Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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When, therefore, Cowper says, ‘My chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original’; when Mr Newman says, ‘My aim is to retain every peculiarity of the original, to be faithful, exactly as is the case with the draughtsman of the Elgin marbles’; their real judge only replies: ‘It may be so: reproduce then upon us, reproduce the effect of Homer, as a good copy reproduces the effect of the Elgin marbles’.

When, again, Mr Newman tells us that ‘by an exhaustive process of argument and experiment’ he has found a metre which is at once the metre of ‘the modern Greek epic’, and a metre ‘like in moral genius’ to Homer’s metre, his judge has still but the same answer for him: ‘It may be so: reproduce then on our ear something of the effect produced by the movement of Homer’.

But what is the general effect which Homer produces on Mr Newman himself? because, when we know this, we shall know whether he and his judges are agreed at the outset, whether we may expect him, if he can reproduce the effect he feels, if his hand does not betray him in the execution, to satisfy his judges and to succeed. If, however, Mr Newman’s impression from Homer is something quite different from that of his judges, then it can hardly be expected that any amount of labour or talent will enable him to reproduce for them their Homer.