Part 44 (1/2)

I. HUGHES SALEL

The dilection of Greek poets has waned during the last pestilent century, and this decline has, I think, kept pace with a decline in the use of Latin cribs to Greek authors. The cla.s.sics have more and more become a baton exclusively for the cudgelling of schoolboys, and less and less a diversion for the mature.

I do not imagine I am the sole creature who has been well taught his Latin and very ill-taught his Greek (beginning at the age, say, of twelve, when one is unready to discriminate matters of style, and when the economy of the adjective cannot be wholly absorbing). A child may be bulldozed into learning almost anything, but man accustomed to some degree of freedom is loath to approach a masterpiece through five hundred pages of grammar. Even a scholar like Porson may confer with former translators.

We have drifted out of touch with the Latin authors as well, and we have mislaid the fine English versions: Golding's _Metamorphoses_; Gavin Douglas' _aeneids;_ Marlowe's _Eclogues_ from Ovid, in each of which books a great poet has compensated, by his own skill, any loss in transition; a new beauty has in each case been created. Greek in English remains almost wholly unsuccessful, or rather, there are glorious pa.s.sages but no long or whole satisfaction. Chapman remains the best English ”Homer,” marred though he may be by excess of added ornament, and rather more marred by parentheses and inversions, to the point of being hard to read in many places.

And if one turn to Chapman for almost any favorite pa.s.sage one is almost sure to be disappointed; on the other hand I think no one will excel him in the plainer pa.s.sages of narrative, as of Priam's going to Achilles in the XXIVth Iliad. Yet he breaks down in Priam's prayer at just the point where the language should be the simplest and austerest.

Pope is easier reading, and, out of fas.h.i.+on though he is, he has at least the merit of translating Homer into _something_. The nadir of Homeric translation is reached by the Leaf-Lang prose; Victorian faddism having persuaded these gentlemen to a belief in King James fustian; their alleged prose has neither the concision of verse nor the virtues of direct motion. In their preface they grumble about Chapman's ”mannerisms,” yet their version is full of ”Now behold I” and ”yea even as” and ”even as when,” tushery possible only to an affected age bent on propaganda. For, having, despite the exclusion of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ from the island, finally found that the Bible couldn't be retained either as history or as private Reuter from J'hvh's Hebrew Press bureau, the Victorians tried to boom it, and even its wilfully bowdlerized translations, as literature.

”So spake he, and roused Athene that already was set thereon.... Even as the son of ... even in such guise....”

perhaps no worse than

”With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving”[1]

but bad enough anyway.

Of Homer two qualities remain untranslated: the magnificent onomatopia, as of the rush of the waves on the sea-beach and their recession in:

_pa?? ???a p???F???s??? ?a??ss??_

untranslated and untranslatable; and, secondly, the authentic cadence of speech; the absolute conviction that the words used, let us say by Achilles to the ”dog-faced” chicken-hearted Agamemnon, are in the actual swing of words spoken. This quality of actual speaking is _not_ untranslatable. Note how Pope fails to translate it:

There sat the seniors of the Trojan race (Old Priam's chiefs, and most in Priam's grace): The king, the first; Thymtes at his side; Lampus and Clytius, long in counsel try'd; Panthus and Hicetaon, once the strong; And next, the wisest of the reverend throng, Antenor grave, and sage Ucalegon, Lean'd on the walls, and bask'd before the sun.

Chiefs, who no more in b.l.o.o.d.y fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer days like gra.s.shoppers rejoice, A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.

These, when the Spartan queen approach'd the tower, In secret own'd resistless beauty's power: They cried, No wonder, such celestial charms For nine long years have set the world in arms!

What winning graces! What majestic mien!

She moves a G.o.ddess, and she looks a queen!

Yet hence, oh Heaven, convey that fatal face, And from destruction save the Trojan race.

This is anything but the ”surge and thunder,” but it is, on the other hand, a definite idiom, within the limits of the rhymed pentameter couplet it is even musical in parts; there is imbecility in the ant.i.thesis, and bathos in ”she looks a queen,” but there is fine accomplishment in:

”Wise through time, and narrative with age,”

Mr. Pope's own invention, and excellent. What we definitely can _not_ hear is the voice of the old men speaking. The simile of the gra.s.shoppers is well rendered, but the old voices do not ring in the ear.

Homer (iii. 156-160) reports their conversation:

_?? ??es??, ???a? ?a? ??????da? ??a????_ _????d ?F? ???a??? p???? ?????? ???ea p?s?e???_ _???? ??a??t?s? ?e?? e?? ?pa ????e?._ _???? ?a? ??, t??? pe? e???', ?? ???s? ?e?s???_ _??d' ??? te??ess? t' '?p?ss? p?a ??p??t?._

Which is given in Sam. Clark's _ad verb.u.m_ translation:

”Non _est_ indigne ferendum, Trojanos et bene-ocreatos Archivos Tali de muliere longum tempus dolores pati: Omnino immortalibus deabus ad vultum similis est.

Sed et sic, talis quamvis sit, in navibus redeat, Neque n.o.bis liberisque in posterum detrimentum relinquatur.”

Mr. Pope has given six short lines for five long ones, but he has added ”fatal” to face (or perhaps only lifted it from _??es??_), he has added ”winning graces,” ”majestic,” ”looks a queen.” As for owning beauty's resistless power secretly or in the open, the Greek is: