Читать книгу On Translating Homer онлайн

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The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our correctness of appreciation of him; and Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment tries to make the ancient not less than the modern world its own; but against modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the translator, if he would feel Homer truly—and unless he feels him truly, how can he render him truly?—cannot be too much on his guard. For example: the writer of an interesting article on English translations of Homer, in the last number of the National Review, quotes, I see, with admiration, a criticism of Mr Ruskin on the use of the epithet φυσίζοος, ‘life-giving’, in that beautiful passage in the third book of the Iliad, which follows Helen’s mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux as alive, though they were in truth dead:

ὣς φάτο· τοὺς δ’ ἤδη κατέχεν φυσίζοος αἶα

ἐν Λακεδαίμονι αὖθι, φίλῃ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ.^[1]

‘The poet’, says Mr Ruskin, ‘has to speak of the earth in sadness; but he will not let that sadness affect or change his thought of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still,—fruitful, life-giving’. This is a just specimen of that sort of application of modern sentiment to the ancients, against which a student, who wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot too resolutely defend himself. It reminds one, as, alas! so much of Mr Ruskin’s writing reminds one, of those words of the most delicate of living critics: “Comme tout genre de composition a son écueil particulier, celui du genre romanesque, c’est le faux”. The reader may feel moved as he reads it; but it is not the less an example of ‘le faux’ in criticism; it is false. It is not true, as to that particular passage, that Homer called the earth φυσίζοος because, ‘though he had to speak of the earth in sadness, he would not let that sadness change or affect his thought of it’, but consoled himself by considering that ‘the earth is our mother still,—fruitful, life-giving’. It is not true, as a matter of general criticism, that this kind of sentimentality, eminently modern, inspires Homer at all. ‘From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more clearly’, says Goethe, ‘that in our life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell’^[2]:—if the student must absolutely have a keynote to the Iliad, let him take this of Goethe, and see what he can do with it; it will not, at any rate, like the tender pantheism of Mr Ruskin, falsify for him the whole strain of Homer.