On Translating Homer

by Matthew Arnold; Francis William Newman

Fate shall fail to vent her gall

Till mine vent thousands.

I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such conceit as that, must purify themselves seven times in the fire before they can hope to render Homer. They must expel their nature with a fork, and keep crying to one another night and day: ‘Homer not only moves rapidly, not only speaks idiomatically; he is, also, free from fancifulness’.

So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness of thought, that to the preservation of this in his own version the translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an odd and unnatural effect. The double epithets so constantly occurring in Homer must be dealt with according to this rule; these epithets come quite naturally in Homer’s poetry; in English poetry they, in nine cases out of ten, come, when literally rendered, quite unnaturally. I will not now discuss why this is so, I assume it as an indisputable fact that it is so; that Homer’s μερόπων ἀνθρώπων comes to the reader as something perfectly natural, while Mr Newman’s ‘voice-dividing mortals’ comes to him as something perfectly unnatural. Well then, as it is Homer’s general effect which we are to reproduce, it is to be false to Homer to be so verbally faithful to him as that we lose this effect: and by the English translator Homer’s double epithets must be, in many places, renounced altogether; in all places where they are rendered, rendered by equivalents which come naturally. Instead of rendering θέτι τανύπεπλε by Mr Newman’s ‘Thetis trailing-robed’, which brings to one’s mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the translator must render the Greek by English words which come as naturally to us as Milton’s words when he says, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. Instead of rendering μώνυχας ἵππους by Chapman’s ‘one-hoofed steeds’, or Mr Newman’s ‘single-hoofed horses’, he must speak of horses in a way which surprises us as little as Shakspeare surprises when he says, ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds’. Instead of rendering μελιηδέα θυμόν by ‘life as honey pleasant’, he must characterise life with the simple pathos of Gray’s ‘warm precincts of the cheerful day’. Instead of converting ποῖόν σε ἔπoς φύγεν ἔρκος ὀδόντων; into the portentous remonstrance, ‘Betwixt the outwork of thy teeth what word hath split’? he must remonstrate in English as straightforward as this of St Peter, ‘Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee’; or as this of the disciples, ‘What is this that he saith, a little while? we cannot tell what he saith’. Homer’s Greek, in each of the places quoted, reads as naturally as any of those English passages: the expression no more calls away the attention from the sense in the Greek than in the English. But when, in order to render literally in English one of Homer’s double epithets, a strange unfamiliar adjective is invented,—such as ‘voice-dividing’ for μέρψς,—an improper share of the reader’s attention is necessarily diverted to this ancillary word, to this word which Homer never intended should receive so much notice; and a total effect quite different from Homer’s is thus produced. Therefore Mr Newman, though he does not purposely import, like Chapman, conceits of his own into the Iliad, does actually import them; for the result of his singular diction is to raise ideas, and odd ideas, not raised by the corresponding diction in Homer; and Chapman himself does no more. Cowper says: ‘I have cautiously avoided all terms of new invention, with an abundance of which persons of more ingenuity than judgment have not enriched our language but encumbered it’; and this criticism so exactly hits the diction of Mr Newman that one is irresistibly led to imagine his present appearance in the flesh to be at least his second.

A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style, diction, and quality of thought, without at the same time having what is the result of these in Homer,—nobleness. Therefore I do not attempt to lay down any rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness,—the effect, too, of all others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, and which most depends on the individual personality of the artist. So I proceed at once to give you, in conclusion, one or two passages in which I have tried to follow those principles of Homeric translation which I have laid down. I give them, it must be remembered, not as specimens of perfect translation, but as specimens of an attempt to translate Homer on certain principles; specimens which may very aptly illustrate those principles by falling short as well as by succeeding.

I take first a passage of which I have already spoken, the comparison of the Trojan fires to the stars. The first part of that passage is, I have said, of splendid beauty; and to begin with a lame version of that would be the height of imprudence in me. It is the last and more level part with which I shall concern myself. I have already quoted Cowper’s version of this part in order to show you how unlike his stiff and Miltonic manner of telling a plain story is to Homer’s easy and rapid manner:

So numerous seemed those fires the bank between

Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece,

In prospect all of Troy—

I need not continue to the end. I have also quoted Pope’s version of it, to show you how unlike his ornate and artificial manner is to Homer’s plain and natural manner: