In the meantime, various attempts in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ and elsewhere, have been made in the last few years at rendering Homer in modern English hexameter verse. We venture to pronounce them unsuccessful. It is not an easy thing to make readable English hexameters at all; not an easy thing even in the freedom of original composition, but a very hard one, indeed, amid the restrictions of faithful translation. Mr. Longfellow has gained, and has charmed, has instructed in some degree, and attuned the ears of his countrymen and countrywomen (in literature we may be allowed to say), upon both sides of the Atlantic, to the flow and cadence of this hitherto unacceptable measure. Yet the success of ‘Evangeline’ was owing not more, we think, to the author’s practised skill in versification than to his judgment in the choice of his material. Even his powers, we believe, would fail to obtain a wide popularity for a translation even from a language so nearly akin to our own as the German. In Greek, where grammar, inflection, intonation, idiom, habit, character, and genius are all most alien, the task is very much more hopeless.
Moreover, in another point, it may be right to turn the ‘Louise’ of Voss and the ‘Herman and Dorothea’ of Goethe into corresponding modern so-called hexameters. If the verse is clumsy in our rendering, so was it to begin with in the original. If no high degree of elegance is attained, no high degree of elegance was there to be lost.
But in Greek there seems really hardly a reason for selecting this in preference to some readier, more native, and popular form of verse. Certainly the easy flowing couplets of Chaucer, the melodious blank verse of Shakspeare, or some improved variety of ballad metre, such as Mr. Frere used in translating the ‘Cid,’ would be, on the whole, not less like the original music of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ than that which we listen to with pleasure in ‘Evangeline,’ and read without much trouble in the ‘Herman and Dorothea.’ Homer’s rounded line, and Virgil’s smooth verse, were both of them (after more puzzling about it than the matter deserves, I have convinced myself) totally unlike those lengthy, straggling, irregular, uncertain slips of prose mesurée which we find it so hard to measure, so easy to read in half a dozen ways, without any assurance of the right one, and which, since the days of Voss, the Gothic nations consider analogous to classic hexameter.
Lend me, if you can spare them for a moment or two my dear sir, your ears, and tell me, honour bright, is
Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant
the same thing as
Hab’ich den Markt und die Strasse doch nicht so einsam gesehen
Were I to interpolate in a smooth passage of ‘Evangeline’ a verse from the ‘Georgies’ or the ‘Æneid,’ would they go together?
Is the following a metrical sequence?
Thus, in the ancient time the smooth Virgilian verses