"Troia the Achaioi hold," and later,
"Troia do the Achaioi hold," followed by:
"this same day
I think a noise—no mixture—reigns i' the city
Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel—"
And it does not end here. In fact it reaches the nadir of its bathos in a later speech of Klutaimnestra in the line
"The perfect man his home perambulating!"
We may add several exclamation points to the one which Mr. Browning has provided. But then all translation is a thankless, or is at least most apt to be a thankless and desolate undertaking.
What Browning had not got into his sometimes excellent top-knot was the patent, or what should be the patent fact that inversions of sentence order in an uninflected language like English are not, simply and utterly are not any sort of equivalent for inversions and perturbations of order in a language inflected as Greek and Latin are inflected. That is the chief source of his error. In these inflected languages order has other currents than simple sequence of subject, predicate, object; and all sorts of departures from this Franco-English natural position are in Greek and Latin neither confusing nor delaying; they may be both simple and emphatic, they do not obstruct one's apperception of the verbal relations.
Obscurities not inherent in the matter, obscurities due not to the thing but to the wording, are a botch, and are not worth preserving in a translation. The work lives not by them but despite them.
Rossetti is in this matter sounder than Browning, when he says that the only thing worth bringing over is the beauty of the original; and despite Rossetti's purple plush and molasses trimmings he meant by "beauty" something fairly near what we mean by the "emotional intensity" of his original.
Obscurities inherent in the thing occur when the author is piercing, or trying to pierce into, uncharted regions; when he is trying to express things not yet current, not yet worn into phrase; when he is ahead of the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might be ahead of the color-sense) of his contemporaries.