Waited the Trojan charge, by Hector led
Spear close to spear, and shield by shield o'erlaid,
Buckler to buckler pressed, and helm to helm,
And man to man, the horse-hair plumes above,
That nodded on the warriors' glittering crests,
Each other touched, so closely matched they stood.
Backward, by many a stalwart hand, were drawn
The spears, in act to hurl; their eyes and minds
Turned to the front and eager for the fray.
On poured the Trojan masses; in the van
Hector straight forward urged his furious course:
As some huge boulder, from its rocky bed
Detached, and by the wintry torrent's force
Hurled down the cliff's steep face, when constant rains
The massive rock's firm hold have undermined,
With giant bounds it flies; the crashing wood
Resounds beneath it, still it hurries on,
Until, arriving at the level plain,
Its headlong impulse checked, it rolls no more;
So Hector, threatening now through ships and tents
Even to the sea to force his murderous way,
Anon, confronted by that phalanx firm,
Halts close before it."
This truly fine passage is the perfection of Homeric poetry. We doubt if pen or brush has ever produced a picture abounding so much in life and action. The marvellous combination of objects presented to view in these lines, each heightening the effect of the other, and all blending into one tumultuous action, stirred by the fiery spirit of war, gives us a grand and terrific picture. In reading it, with almost the noise and din and the fray of warring men ringing in the words employed in the translation, we feel as if we had never before been enabled, by any English version, to enter into the full spirit of Homer himself.
We give a last quotation from the closing scene of the poem, where the cry of mourning Troy is raised over the lifeless body of its brave defender. The wail of his wife and of his mother has been heard; but there remains one other, the beauteous Helen, whose fatal charms had deluged the plains of Troy with blood, had inflicted on the lifeless hero on whom she now gazes in sadness many a day of toil and many an hour of pain, and now had crowned the heap of Ilium's sorrows with this last scene of woe. Her words of love commingled with self-reproach, are the highest tribute the poet could pay, in his closing verse, to the hero whom, throughout his song, he endows with all the noblest traits of son, of patriot, of brother, and of husband.
"Hector, of all my brethren dearest thou!
True, godlike Paris claims me as his wife,
Who bore me hither—would I then had died!
But twenty years have passed since here I came
And left my native land; yet ne'er from thee 895
I heard one scornful, one degrading word.
And when from others I have borne reproach,
Thy brothers, sisters, or thy brothers' wives
Or mother, (for thy sire was ever kind
Even as a father,) thou hast checked them still
With kindly feeling and with gentle words:
For thee I weep, and for myself no less;
For through the breadth of Troy, none love me now,
None kindly look on me, but all abhor."
In the portions of Lord Derby's translation we have here given, we have not selected what are universally regarded as the most beautiful passages of the poem. We have selected such passages as from their crowded incidents, their bewildering throng of objects, their rapid succession of scenes or deep and tender pathos, appeared to us the most difficult for the translator to reproduce. We doubt if there be a student of Homer who will fail to find them a transcript of the poet's meaning, with almost literal exactness, as well as a copy of the genius and spirit of the poem. We had purposed selecting some passages which would give our readers a sample of his manner of rendering the Homeric epithets. The beauty of the few occurring in the above extracts will not escape them. Students of Homer are aware how constantly he appends distinctive epithets to persons, things, and places. To translate these wherever they occur would give a strange, unnatural cast to the poem. The English language, not like the plastic Greek, could not bear along the burden of them; besides, many of them would require an awkward paraphrase, which would only add words, not vividness or distinctness, to the thought of the poet. Lord Derby has wisely and discriminately dealt with these; when he renders them, he does so with so much exactitude and expressive force, that we feel rise within us, at this late hour, a sigh of regret that we had not at our hand his version of them, when we were students of Homer. In reading the translation through, we cannot say where we would have an epithet added that has been omitted, or where we would have stricken it out where it has been preserved. We said that the translation is a copy of the Iliad—a copy produced with genius and spirit. It will be read with pleasure by the classical scholar, to whom it will recall in their freshness and grandeur the scenes of that poem which charmed him in years long past. It will be welcomed by the general reader, who has not before tasted the charms of Homer's song, and who will gratefully acknowledge it as a new treasure to the storehouse of English literature. In it—and in the life of the noble author, whose devotedness to classical literature could not have lived through his busy political life, did he not in his own inward consciousness ever find the great benefit and elegant pleasure he had gained from it—is furnished for the public at large the strongest argument we know against banishing classical education from our schools and colleges.
Lines written by Theodulphus.
Translated From The Latin.