THE ODYSSEY OF HOMERDONE INTO ENGLISH PROSEby S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.ANDA. LANG, M.A.PREFACE.There would have been less controversyabout the proper method of Homerictranslation, if critics bad recognisedthat the question is a purely relativeone, that of Homer there can be no finaltranslation. The taste and the literaryhabits of each age demand differentqualities in poetry, and therefore adifferent sort of rendering of Homer. Tothe men of the time of Elizabeth, Homerwould have appeared bald, it seems, andlacking in ingenuity, if he had beenpresented in his antique simplicity. Forthe Elizabethan age, Chapman suppliedwhat was then necessary, and themannerisms that were then deemed of theessence of poetry, namely, daring andluxurious conceits. Thus in Chapman'sverse Troy must 'shed her towers fortears of overthrow,' and when the windstoss Odysseus about, their sport must becalled 'the horrid tennis.'In the age of Anne, 'dignity' and'correctness' had to be given to Homer,and Pope gave them by aid of hisdazzling rhetoric, his antitheses, hisnettete, his command of everyconventional and favourite artifice.Without Chapman's conceits, Homer'spoems would hardly have been what theElizabethans took for poetry; withoutPope's smoothness, and Pope's points,the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemedrude, and harsh in the age of Anne.These great translations must alwayslive as English poems. As transcripts ofHomer they are like pictures drawn froma lost point of view. Chaque siecledepuis le xvi a ue de ce cote sonbelveder different. Again, when Europe
woke to a sense, an almost exaggeratedand certainly uncritical sense, of thevalue of her songs of the people, of allthe ballads that Herder, Scott, Lonnrot,and the rest collected, it was commonlysaid that Homer was a ballad-minstrel,that the translator must imitate thesimplicity, and even adopt the formulaeof the ballad. Hence came the renderingsof Maginn, the experiments of Mr.Gladstone, and others. There was someexcuse for the error of critics whoasked for a Homer in ballad rhyme. TheEpic poet, the poet of gods and heroes,did indeed inherit some of the formulaeof the earlier Volks-lied. Homer, likethe author of The Song of Roland, likethe singers of the Kalevala, usesconstantly recurring epithets, andrepeats, word for word, certain emphaticpassages, messages, and so on. Thatcustom is essential in the ballad, it isan accident not the essence of the epic.The epic is a poem of complete andelaborate art, but it still bears somebirthmarks, some signs of the earlypopular chant, out of which it sprung,as the garden-rose springs from the wildstock, When this is recognised thedemand for ballad-like simplicity and'ballad-slang' ceases to exist, and thenall Homeric translations in the balladmanner cease to represent our conceptionof Homer. After the belief in the balladmanner follows the recognition of theromantic vein in Homer, and, as aresult, came Mr. Worsley's admirableOdyssey. This masterly translation doesall that can be done for the Odyssey inthe romantic style. The smoothness ofthe verse, the wonderful closeness tothe original, reproduce all of Homer, inmusic and in meaning, that can berendered in English verse. There still,however, seems an aspect Homeric poems,and a demand in connection with Homer tobe recognised, and to be satisfied.Sainte-Beuve says, with referenceprobably to M. Leconte de Lisle's proseversion of the epics, that some peopletreat the epics too much as if the weresagas. Now the Homeric epics are sagas,but then they are the sagas of thedivine heroic age of Greece, and thusare told with an art which is not theart of the Northern poets. The epics arestories about the adventures of menliving in most respects like the men ofour own race who dwelt in Iceland,
Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The epicsare, in a way, and as far as manners andinstitutions are concerned, historicaldocuments. Whoever regards them in thisway, must wish to read them exactly asthey have reached us, without modernornament, with nothing added or omitted.He must recognise, with Mr. MatthewArnold, that what he now wants, namely,the simple truth about the matter of thepoem, can only be given in prose, 'forin a verse translation no original workis any longer recognisable.' It is forthis reason that we have attempted totell once more, in simple prose, thestory of Odysseus. We have tried totransfer, not all the truth about thepoem, but the historical truth, intoEnglish. In this process Homer must loseat least half his charm, his bright andequable speed, the musical current ofthat narrative, which, like the river ofEgypt, flows from an indiscoverablesource, and mirrors the temples and thepalaces of unforgotten gods and kings.Without this music of verse, only a halftruth about Homer can be told, but thenit is that half of the truth which, atthis moment, it seems most necessary totell. This is the half of the truth thatthe translators who use verse cannoteasily tell. They MUST be adding toHomer, talking with Pope about 'tracingthe mazy lev'ret o'er the lawn,' or withMr. Worsley about the islands that are'stars of the blue Aegaean,' or with Dr.Hawtrey about 'the earth's soft arms,'when Homer says nothing at all about the'mazy lev'ret,' or the 'stars of theblue Aegaean,' or the 'soft arms' ofearth. It would be impertinent indeed toblame any of these translations in theirplace. They give that which the romanticreader of poetry, or the student of theage of Anne, looks for in verse; andwithout tags of this sort, a translationof Homer in verse cannot well be made tohold together.There can be then, it appears, no finalEnglish translation of Homer. In eachthere must be, in addition to what isGreek and eternal, the element of whatis modern, personal, and fleeting. Thuswe trust that there may be room for 'thepale and far-off shadow of a prosetranslation,' of which the aim islimited and humble. A prose translationcannot give the movement and the fire ofa successful translation in verse; it
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