Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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I do not despair of making all these propositions clear to a student who approaches Homer with a free mind. First, Homer is eminently rapid, and to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien. The reputation of Cowper, that most interesting man and excellent poet, does not depend on his translation of Homer; and in his preface to the second edition, he himself tells us that he felt,—he had too much poetical taste not to feel,—on returning to his own version after six or seven years, ‘more dissatisfied with it himself than the most difficult to be pleased of all his judges’. And he was dissatisfied with it for the right reason,—that ‘it seemed to him deficient in the grace of ease’. Yet he seems to have originally misconceived the manner of Homer so much, that it is no wonder he rendered him amiss. ‘The similitude of Milton’s manner to that of Homer is such’, he says, ‘that no person familiar with both can read either without being reminded of the other; and it is in those breaks and pauses to which the numbers of the English poet are so much indebted, both for their dignity and variety, that he chiefly copies the Grecian’. It would be more true to say: ‘The unlikeness of Milton’s manner to that of Homer is such, that no person familiar with both can read either without being struck with his difference from the other; and it is in his breaks and pauses that the English poet is most unlike the Grecian’.