ANDREW LANG WE NEED HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK

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Select excerpts from a study contained in A. Lang, Essays in Little

Page 11

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.

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    Cf. The Complete Iliad ||| The Complete Odyssey

    Related:  Clyde Pharr, Homer and the study of Greek   Homer Bilingual (Greek English) Anthology  Homer : Greek - English Interlinear Iliad  A Commentary on the Odyssey,  Homer: Achilles' Grief, Returning to Ithaca & The Underworld,  Cavafy, The Horses of Achilles,  Helen Keller, It was the Iliad that made Greece my paradise,  Plato Home Page 

The Greek Word Course : Lessons in Ancient Greek

Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/lessons/lang-homer.asp?pg=11