian. Homer, in the Laureate's few fragments of experiment, is still a poet, but he is not Homer. Mr. Morris, and Avia, make him Icelandic, and archaistic, and hard to scan, though vigorous in his fetters for all that. Bohn makes him a crib; and of other translators in prose it has been said, with a humour which one of them appreciates, that they render Homer into a likeness of the Book of Mormon.
Homer is untranslatable. None of us can bend the bow of Eurytus, and make the bow-string "ring sweetly at the touch, like the swallow's song." The adventure is never to be achieved; and, if Greek is to be dismissed from education, not the least of the sorrows that will ensue is English ignorance of Homer.
