When Alexander Pope began his translation of the Iliad, his concern was neither literal faithfulness nor archaeological veracity, but a brave attempt to ‘invent again’ what the greatest of poets had invented for the first time; to achieve something close to perfection through an established literary correctness within which a poet’s imagination could build its singular designs. For Pope, it was no Muse that inspired Homer but the poet’s own creative genius. ‘Homer,’ he wrote in the Preface, ‘is universally allowed to have had the greatest invention of any writer whatever… It is the invention that in different degrees distinguishes all great geniuses: the utmost stretch of human study, learning, and industry, which masters everything besides, can never attain to this.’7
Pope was largely self-educated. The son of a Roman Catholic London draper, he spent a difficult childhood afflicted with a tubercular disease of the spine, a recluse in his parents’ home in Windsor Forest, which led him in later life to be both suspicious of and greedy for attention. At the age of sixteen, he wrote a series of pastorals in imitation of Theocritus and Virgil, embarking on a lifelong relationship with the ancient authors from whom he would draw both rhetoric and subject matter. In 1715, at the age of twenty-seven, he published the first volume of his translation of Homer’s Iliad. Pope had imagined his enterprise as a long journey whose end seemed almost unattainable. Pope had no Greek – no doubt a stumbling-block for anyone attempting a translation of Homer – but he worked from the translations of others, namely those of Chapman, John Ogilby and Thomas Hobbes, as well as from John Dryden’s unfinished Iliad, and from Latin versions which he could only more or less decipher since his Latin was far from perfect. He wrote diligently, constructing the book in the strict form of heroic couplets, elevating the tone when he felt that Homer was being too pedestrian. Every day, he would translate thirty or forty verses before getting out of bed, and then he would continue to revise them until the evening, when he would read through the finished pages ‘for the versification only’. Before starting, he wrote out the sense of each of Homer’s lines in prose, and only after grasping the full meaning would he proceed to shape it into verse. But however honed these mechanics, the process itself was never mechanical. The poet Richard Outram once explained that many poets work in this way:8 constructing a poem from prose jottings of ideas and observations, their own but also those of other writers, and that from this word-skeleton the poem begins to take on its individual shape.
Homer made Pope financially independent. No author had ever made as much from a translation. The Iliad, published in six volumes, brought him £5,320 4s, the Odyssey £3,500, a total profit of almost £9,000 – a fortune in those days. ‘Thanks to Homer,’ Pope said, he could ‘live and thrive, indebted to no prince or peer alive.’ Although his Iliad was met with high praise from the reading public, the academics were less enthusiastic. Edward Gibbon, who enjoyed the translation, said that it had ‘every merit except that of likeness to the original’,9 and the despotic Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Richard Bentley, judged it ‘a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer’. Dr Johnson, however, not the least gifted of readers, called it ‘the noblest version of poetry the world has ever seen’.10 Henry Fielding, in his amusing A Journey from this World to the Next, imagined seeing Homer in Elysium, with the scholarly Madame Dacier sitting in his lap. ‘[Homer] asked much after Mr Pope, and said he was very desirous of seeing him; for that he had read his Iliad in his translation with almost as much delight, as he believed he had given others in the original.’11
But some critics disliked what they perceived as Pope’s artificiality rather than his artifice, and made fun of his scruples in rendering Homer’s vulgarities vulgar. William Hazlitt argued that Pope’s ‘chief excellence lay more in diminishing, than in aggrandizing objects… in describing a row of pins and needles, rather than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans’.12 Leslie Stephen, in his biography of Pope, saw the problem clearly: ‘Any style becomes bad when it dies; when it is used merely as tradition, and not as the best mode of producing the desired impression… In such a case, no doubt, the diction becomes a burden, and a man is apt to fancy himself a poet because he is the slave of the external form instead of using it as the most familiar instrument.’13 But that was after Pope had triumphed; it was his successors who failed to match his achievements.
Pope took every precaution to deflect criticism. ‘Our author’s work,’ he wrote of Homer in his Preface, ‘is a wild paradise, where if we cannot see all the beauties so distinctly as in an ordered garden, it is only because the number of them is infinitely greater.’ He then pushed as far as he could the botanical metaphor: ‘It is like a copious nursery, which contains the seeds and first productions of every kind, out of which those who followed him have but selected some particular plants, each according to his fancy, to cultivate and beautify. If some things are too luxuriant, it is owing to the richness of the soil; and if others are not arrived to perfection or maturity, it is only because they are overrun and oppressed by those of a stronger nature.’14 In other words, Homer’s perfection cannot be fully transplanted by anyone.
‘The concept of a definitive text,’ wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1932, ‘belongs to either religion or weariness.’15 A definitive translation, therefore, is only one that we have read more times than another. We grow accustomed to Edward FitzGerald or John Chapman, T. E. Lawrence or J. H. Voss, and because we are especially familiar with one of them, believe it to be truer and better than the rest. Pope’s version is for most of his readers (those who enjoy his daring, inspired music) definitive. Almost any example will do to prove his excellence, such as this description from Book XXIII, after Achilles has killed Hector and built a funeral pile for Patroclus. But the winds won’t rise to feed the flames, and the goddess Iris must deliver Achilles’ prayer to the winds Boreas and Zephyr.
Swift as the word she vanish’d from their view;
Swift as the word the winds tumultuous flew;
Forth burst the stormy band with thundering roar,
And heaps on heaps the clouds are tossed before.
To the wide main then stooping from the skies,
The heaving deeps in watery mountains rise:
Troy feels the blast along her shaking walls,
Till on the pile the gather’d tempest falls.16
Robert Fagles, whose translations are used throughout this book, has been widely praised for his accuracy and modern ring. In his version of the Iliad of 1990, he paints the same scene in six lines:
Message delivered, off she sped as the winds rose
with a superhuman roar, stampeding clouds before them.
Suddenly reaching the open sea in gale force,
whipping whitecaps under a shrilling killer-squall
they raised the good rich soil of Troy and struck the pyre
and a huge inhuman blaze went howling up the skies.17
Our modern ear recognizes Fagles’ idiom, from the ‘Message delivered’ to the ‘killer-squall’, and the ‘inhuman’ for the huge blaze is very good; it all rings true. But Pope is not aiming for verisimilitude; rather a natural artificiality punctuated by cadenced rhymes, composing verses with a repetitive beat not unlike today’s rap, attempting an art ‘itself unseen, but in the effects, remains’, as he had called for in his Essay on Criticism:
First follow Nature, and your Judgment frame
By her just Standard, which is still the same:
…
Art from that Fund each just Supply provides,
Works without Show, and without Pomp presides.18
Pope wrote at the closing (and also at the beginning) of a particular moment in English literature, with certain codes and conventions which he handled better than almost anyone, perhaps because he had invented many of them. ‘By perpetual practice,’ wrote Dr Johnson, ‘language had in his mind a systematical arrangement; having always the same use for words, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at his
call.’19 Pope’s style was never ‘external’ to him, never mechanical: it only seemed so in the eyes of certain of his readers who either demanded scientific exactness from the poet, or had already become attuned to William Wordsworth’s cadences, and who therefore felt that Pope’s lines were strained and weak and nothing but decorative. William Cowper, a dreary minor poet, said that Pope ‘Made poetry a mere mechanic art/And ev’ry warbler has his tune by heart.’20 But, as George Steiner wisely maintained, ‘Pope’s detractors have been those who have not read him.’21
Matthew Arnold certainly had read Pope, and yet in spite of judging him a ‘prodigious talent’, found him wanting as a translator. ‘Homer,’ Arnold wrote in 1861, ‘invariably composes “with his eye on the object”, whether the object be a moral or a metrial one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his subject, whatever it is.’22 Arnold was a keen reader, an astute critic, a gifted educator and sometimes a good poet. The son of a Rugby headmaster, he became first fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and then inspector of schools, an appointment that allowed him, for thirty-five long years, to observe the conditions of education in England and led to his plea for better educational standards, following the Prussian model (Schools and Universities on the Continent, 1868) and to his arguments for a livelier artistic engagement (Culture and Anarchy, 1869). Arnold was, above all, a cosmopolitan, impatient with the provincialism and short-sightedness of English intellectual life. But it was, perhaps, in his discussion of the problems related to Homeric translation that he best demonstrated his critical skills.
Arnold’s points of departure are the two main schools of thought regarding translation in general. The first (put forward by the classicist Francis William Newman, only better to condemn it) argued in 1861 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 in English) from an English hand.’23 The second, strongly defended by Newman, argued that a translator should ‘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 might ‘never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material’. The translator’s first duty was ‘a historical one, to be faithful’. Both sides, Arnold pointed out, would agree as to faithfulness, ‘but the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists’. Arnold reasonably noted that, even if Newman were to achieve his purpose and ‘retain every peculiarity of his original’, who would assure him that what he had done adhered to Homer’s manner and habit of thought? ‘The only competent tribunal in this matter, the Greeks,’ Arnold pointed out, ‘are dead.’24
Arnold advised any would-be translator to leave aside a number of questions – whether Homer ever existed, whether he was one or many, whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement was foreshadowed in Homeric mythology – since, even if it were possible to answer them, they could be of no benefit to the translation. Nor should the translator assume that modern sentiment is applicable to ancient stories: whatever it was that the ancients believed, we must assume that it was something different from what we believe today. The translator of Homer should be four things: rapid in his telling, plain and direct in his expression, also plain and direct in his thought, and finally, eminently noble. These qualities, Arnold recognized, were probably ‘too general to be of much service to anybody’, except to a future poet who would try his hand at Homer and who ‘will have (or he cannot succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that disinterested love of it, which are, both of them, so rare in literature, and so precious’.25
Newman dismissed Arnold’s criticisms without really addressing them, using pedantic grammatical quibbles and abstruse semantic principles. He imagined that Arnold was being ironic when he was being reflective, and disrespectful when he was nothing but accurate. That most exacting of critics, A. E. Housman, writing in 1892, had this to say of Arnold’s arguments: ‘But when it comes to literary criticism, heap up in one scale all the literary criticism that the whole nation of professed scholars ever wrote, and drop into the other the thin green volume of Matthew Arnold’s Lectures on Translating Homer, which has long been out of print because the British public does not care to read it, and the first scale, as Milton says, will straight fly up and kick the beam.’26
CHAPTER 13
Realms of Gold
Talking it over, we agreed that Blake was no good because he learnt Italian at over 60 to study Dante, and we knew Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson – well, Tennyson goes without saying.
Samuel Butler, The Notebooks, 1912 (post.)
For the Romantic poets, it was not in literary straitjackets that poetry was to be found, but in wild inspiration, out in the fresh air and in the experience of country life. Form should mirror feeling. John Keats believed that time spent in natural surroundings would ‘strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I should reach Homer’.1 Keats, or at least so he said, had come to Homer through Chapman’s 1598 translation of the Iliad in opulent fourteen-syllable lines. Keats’ account of the discovery is justly famous.
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states & kingdoms seen:
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.2
Chapman, in his ‘Preface to the Reader’, argued that the English tongue was best suited for translating Homer, ‘Prince of Poets’, for ‘Poesy is the flower of the Sun, and disdains to open to the eye of a candle’. This, for the Romantics, felt closer to the notion of the primordial ground-breaking Homer, the ‘with-all-skill-enriched Poet’3 whom no rigid poetic form could truly contain. Attacking Pope against Chapman was, they felt, a good way of defending Homer.
William Blake attacked all three, but especially Homer. Blake’s relationship to Homer isn’t easy to understand: Homer was both a poet to be lauded and a name to be reviled; both one of the Visionary Poets (Blake ranked him with Virgil, Milton and Dante)4 and one of the ‘superceded’ classics; one of the ‘Inspired Men’5 society condemned as dangerous outsiders and also a figurehead for the ‘classical’ past, used by society for defending intellectual crimes such as trading and hoarding, translating and copying, while at the same time despising true creation. ‘The Classics!’ Blake raged. ‘It is the Classics, & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars.’6
According to Blake, what set Homer ‘in so high a rank of Art’ was his craft in dealing with symbols. Homer, he wrote in about 1820, ‘addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason’.7 And yet, in Blake’s view, Homer’s poems had been degraded by readers who found in them contemporary morals. ‘If Homer’s merit,’ Blake answered, ‘was only in these Historical combinations & Moral sentiments he would be no better than Clarissa’, Richardson’s huge sentimental novel. And Blake added, beyond appeal: ‘The grandest Poetry is Immoral, the Grandest characters Wicked!’8 Homer’s ‘Poetry of the Heathen’, however, was ‘Stolen and Perverted from the Bible, not by Chance but by design, by the Kings of Persia & their Generals, the Greek Heroes, & lastly by the Romans.’9 It is as if, for Blake, ‘Homer’ stood for various different notions unrelated and unrelatable to one
another. Perhaps a clue to the ambiguous identity Blake lent Homer can be seen in one of the illustrations that he made for Dante’s Commedia. The seventh image in the series is a depiction of the ‘Father of Poetry’, as Dante saw him, crowned in laurel, bearing a sword and attended by the six poets from antiquity. Except that instead of giving Homer his name, Blake wrote ‘Satan’ and then partly erased the caption.10 Satan was, for Blake, the true hero of Paradise Lost.11
What Blake thought of Pope is clearer. He coupled him with Dryden, whose poetry he branded ‘Monotonous Sing Song, Sing Song from beginning to end’.12 His near contemporary, Lord Byron, disagreed. He had read Pope thoroughly and found him a greater revolutionary than any of Byron’s fellow writers and, as a poet, ‘a touchstone of taste’.13 ‘With regard to poetry in general,’ he wrote to his publisher, John Murray, on 17 September 1817, ‘I am convinced that [we] are all in the wrong, one as much as another; that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself… I am the more confirmed in this by having lately gone over some of our classics, particularly Pope, whom I tried in this way… and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified at the ineffable distance in point of sense, harmony, effect, and even Imagination, passion, and Invention, between the little Queen Anne’s man, and us of the Lower Empire.’14
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