Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or Dante are, doubtless, most impressive qualities of style; but they are the very opposites of the directness and flowingness of Homer, which he keeps alike in passages of the simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest emotion. Not only, for example, are these lines of Cowper un-Homeric:

So numerous seemed those fires the banks between

Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece

In prospect all of Troy;

where the position of the word ‘blazing’ gives an entirely un-Homeric movement to this simple passage, describing the fires of the Trojan camp outside of Troy; but the following lines, in that very highly-wrought passage where the horse of Achilles answers his master’s reproaches for having left Patroclus on the field of battle, are equally un-Homeric:

For not through sloth or tardiness on us

Aught chargeable, have Ilium’s sons thine arms

Stript from Patroclus’ shoulders; but a God

Matchless in battle, offspring of bright-haired

Latona, him contending in the van