The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. Adam Nicolson
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with a lamb in her lap.
This wasn’t entirely fair to Pope. His preface to the Iliad, published in 1715, is one of the most plangent descriptions ever written in English of the power of the Homeric poems. Northern European culture had been dominated for too long by the processed and stable maturity of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Latin epic par excellence, written in about 20 BC. Homer represented an earlier stage in human civilisation, a greater closeness to nature, to the potency of the sublime, a form of poetry which was not to be admired from afar but which would bind up its reader or listener in a kind of overwhelming absorption in its world. ‘No man of true Poetical Spirit,’ the young Pope had written, ‘is Master of himself while he reads him; so forcible is the poet’s Fire and Rapture.’ Translation was not a calm carrying over of the meaning in Greek into the meaning in English, but a vision of the processes of the mind as a flaming crucible in which the sensibilities of translator and translated were fused into a new, radiant alloy.
Pope may have been the darling of the establishment. In his preface, he thanked a roll-call of the eighteenth-century British great – Addison, Steele, Swift, Congreve, a string of dukes, earls, lords and other politicians – but for all that, his entrancement with Homeric power is not in doubt. Homer was like nature itself. He was a kind of wildness, ‘a wild paradise’ in which, as the theory then was, the great stories and figures he described came into being.
What he writes is of the most animated Nature imaginable; every thing moves, every thing lives, and is put in Action … The Course of his Verses resembles that of the Army he describes,
They pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it.
This inseparability of Homer and his world is what excited Pope. It seemed to him like a voice from the condition of mankind when it was still simple, quite different from ‘the luxury of succeeding ages’. Poetic fire was the essential ingredient. ‘In Homer, and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every where irresistibly.’
Pope grasped the essential point: unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a pre-classic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace.
Virgil bestows with a careful Magnificence: Homer scatters with a generous Profusion. Virgil is like a River in its Banks, with a gentle and constant Stream: Homer like the Nile, pours out his Riches with a sudden Overflow.
In this preface to the Iliad, Pope can lay claim to being the greatest critic of Homer in English. But what of his translation? Was he able to bear out this deep understanding of Homer’s ‘unaffected and equal Majesty’ in the translation he made? Perhaps not. Take for example a moment of passionate horror towards the end of the Iliad. For most of the poem Achilles has been in his tent, nursing his grievance and loathing against Agamemnon, but now that Patroclus, the man he loved, has been killed by Hector, Achilles is out to exact revenge. He is on his blood-run, gut-driven, pitiless, the force of destiny. Among his enemies on the field, he encounters a young Trojan and looks down on him with the vacancy of fate. The young warrior stares back up:
In vain his youth, in vain his beauty pleads:
In vain he begs thee, with a suppliant’s moan
To spare a form and age so like thy own!
Unhappy boy! no prayer, no moving art
E’er bent that fierce inexorable heart!
While yet he trembled at his knees, and cried,
The ruthless falchion [a single-edged sword] oped his tender side;
The panting liver pours a flood of gore,
That drowns his bosom till he pants no more.
‘It is not to be doubted,’ Pope had written in his own preface, ‘that the Fire of the Poem is what a Translator should principally regard, as it is most likely to expire in his managing.’ But that is what has happened here. Apart from what Leigh Hunt, the great liberal editor of the Examiner, called Pope’s trivialising, ‘cuckoo-song’ regularity, he has lost something else: Homer’s neck-gripping physical urgency. In the Greek everything is about the body. The boy crawls towards Achilles and holds him by the knees. It is Achilles’s ears that are deaf to him, his heart and his mind that remain unapproachably fierce. The boy puts his hands on Achilles’s knees to make his prayer, and then the sword goes into the liver, the liver slipping out of the slit wound, the black blood drenching the boy’s lap and ‘the darkness of death clouding his eyes’. Nothing mediates the physical reality. Homer’s nakedness is his power, but Pope has dressed it. ‘The panting liver … pants no more’: that is so neat it is almost disgusting, as if Pope were adjusting his cuffs while observing an atrocity. Dr Johnson called the translation ‘a treasure of poetical elegances’. That was the problem.
Keats had undoubtedly read Homer in Pope’s translation; there are echoes of Pope’s words in what Keats would write himself. But he was ready for something else. His life was constrained in the crowded and meagre streets of south London, filled with the ‘money-mongering pitiable brood’ of other Londoners. He had been to Margate with his brothers and had seen ‘the ocean’ there in the pale shallows of the North Sea, but nowhere further. In early October 1816 he went for the evening to see his old friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who was living with his brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. Cowden Clarke had been lent a beautiful big early folio edition of the translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey made by the poet and playwright George Chapman.
The two men began to look through its seventeenth-century pages. Clarke’s friend Leigh Hunt, the heroic editor of the Examiner, in which he had just published the first of Shelley’s poems to be printed, had already praised Chapman in the August issue, for bottling ‘the fine rough old wine’ of the original. In the next few days Keats was about to meet Hunt himself, with the possibility in the air that he too might swim out into the world of published poetry and fame. The evening was pregnant with the hope of enlargement, of a dignifying difference from the mundane conditions of his everyday life. To meet Homer through Chapman might be an encounter with the source.
It is touching to imagine the hunger with which Keats must have approached this book, searching its two-hundred-year-old pages for something undeniable, the juice of antiquity. The two of them sat side by side in Clarke’s house, ‘turning to some of the “famousest” passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope’s version’. Chapman had produced his translations – almost certainly not from the Greek but with the help of Latin and French versions – between 1598 and 1616. It is a repeated experience with Homer that he seems to haunt the present, and Chapman himself had met him one day in Hertfordshire, not far from Hitchin where Chapman had been born, Homer masquerading as ‘a sweet gale’ as Chapman walked on the hills outside the town. It was a moment of revelation and life-purpose for him, so that later he could say: ‘There did shine,/A beam of Homer’s freer soul in mine.’ The eighteenth century had not admired it. Pope had called it ‘loose and rambling’, and Chapman himself ‘an Enthusiast’ with a ‘daring fiery Spirit that animates his Translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself would have writ before he arriv’d to Years of Discretion’. Dr Johnson had dismissed it as ‘now totally neglected’. But Coleridge had rediscovered it. In 1808 he sent a copy of Chapman’s Homer to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, the woman he loved. ‘Chapman writes & feels as a Poet,’ he wrote, ‘– as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth … In the main it is an English Heroic Poem, the tale of which is borrowed from the Greek – …’
Chapman’s distance, his rough-cut unaffectedness, stood beyond the refinements of the Enlightenment, as if he were the last part of the old world that Homer had also inhabited, before politeness had polluted it. Here the Romantics found Achilles as the ‘fear-master’, and horses after battle which liked to ‘cool their hooves’. Cowden Clarke and Keats were hunched together over pages that were drenched in antiquity. Ghosts must have come seeping out of them.
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