Preface

________________________________________________

THE ODYSSEY

DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE

by S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.

AND

A. LANG, M.A.

PREFACE.

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.'

In the age of Anne, 'dignity' and 'correctness' had to be

given to Homer, and Pope gave them by aid of his dazzling

rhetoric, his antitheses, his nettete, his command of every

conventional and favourite artifice. Without Chapman's

conceits, Homer's poems would hardly have been what the

Elizabethans took for poetry; without Pope's smoothness,

and Pope's points, the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemed

rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great

translations must always live as English poems. As

transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a

lost point of view. Chaque siecle depuis le xvi a ue de ce

cote son belveder different. Again, when Europe woke to a

sense, an almost exaggerated and certainly uncritical

sense, of the value of her songs of the people, of all the

ballads that Herder, Scott, Lonnrot, and the rest

collected, it was commonly said that Homer was a

ballad-minstrel, that the translator must imitate the

simplicity, and even adopt the formulae of the ballad.

Hence came the renderings of Maginn, the experiments of Mr.

Gladstone, and others. There was some excuse for the error

of critics who asked for a Homer in ballad rhyme. The Epic

poet, the poet of gods and heroes, did indeed inherit some

of the formulae of the earlier Volks-lied. Homer, like the

author of The Song of Roland, like the singers of the

Kalevala, uses constantly recurring epithets, and repeats,

word for word, certain emphatic passages, messages, and so

on. That custom is essential in the ballad, it is an

accident not the essence of the epic. The epic is a poem of

complete and elaborate art, but it still bears some

birthmarks, some signs of the early popular chant, out of

which it sprung, as the garden-rose springs from the wild

stock, When this is recognised the demand for ballad-like

simplicity and 'ballad-slang' ceases to exist, and then all

Homeric translations in the ballad manner cease to

represent our conception of Homer. After the belief in the

ballad manner follows the recognition of the romantic vein

in Homer, and, as a result, came Mr. Worsley's admirable

Odyssey. This masterly translation does all that can be

done for the Odyssey in the romantic style. The smoothness

of the verse, the wonderful closeness to the original,

reproduce all of Homer, in music and in meaning, that can

be rendered in English verse. There still, however, seems

an aspect Homeric poems, and a demand in connection with

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 people treat

the epics too much as if the were sagas. Now the Homeric

epics are sagas, but then they are the sagas of the divine

heroic age of Greece, and thus are told with an art which

is not the art of the Northern poets. The epics are stories

about the adventures of men living in most respects like

the men of our own race who dwelt in Iceland, Norway,

Denmark, and Sweden. The epics are, in a way, and as far as

manners and institutions are concerned, historical

documents. Whoever regards them in this way, must wish to

read them exactly as they have reached us, without modern

ornament, with nothing added or omitted. He must recognise,

with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that what he now wants, namely,

the simple truth about the matter of the poem, can only be

given in prose, 'for in a verse translation no original

work is any longer recognisable.' It is for this reason

that we have attempted to tell once more, in simple prose,

the story of Odysseus. We have tried to transfer, not all

the truth about the poem, but the historical truth, into

English. In this process Homer must lose at least half his

charm, his bright and equable speed, the musical current of

that narrative, which, like the river of Egypt, flows from

an indiscoverable source, and mirrors the temples and the

palaces of unforgotten gods and kings. Without this music

of verse, only a half truth about Homer can be told, but

then it is that half of the truth which, at this moment, it

seems most necessary to tell. This is the half of the truth

that the translators who use verse cannot easily tell. They

MUST be adding to Homer, talking with Pope about 'tracing

the mazy lev'ret o'er the lawn,' or with Mr. 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

the blue Aegaean,' or the 'soft arms' of earth. It would be

impertinent indeed to blame any of these translations in

their place. They give that which the romantic reader of

poetry, or the student of the age of Anne, looks for in

verse; and without tags of this sort, a translation of

Homer in verse cannot well be made to hold together.

There can be then, it appears, no final English translation

of Homer. In each there must be, in addition to what is

Greek and eternal, the element of what is modern, personal,

and fleeting. Thus we trust that there may be room for 'the

pale and far-off shadow of a prose translation,' of which

the aim is limited and humble. A prose translation cannot

give the movement and the fire of a successful translation

in verse; it only gathers, as it were, the crumbs which

fall from the richer table, only tells the story, without

the song. Yet to a prose translation is permitted, perhaps,

that close adherence to the archaisms of the epic, which in

verse become mere oddities. The double epithets, the

recurring epithets of Homer, if rendered into verse, delay

and puzzle the reader, as the Greek does not delay or

puzzle him. In prose he may endure them, or even care to

study them as the survivals of a stage of taste, which is

to be found in its prime in the sagas. These double and

recurring epithets of Homer are a softer form of the quaint

Northern periphrases, which make the sea the 'swan's bath,'

gold, the 'dragon's hoard,' men, the 'ring-givers,' and so

on. We do not know whether it is necessary to defend our

choice of a somewhat antiquated prose. Homer has no ideas

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 terms as, being used by the Translators of

the Bible, are still not unfamiliar, we have tried to

restrict ourselves. It may be objected, that the employment

of language which does not come spontaneously to the lips,

is an affectation out of place in a version of the Odyssey.

To this we may answer that the Greek Epic dialect, like the

English of our Bible, was a thing of slow growth and

composite nature, that it was never a spoken language, nor,

except for certain poetical purposes, a written language.

Thus the Biblical English seems as nearly analogous to the

Epic Greek, as anything that our tongue has to offer.

The few foot-notes in this book are chiefly intended to

make clear some passages where there is a choice of

reading. The notes at the end, which we would like to have

written in the form of essays, and in company with more

complete philological and archaeological studies, are

chiefly meant to elucidate the life of Homer's men. We have

received much help from many friends, and especially from

Mr. R. W. Raper, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and Mr.

Gerald Balfour, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who

has aided us with many suggestions while the book was

passing through 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 the

proof-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

mention our reading in a foot-note.

The Arguments prefixed to the Books are taken, with very

slight alterations, from Hobbes' Translation of the

Odyssey.

It is hoped that the Introduction added to the second

edition may illustrate the growth of those national legends

on which Homer worked, and may elucidate the plot of the

Odyssey.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

Wet owe our thanks to the Rev. E. Warre, of Eton College,

for certain corrections on nautical points. In particular,

he has convinced us that the raft of Odysseus in B. v. is a

raft strictly so called, and that it is not, under the

poet's description, elaborated into a ship, as has been

commonly supposed. The translation of the passage (B.

v.246-261) is accordingly altered.

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