Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/32

Rh become an established possession of the minds of men, and therefore is, in its proper place, familiar to them, will not ‘surprise’ them. If Homer’s language was familiar,—that is, often heard,—then to this language words like londis and libbard, which are not familiar, offer, for the translator’s purpose, no parallel. For some purpose of the philologer they may offer a parallel to it; for the translator’s purpose they offer none. The question is not, whether a diction is antiquated for current speech, but whether it is antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is employed. A diction that is antiquated for common speech and common prose, may very well not be antiquated for poetry or certain special kinds of prose. ‘Peradventure there shall be ten found there,’ is not antiquated for Biblical prose, though for conversation or for a newspaper it is antiquated. ‘The trumpet spake not to the arméd throng,’ is not antiquated for poetry, although we should not write in a letter, ‘he spake to me,’ or say, ‘the British soldier is arméd with the Enfield rifle.’ But when language is antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is employed,—as numbers of Chaucer’s words, for instance, are antiquated for poetry,—such language is a bad representative of language which, like Homer’s, was never antiquated for that particular purpose for which it was employed. I imagine that for, in Homer, no more sounded antiquated