Читать книгу On Translating Homer - Arnold Matthew - Страница 4

The spirit I first did breathe

Did never teach me that; much less, since the contempt of death

Was settled in me, and my mind knew what a worthy was,

Whose office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass

Without improvement. In this fire must Hector’s trial shine:

Here must his country, father, friends, be in him made divine.

You see how ingeniously Homer’s plain thought is tormented, as the French would say, here. Homer goes on: ‘For well I know this in my mind and in my heart, the day will be, when sacred Troy shall perish’—

ἔσσεται ἦμαρ, ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρή.

Chapman makes this:

And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know,

When sacred Troy shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow.

I might go on for ever, but I could not give you a better illustration than this last, of what I mean by saying that the Elizabethan poet fails to render Homer because he cannot forbear to interpose a play of thought between his object and its expression. Chapman translates his object into Elizabethan, as Pope translates it into the Augustan of Queen Anne; both convey it to us through a medium. Homer, on the other hand, sees his object and conveys it to us immediately.

And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of Homer’s style, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of his ideas, he is eminently noble; he works as entirely in the grand style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, or Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what makes his translators despair. ‘To give relief’, says Cowper, ‘to prosaic subjects’ (such as dressing, eating, drinking, harnessing, travelling, going to bed), that is to treat such subjects nobly, in the grand style, ‘without seeming unreasonably tumid, is extremely difficult’. It is difficult, but Homer has done it. Homer is precisely the incomparable poet he is, because he has done it. His translator must not be tumid, must not be artificial, must not be literary; true: but then also he must not be commonplace, must not be ignoble. I have shown you how translators of Homer fail by wanting rapidity, by wanting simplicity of style, by wanting plainness of thought: in a second lecture I will show you how a translator fails by wanting nobility.