Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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O gentle friend! if thou and I, from this encounter ’scaping,

Hereafter might for ever be from Eld and Death exempted

As heavenly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost,

Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle.

Now,—sith ten thousand shapes of Death do any-gait pursue us

Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and nimble;—

Onward! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to someone.

Could all our care elude the gloomy grave

Which claims no less the fearful than the brave.

I am not going to quote Pope’s version over again, but I must remark in passing, how much more, with all Pope’s radical difference of manner from Homer, it gives us of the real effect of

εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε

than Mr Newman’s lines. And now, why are Mr Newman’s lines faulty? They are faulty, first, because, as a matter of diction, the expressions ‘O gentle friend’, ‘eld’, ‘in sooth’, ‘liefly’, ‘advance’, ‘man-ennobling’, ‘sith’, ‘any-gait’, and ‘sly of foot’, are all bad; some of them worse than others, but all bad: that is, they all of them as here used excite in the scholar, their sole judge,—excite, I will boldly affirm, in Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett,—a feeling totally different from that excited in them by the words of Homer which these expressions profess to render. The lines are faulty, secondly, because, as a matter of rhythm, any and every line among them has to the ear of the same judges (I affirm it with equal boldness) a movement as unlike Homer’s movement in the corresponding line as the single words are unlike Homer’s words. Οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμαι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειρν,—‘Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle’;—for whose ears do those two rhythms produce impressions of, to use Mr Newman’s own words, ‘similar moral genius’?