On Translating Homer

by Matthew Arnold; Francis William Newman

And ardent warriors wait the rising morn.

It is for passages of this sort, which, after all, form the bulk of a narrative poem, that Pope’s style is so bad. In elevated passages he is powerful, as Homer is powerful, though not in the same way; but in plain narrative, where Homer is still powerful and delightful, Pope, by the inherent fault of his style, is ineffective and out of taste. Wordsworth says somewhere, that wherever Virgil seems to have composed ‘with his eye on the object’, Dryden fails to render him. Homer invariably composes ‘with his eye on the object’, whether the object be a moral or a material one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is. That, therefore, which Homer conveys to us immediately, Pope conveys to us through a medium. He aims at turning Homer’s sentiments pointedly and rhetorically; at investing Homer’s description with ornament and dignity. A sentiment may be changed by being put into a pointed and oratorical form, yet may still be very effective in that form; but a description, the moment it takes its eyes off that which it is to describe, and begins to think of ornamenting itself, is worthless.

Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer’s style; of the simplicity with which Homer’s thought is evolved and expressed. He has Pope’s fate before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created even between the most gifted translator and Homer by an artificial evolution of thought and a literary cast of style.

Chapman’s style is not artificial and literary like Pope’s nor his movement elaborate and self-retarding like the Miltonic movement of Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh, vigorous, and, to a certain degree, rapid; and all these are Homeric qualities. I cannot say that I think the movement of his fourteen-syllable line, which has been so much commended, Homeric; but on this point I shall have more to say by and by, when I come to speak of Mr Newman’s metrical exploits. But it is not distinctly anti-Homeric, like the movement of Milton’s blank verse; and it has a rapidity of its own. Chapman’s diction, too, is generally good, that is, appropriate to Homer; above all, the syntactical character of his style is appropriate. With these merits, what prevents his translation from being a satisfactory version of Homer? Is it merely the want of literal faithfulness to his original, imposed upon him, it is said, by the exigencies of rhyme? Has this celebrated version, which has so many advantages, no other and deeper defect than that? Its author is a poet, and a poet, too, of the Elizabethan age; the golden age of English literature as it is called, and on the whole truly called; for, whatever be the defects of Elizabethan literature (and they are great), we have no development of our literature to compare with it for vigour and richness. This age, too, showed what it could do in translating, by producing a master-piece, its version of the Bible.

Chapman’s translation has often been praised as eminently Homeric. Keats’s fine sonnet in its honour everyone knows; but Keats could not read the original, and therefore could not really judge the translation. Coleridge, in praising Chapman’s version, says at the same time, ‘It will give you small idea of Homer’. But the grave authority of Mr Hallum pronounces this translation to be ‘often exceedingly Homeric’; and its latest editor boldly declares that by what, with a deplorable style, he calls ‘his own innative Homeric genius’, Chapman ‘has thoroughly identified himself with Homer’; and that ‘we pardon him even for his digressions, for they are such as we feel Homer himself would have written’.

I confess that I can never read twenty lines of Chapman’s version without recurring to Bentley’s cry, ‘This is not Homer!’ and that from a deeper cause than any unfaithfulness occasioned by the fetters of rhyme.

I said that there were four things which eminently distinguished Homer, and with a sense of which Homer’s translator should penetrate himself as fully as possible. One of these four things was, the plainness and directness of Homer’s ideas. I have just been speaking of the plainness and directness of his style; but the plainness and directness of the contents of his style, of his ideas themselves, is not less remarkable. But as eminently as Homer is plain, so eminently is the Elizabethan literature in general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful. Steeped in humours and fantasticality up to its very lips, the Elizabethan age, newly arrived at the free use of the human faculties after their long term of bondage, and delighting to exercise them freely, suffers from its own extravagance in this first exercise of them, can hardly bring itself to see an object quietly or to describe it temperately. Happily, in the translation of the Bible, the sacred character of their original inspired the translators with such respect that they did not dare to give the rein to their own fancies in dealing with it. But, in dealing with works of profane literature, in dealing with poetical works above all, which highly stimulated them, one may say that the minds of the Elizabethan translators were too active; that they could not forbear importing so much of their own, and this of a most peculiar and Elizabethan character, into their original, that they effaced the character of the original itself.

Take merely the opening pages to Chapman’s translation, the introductory verses, and the dedications. You will find:

An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince,

My most gracious and sacred Mæcenas,