Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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Take merely the opening pages to Chapman’s translation, the introductory verses, and the dedications. You will find:

An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince,

My most gracious and sacred Mæcenas,

Henry, Prince of Wales,

Our Sunn, Heyr, Peace, Life,

Henry, son of James the First, to whom the work is dedicated. Then comes an address,

To the sacred Fountain of Princes,

Sole Empress of Beauty and Virtue, Anne, Queen

Of England, etc.

All the Middle Age, with its grotesqueness, its conceits, its irrationality, is still in these opening pages; they by themselves are sufficient to indicate to us what a gulf divides Chapman from the ‘clearest-souled’ of poets, from Homer, almost as great a gulf as that which divides him from Voltaire. Pope has been sneered at for saying that Chapman writes ‘somewhat as one might imagine Homer himself to have written before he arrived at years of discretion’. But the remark is excellent: Homer expresses himself like a man of adult reason, Chapman like a man whose reason has not yet cleared itself. For instance, if Homer had had to say of a poet, that he hoped his merit was now about to be fully established in the opinion of good judges, he was as incapable of saying this as Chapman says it,—‘Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora, and Ganges, few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his temples with the sun’,—I say, Homer was as incapable of saying this in that manner, as Voltaire himself would have been. Homer, indeed, has actually an affinity with Voltaire in the unrivalled clearness and straightforwardness of his thinking; in the way in which he keeps to one thought at a time, and puts that thought forth in its complete natural plainness, instead of being led away from it by some fancy striking him in connection with it, and being beguiled to wander off with this fancy till his original thought, in its natural reality, knows him no more. What could better show us how gifted a race was this Greek race? The same member of it has not only the power of profoundly touching that natural heart of humanity which it is Voltaire’s weakness that he cannot reach, but can also address the understanding with all Voltaire’s admirable simplicity and rationality.