Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/36

Rh sense from Milton’s words, ‘grate on their scrannel pipes,’ who yet might have been puzzled to write a commentary on the word scrannel for the dictionary! So we get a clear sense from as an epithet for grief, after often meeting with it and finding out all we can about it, even though that all be philologically insufficient: so we get a clear sense from  as an epithet for cows. And this his clear poetical sense about the words, not his philological uncertainties about them, is what the translator has to convey. Words like bragly and bulkin offer no parallel to these words; because the reader, from his entire want of familiarity with the words bragly and bulkin, has no clear sense of them poetically.

Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological aspect of Homer’s language, encumbered by his own learning, Mr. Newman, I say, misses the poetical aspect, misses that with which alone we are here concerned. ‘Homer is odd,’ he persists, fixing his eyes on his own philological analysis of, and , and , and not on these words in their synthetic character;—just as Professor Max Müller, going a little farther back, and fixing his attention on the elementary value of the word , might say Homer was ‘odd’ for using that word;—‘if the whole Greek nation, by long familiarity, had become inobservant of Homer's oddities,’—of the oddities of this ‘noble barbarian,’ as Mr. Newman elsewhere calls him, this ‘noble barbarian’ with the