Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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Well then, Homer is neither quaint, nor garrulous, nor prosaic, nor mean: and Mr Newman, in seeing him so, sees him differently from those who are to judge Mr Newman’s rendering of him. By pointing out how a wrong conception of Homer affects Mr Newman’s translation, I hope to place in still clearer light those four cardinal truths which I pronounce essential for him who would have a right conception of Homer: that Homer is rapid, that he is plain and direct in word and style, that he is plain and direct in his ideas, and that he is noble.

Mr Newman says that in fixing on a style for suitably rendering Homer, as he conceives him, he ‘alights on the delicate line which separates the quaint from the grotesque’. ‘I ought to be quaint’, he says, ‘I ought not to be grotesque’. This is a most unfortunate sentence. Mr Newman is grotesque, which he himself says he ought not to be; and he ought not to be quaint, which he himself says he ought to be.

‘No two persons will agree’, says Mr Newman, ‘as to where the quaint ends and the grotesque begins’; and perhaps this is true. But, in order to avoid all ambiguity in the use of the two words, it is enough to say, that most persons would call an expression which produced on them a very strong sense of its incongruity, and which violently surprised them, grotesque; and an expression, which produced on them a slighter sense of its incongruity, and which more gently surprised them, quaint. Using the two words in this manner, I say, that when Mr Newman translates Helen’s words to Hector in the sixth book,