Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/60

Rh unfit to render Homer thoroughly well, although I still think other metres fit to render him better. So I concede to Mr. Spedding that every form of translation, prose or verse, must more or less break up Homer in order to reproduce him; but then I urge that that form which needs to break him up least is to be preferred. So I concede to him that the test proposed by me for the translator,—a competent scholar’s judgment whether the translation more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original,—is not perfectly satisfactory; but I adopt it as the best we can get, as the only test capable of being really applied; for Mr. Spedding’s proposed substitute,—the translation’s making the same effect, more or less, upon the unlearned which the original makes