Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/25

14 them, I hare called bad words, every one may be excellent in some other place. Take eld, for instance: when Shakspeare, reproaching man with the dependence in which his youth is passed, says:

it seems to me that eld comes in excellently there, in a passage of curious meditation; but when Mr. Newman renders by ‘from Eld and Death exempted,’ it seems to me he infuses a tinge of quaintness into the transparent simplicity of Homer’s expression, and so I call eld a bad word in that place.

Once more. Mr. Newman lays it down as a general rule that ‘many of Homer’s energetic descriptions are expressed in coarse physical words.’ He goes on: ‘I give one illustration—. Cowper, misled by the ignis fatuus of “stateliness,” renders it absurdly:

but it is, strictly, “The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted forward) in close pack.” The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the edjective is very strong (packed together). I believe, that “forward in pack the Trojans pitch’d,” would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric