Why Homer Matters Read Online Free PDF

radiant alloy.
    Pope may have been the darling of the establishment. In his preface, he thanks 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 is like nature itself. He is a kind of wildness, “a wild paradise” in which, as the theory then was, the great stories and figures he describes 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,
    Â 
    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 preclassic , 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 embody 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 toward 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.
    â€œIt is not to be doubted,” Pope writes 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 trivializing, “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 toward Achilles and holds him by the knees. It is Achilles’s ears that are deaf to him, his heart that remains 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