Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/119

 'Why dost thou prophesy so my death to me, Xanthus? It needs not. I of myself know well, that here I am destined to perish, Far from my father and mother dear: for all that I will not Stay this hand from fight, till the Trojans are utterly routed

So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle.

Here the only particular remark which I will make is, that in the fourth and eighth line the grammar is what I call a loose and idiomatic grammar. In writing a regular and literary style, one would in the fourth line have to repeat before 'leave' the words 'that ye' from the second line, and to insert the word 'do'; and in the eighth line one would not use such an expression as 'he was given a voice'. But I will make one general remark on the character of my own translations, as I have made so many on that of the translations of others. It is, that over the graver passages there is shed an air somewhat too strenuous and severe, by comparison with that lovely ease and sweetness which Homer, for all his noble and masculine way of thinking, never loses.

Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that the task of translating Homer into English verse both will be reattempted, and may be reattempted successfully. There are great works composed of parts so disparate that one translator is