Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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Pope translates the passage thus:

Could all our care elude the gloomy grave

Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,

For lust of fame I should not vainly dare

In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war:

But since, alas! ignoble age must come,

Disease, and death’s inexorable doom;

The life which others pay, let us bestow,

And give to fame what we to nature owe.

Nothing could better exhibit Pope’s prodigious talent; and nothing, too, could be better in its own way. But, as Bentley said, ‘You must not call it Homer’. One feels that Homer’s thought has passed through a literary and rhetorical crucible, and come out highly intellectualised; come out in a form which strongly impresses us, indeed, but which no longer impresses us in the same way as when it was uttered by Homer. The antithesis of the last two lines—

The life which others pay, let us bestow,

And give to fame what we to nature owe

is excellent, and is just suited to Pope’s heroic couplet; but neither the antithesis itself, nor the couplet which conveys it, is suited to the feeling or to the movement of the Homeric ἴομεν.