On Translating Homer

by Matthew Arnold; Francis William Newman

Once more. Mr Newman lays it down as a general rule that ‘many of Homer’s energetic descriptions are expressed in coarse physical words’. He goes on: ‘I give one illustration,—Τρῶες προὔτυψαν ἀολλέες. Cowper, misled by the ignis fatuus of “stateliness” renders it absurdly:

The powers of Ilium gave the first assault

Embattled close;

but it is, strictly, “The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted forward) in close pack”. The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong (packed together). I believe that “forward in pack the Trojans pitched”, would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour; and I maintain that “forward in mass the Trojans pitched”, would be an irreprovable rendering’. He actually gives us all that as if it were a piece of scientific deduction; and as if, at the end, he had arrived at an incontrovertible conclusion. But, in truth, one cannot settle these matters quite in this way. Mr Newman’s general rule may be true or false (I dislike to meddle with general rules), but every part in what follows must stand or fall by itself, and its soundness or unsoundness has nothing at all to do with the truth or falsehood of Mr Newman’s general rule. He first gives, as a strict rendering of the Greek, ‘The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted forward), in close pack’. I need not say that, as a ‘strict rendering of the Greek’, this is good; all Mr Newman’s ‘strict renderings of the Greek’ are sure to be, as such, good; but ‘in close pack’, for ἀολλέες, seems to me to be what Mr Newman’s renderings are not always,—an excellent poetical rendering of the Greek; a thousand times better, certainly, than Cowper’s ‘embattled close’. Well, but Mr Newman goes on: ‘I believe that, “forward in pack the Trojans pitched”, would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour’. Here, I say, the Homeric colour is half washed out of Mr Newman’s happy rendering of ἀολλέες; while in ‘pitched’ for προὔτυψαν, the literal fidelity of the first rendering is gone, while certainly no Homeric colour has come in its place. Finally, Mr Newman concludes: ‘I maintain that “forward in mass the Trojans pitched”, would be an irreprovable rendering’. Here, in what Mr Newman fancies his final moment of triumph, Homeric colour and literal fidelity have alike abandoned him altogether; the last stage of his translation is much worse than the second, and immeasurably worse than the first.

All this to show that a looser, easier method than Mr Newman’s must be taken, if we are to arrive at any good result in these questions. I now go on to follow Mr Newman a little further, not at all as wishing to dispute with him, but as seeking (and this is the true fruit we may gather from criticisms upon us) to gain hints from him for the establishment of some useful truth about our subject, even when I think him wrong. I still retain, I confess, my conviction that Homer’s characteristic qualities are rapidity of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all, nobleness, the grand manner. Whenever Mr Newman drops a word, awakens a train of thought, which leads me to see any of these characteristics more clearly, I am grateful to him; and one or two suggestions of this kind which he affords, are all that now, having expressed my sorrow that he should have misconceived my feelings towards him, and pointed out what I think the vice of his method of criticism, I have to notice in his Reply.

Such a suggestion I find in Mr Newman’s remarks on my assertion that the translator of Homer must not adopt a quaint and antiquated style in rendering him, because the impression which Homer makes upon the living scholar is not that of a poet quaint and antiquated, but that of a poet perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible. I added that we cannot, I confess, really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles, but that it is impossible to me to believe that he seemed to him quaint and antiquated. Mr Newman asserts, on the other hand, that I am absurdly wrong here; that Homer seemed ‘out and out’ quaint and antiquated to the Athenians; that ‘every sentence of him was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns’ poems’. And not only does Mr Newman say this, but he has managed thoroughly to convince some of his readers of it. ‘Homer’s Greek’, says one of them, ‘certainly seemed antiquated to the historical times of Greece. Mr Newman, taking a far broader historical and philological view than Mr Arnold, stoutly maintains that it did seem so.’ And another says: ‘Doubtless Homer’s dialect and diction were as hard and obscure to a later Attic Greek as Chaucer to an Englishman of our day.’

Mr Newman goes on to say, that not only was Homer antiquated relatively to Pericles, but he is antiquated to the living scholar; and, indeed, is in himself ‘absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age’. He tells us of his ‘inexhaustible quaintnesses’, of his ‘very eccentric diction’; and he infers, of course, that he is perfectly right in rendering him in a quaint and antiquated style.

Now this question, whether or no Homer seemed quaint and antiquated to Sophocles, I call a delightful question to raise. It is not a barren verbal dispute; it is a question ‘drenched in matter’, to use an expression of Bacon; a question full of flesh and blood, and of which the scrutiny, though I still think we cannot settle absolutely, may yet give us a directly useful result. To scrutinize it may lead us to see more clearly what sort of a style a modern translator of Homer ought to adopt.

Homer’s verses were some of the first words which a young Athenian heard. He heard them from his mother or his nurse before he went to school; and at school, when he went there, he was constantly occupied with them. So much did he hear of them that Socrates proposes, in the interests of morality, to have selections from Homer made, and placed in the hands of mothers and nurses, in his model republic; in order that, of an author with whom they were sure to be so perpetually conversant, the young might learn only those parts which might do them good. His language was as familiar to Sophocles, we may be quite sure, as the language of the Bible is to us.

Nay, more. Homer’s language was not, of course, in the time of Sophocles, the spoken or written language of ordinary life, any more than the language of the Bible, any more than the language of poetry, is with us; but for one great species of composition, epic poetry, it was still the current language; it was the language in which everyone who made that sort of poetry composed. Everyone at Athens who dabbled in epic poetry, not only understood Homer’s language, he possessed it. He possessed it as everyone who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose: I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps, spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charméd for charm’d, and thousands of others.