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pubOne.info present you this new edition. There would have been less controversy about the proper method of Homeric translation, if critics bad recognised that the question is a purely relative one, that of Homer there can be no final translation. The taste and the literary habits of each age demand different qualities in poetry, and therefore a different sort of rendering of Homer. To the men of the time of Elizabeth, Homer would have appeared bald, it seems, and lacking in ingenuity, if he had been presented in his antique simplicity. For the Elizabethan age, Chapman supplied what was then necessary, and the mannerisms that were then deemed of the essence of poetry, namely, daring and luxurious conceits. Thus in Chapman's verse Troy must 'shed her towers for tears of overthrow, ' and when the winds toss Odysseus about, their sport must be called 'the horrid tennis.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819934394
Langue	English

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THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER
DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE
by S. H. BUTCHER, M. A.
AND
A. LANG, M.A.
PREFACE.
There would have been less controversy about theproper method of Homeric translation, if critics bad recognisedthat the question is a purely relative one, that of Homer there canbe no final translation. The taste and the literary habits of eachage demand different qualities in poetry, and therefore a differentsort of rendering of Homer. To the men of the time of Elizabeth,Homer would have appeared bald, it seems, and lacking in ingenuity,if he had been presented in his antique simplicity. For theElizabethan age, Chapman supplied what was then necessary, and themannerisms that were then deemed of the essence of poetry, namely,daring and luxurious conceits. Thus in Chapman's verse Troy must'shed her towers for tears of overthrow, ' and when the winds tossOdysseus about, their sport must be called 'the horrid tennis.'
In the age of Anne, 'dignity' and 'correctness' hadto be given to Homer, and Pope gave them by aid of his dazzlingrhetoric, his antitheses, his nettete, his command of everyconventional and favourite artifice. Without Chapman's conceits,Homer's poems would hardly have been what the Elizabethans took forpoetry; without Pope's smoothness, and Pope's points, the Iliad andOdyssey would have seemed rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. Thesegreat translations must always live as English poems. Astranscripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a lost pointof view. Chaque siecle depuis le xvi a ue de ce cote son belvederdifferent. Again, when Europe woke to a sense, an almostexaggerated and certainly uncritical sense, of the value of hersongs of the people, of all the ballads that Herder, Scott,Lonnrot, and the rest collected, it was commonly said that Homerwas a ballad-minstrel, that the translator must imitate thesimplicity, and even adopt the formulae of the ballad. Hence camethe renderings of Maginn, the experiments of Mr. Gladstone, andothers. There was some excuse for the error of critics who askedfor a Homer in ballad rhyme. The Epic poet, the poet of gods andheroes, did indeed inherit some of the formulae of the earlierVolks-lied. Homer, like the author of The Song of Roland, like thesingers of the Kalevala, uses constantly recurring epithets, andrepeats, word for word, certain emphatic passages, messages, and soon. That custom is essential in the ballad, it is an accident notthe essence of the epic. The epic is a poem of complete andelaborate art, but it still bears some birthmarks, some signs ofthe early popular chant, out of which it sprung, as the garden-rosesprings from the wild stock, When this is recognised the demand forballad-like simplicity and 'ballad-slang' ceases to exist, and thenall Homeric translations in the ballad manner cease to representour conception of Homer. After the belief in the ballad mannerfollows the recognition of the romantic vein in Homer, and, as aresult, came Mr. Worsley's admirable Odyssey. This masterlytranslation does all that can be done for the Odyssey in theromantic style. The smoothness of the verse, the wonderfulcloseness to the original, reproduce all of Homer, in music and inmeaning, that can be rendered in English verse. There still,however, seems an aspect Homeric poems, and a demand in connectionwith Homer to be recognised, and to be satisfied.
Sainte-Beuve says, with reference probably to M.Leconte de Lisle's prose version of the epics, that some peopletreat the epics too much as if the were sagas. Now the Homericepics are sagas, but then they are the sagas of the divine heroicage of Greece, and thus are told with an art which is not the artof the Northern poets. The epics are stories about the adventuresof men living in most respects like the men of our own race whodwelt in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The epics are, in away, and as far as manners and institutions are concerned,historical documents. Whoever regards them in this way, must wishto read them exactly as they have reached us, without modernornament, with nothing added or omitted. He must recognise, withMr. Matthew Arnold, that what he now wants, namely, the simpletruth about the matter of the poem, can only be given in prose,'for in a verse translation no original work is any longerrecognisable. ' It is for this reason that we have attempted totell once more, in simple prose, the story of Odysseus. We havetried to transfer, not all the truth about the poem, but thehistorical truth, into English. In this process Homer must lose atleast half his charm, his bright and equable speed, the musicalcurrent of that narrative, which, like the river of Egypt, flowsfrom an indiscoverable source, and mirrors the temples and thepalaces of unforgotten gods and kings. Without this music of verse,only a half truth about Homer can be told, but then it is that halfof the truth which, at this moment, it seems most necessary totell. This is the half of the truth that the translators who useverse cannot easily tell. They MUST be adding to Homer, talkingwith Pope about 'tracing the 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 Homersays nothing at all about the 'mazy lev'ret, ' or the 'stars of theblue Aegaean, ' or the 'soft arms' of earth. It would beimpertinent indeed to blame any of these translations in theirplace. They give that which the romantic reader of poetry, or thestudent of the age of Anne, looks for in verse; and without tags ofthis sort, a translation of Homer in verse cannot well be made tohold together.
There can be then, it appears, no final Englishtranslation of Homer. In each there must be, in addition to what isGreek and eternal, the element of what is modern, personal, andfleeting. Thus we trust that there may be room for 'the pale andfar-off shadow of a prose translation, ' of which the aim islimited and humble. A prose translation cannot give the movementand the fire of a successful translation in verse; it only gathers,as it were, the crumbs which fall from the richer table, only tellsthe story, without the song. Yet to a prose translation ispermitted, perhaps, that close adherence to the archaisms of theepic, which in verse become mere oddities. The double epithets, therecurring epithets of Homer, if rendered into verse, delay andpuzzle the reader, as the Greek does not delay or puzzle him. Inprose he may endure them, or even care to study them as thesurvivals of a stage of taste, which is to be found in its prime inthe sagas. These double and recurring epithets of Homer are asofter form of the quaint Northern periphrases, which make the seathe 'swan's bath, ' gold, the 'dragon's hoard, ' men, the'ring-givers, ' and so on. We do not know whether it is necessaryto defend our choice of a somewhat antiquated prose. Homer has noideas which cannot be expressed in words that are 'old and plain, 'and to words that are old and plain, and, as a rule, to such termsas, being used by the Translators of the Bible, are still notunfamiliar, we have tried to restrict ourselves. It may beobjected, that the employment of language which does not comespontaneously to the lips, is an affectation out of place in aversion of the Odyssey. To this we may answer that the Greek Epicdialect, like the English of our Bible, was a thing of slow growthand composite nature, that it was never a spoken language, nor,except for certain poetical purposes, a written language. Thus theBiblical English seems as nearly analogous to the Epic Greek, asanything that our tongue has to offer.
The few foot-notes in this book are chiefly intendedto make clear some passages where there is a choice of reading. Thenotes at the end, which we would like to have written in the formof essays, and in company with more complete philological andarchaeological studies, are chiefly meant to elucidate the life ofHomer's men. We have received much help from many friends, andespecially from Mr. R. W. Raper, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxfordand Mr. Gerald Balfour, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, whohas aided us with many suggestions while the book was passingthrough the press.
In the interpretation of B. i. 411, ii. 191, v. 90,and 471, we have departed from the received view, and followed Mr.Raper, who, however, has not been able to read through theproof-sheets further than Book xii.
We have adopted La Roche's text (Homeri Odyssea, J.La Roche, Leipzig, 1867), except in a few cases where we mentionour reading in a foot-note.
The Arguments prefixed to the Books are taken, withvery slight alterations, from Hobbes' Translation of theOdyssey.
It is hoped that the Introduction added to thesecond edition may illustrate the growth of those national legendson which Homer worked, and may elucidate the plot of theOdyssey.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Wet owe our thanks to the Rev. E. Warre, of EtonCollege, for certain corrections on nautical points. In particular,he has convinced us that the raft of Odysseus in B. v. is a raftstrictly so called, and that it is not, under the poet'sdescription, elaborated into a ship, as has been commonly supposed.The translation of the passage (B. v. 246-261) is accordinglyaltered.
INTRODUCTION
COMPOSITION AND PLOT OF THE ODYSSEY.
The Odyssey is generally supposed to be somewhat thelater in date of the two most ancient Greek poems which areconcerned with the events and consequences of the Trojan war. As tothe actual history of that war, it may be said that nothing isknown. We may conjecture that some contest between peoples of moreor less kindred stocks, who occupied the isles and the eastern andwestern shores of the Aegean, left a strong impression on thepopular fancy. Round the memories of this contest would gather manyolder legends, myths, and stories, not peculiarly Greek or even'Aryan, ' which previously floated unattached, or were connectedwith heroes whose fame w