Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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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.