“Ah! wretched men, what ill is this ye suffer? In night are swathed your heads, your faces, your knees; and the voice of wailing is kindled, and cheeks are wet with tears, and with blood drip the walls, and the fair main beams of the roof, and the porch is full of shadows, and full is the courtyard, of ghosts that hasten hellward below the darkness, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist sweeps up over all.”
So much for Homer. The first attempt at metric translation here given is meant to be in the manner of Pope:
“Caitiffs!” he cried, “what heaven-directed blight
Involves each countenance with clouds of night!
What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!
Why do the walls with gouts ensanguined ooze?
The court is thronged with ghosts that ’neath the gloom
Seek Pluto’s realm, and Dis’s awful doom;
In ebon curtains Phoebus hides his head,
And sable mist creeps upward from the dead.”
This appears pretty bad, and nearly as un-Homeric as a translation could possibly be. But Pope, aided by Broome and Fenton, managed to be much less Homeric, much more absurd, and infinitely more “classical” in the sense in which Pope is classical:
“O race to death devote! with Stygian shade
Each destined peer impending fates invade;
With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned;
With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:
Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,
To people Orcus and the burning coasts!
Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,
But universal night usurps the pole.”
Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far from his matchless original? “Wretches!” cries Theoclymenus, the seer; and that becomes, “O race to death devote!” “Your heads are swathed in night,” turns into “With Stygian shade each destined peer” (peer is good!) “impending fates invade,” where Homer says nothing about Styx nor peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of Erebus, and “the burning coasts” are derived from modern popular theology. The very grammar detains or defies the reader; is it the sun that does not give his golden orb to roll, or who, or what?
The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter himself that he rivals Pope at his own game is—
“What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!”
This is, if possible, more classical than Pope’s own—
“With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned.”