Voss and Mr. Bryant are in this place so much alike that we will not collate the German, but give instead Monti’s blank-verse:
“Disse e la Diva dalle bianche bracchia
Obbediente dall’ Idea montagna
Al Olympo sali. Colla prestezza
Con que vola il pensier del viatore
Che scorse molte terre le rianda
In suo segreto e dici, Io quella riva
Io quell’ altra toccai.”
Scorse and rianda are pictorial, and perhaps sufficiently literal. We like also suo segreto for “close mind.” Altogether the version is neat and animated, but less compact than Mr. Bryant’s. Both are quite as faithful as the prose of Bitaube and Montbel. The former writes: “Il dit, et Junon soumise à son époux s’élève des sommets d’Ida sur Olympe. Tel que le rapide essor de la pensée de l’homme lorsqu’ayant parcouru des pays d’une vaste étendue, et se rappelant en un moment tous les objets qui l’ont frappé, il dit en lui-même, j’étais ici, j’étais là.” It will be observed that Mr. Bryant’s “Here would I be, I would be there!” reproduces the optative εἰην. So does the Dorthin möcht ich, und dort of Voss. An alternative reading is ἠηv which Bitaube and Monti have preferred. The verb, however, should then be in the third person, not the first as they give it. The imperfect would impart to the thought a slightly different tinge, and make the traveller rather retrace in memory than revisit it in desire. If this reading be accepted, we might, perhaps, venture to present the passage in this form:
Thus he pronounced; and Herê, the white-armed goddess, obeyed him,
Down from the summits of Ida speeding to lofty Olympus,
Darting as darteth the mind of a man who whilom has travelled
Up and down on the earth, in close thought ponders his travels,
Here was he now—now there!—still aiming in many directions.
In the battle which opens in the twentieth book culminates the action of the poem. Achilles now enters the field, and Mr. Gladstone has justly remarked that we seem never to have heard of wars or warriors before. To frame his central figure, Homer summons from Olympus the whole hierarchy of heaven. Amid thunder and earthquake, the gods are seen rallying to either side. No part of the Iliad is pitched in a loftier key. Nowhere is a translator more strongly impelled to put forth all his powers. We quote Mr. Bryant:
“From above with terrible crash
Thundered the father of the blessed gods
And mortal men, while Neptune from below
Shook the great earth and lofty mountain-peaks.
Then watery Ida’s heights and very roots,
The city of Troy, and the Greek galleys, quaked.
Then Pluto, ruler of the nether world,
Leaped from his throne in terror, lest the god
Who makes the earth to tremble, cleaving it
Above him, should lay bare to gods and men
His horrible abodes, the dismal haunts
Which even the gods abhor.”
We ought not, perhaps, to dislike the expansion of πατερ ἀνθρωπων τε θεων τε in the second line, for the epithets added are themselves hardly more than formulas. The next four lines exhibit Mr. Bryant’s best work. Their vigor and elegance are not extraneous, but wrought with patient fingers out of the text itself. “Leaped from his throne in terror” is a melancholy falling off. This indifferent line must stand for three Greek verbs which render with startling accuracy the staccato movement of fear. We give from Voss the three hexameters which depict the panic of Aïdoneus:
“Bang auch erschrack dort unten des Nachtreichs Fürst Aldoneus,
Bebend entsprang er dem Thron, und schrie laut dass ihm von oben
Nicht die Erd’ aufrisse der Landerschüttrer Poseidōn.”
Nachtreich is not quite equal to “nether world,” but really these lines are incomparable. Beside them even the prose of Montbel seems a little wide of the text: “Dans ses retraites souterraines le roi des ombres Pluton frémit; épouvanté il s’élance de son trône, pousse un cri, de peur que le terrible Neptune entr’ouvrant la terre ne montre aux dieux et aux hommes ces demeures terribles en horreur même aux immortels.”