Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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Mr Newman, by expressions of this kind, is false to his original in two ways. He is false to him inasmuch as he is ignoble; for a noble air, and a grotesque air, the air of the address,

Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης,

and the air of the address,

O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,

A numbing horror,

are just contrary the one to the other: and he is false to him inasmuch as he is odd; for an odd diction like Mr Newman’s, and a perfectly plain natural diction like Homer’s,—‘dapper-greaved Achaians’ and ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί,—are also just contrary the one to the other. Where, indeed, Mr Newman got his diction, with whom he can have lived, what can be his test of antiquity and rarity for words, are questions which I ask myself with bewilderment. He has prefixed to his translation a list of what he calls ‘the more antiquated or rarer words’ which he has used. In this list appear, on the one hand, such words as doughty, grisly, lusty, noisome, ravin, which are familiar, one would think, to all the world; on the other hand such words as bragly, meaning, Mr Newman tells us, ‘proudly fine’; bulkin, ‘a calf’; plump, a ‘mass’; and so on. ‘I am concerned’, says Mr Newman, ‘with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible’. But it seems to me that lusty is not antiquated: and that bragly is not a word readily understood. That this word, indeed, and bulkin, may have ‘a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity’, I admit; but that they are ‘easily intelligible’, I deny.