Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/179

 Homer's deformity, assails me for my phrase as intolerably grotesque.

He further forbids me to invent new compound adjectives, as fair-thron'd, rill-*bestream'd ; because they strike us as new, though Homer's epithets (he says) did not so strike the Greeks: hence they derange attention from the main question. I hold this doctrine of his (conceding his fact for a moment) to be destructive of all translation whatever, into prose or poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles' horses were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by 'the horses grazed', and does not say on what. Using Mr Arnold's principles, he might defend himself by arguing: 'The Greeks, being familiar with such horsefood, were not struck by it as new, as my reader would be. I was afraid of telling him what the horses were eating, lest it should derange the balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him from the main idea of the sentence'. But, I find, readers are indignant on learning Pope's suppression: they feel that he has defrauded them of a piece of interesting information.—In short, how can an Englishman read any Greek composition and be affected by it as Greeks were? In a piece of Euripides my imagination is caught by many things, which he never intended or calculated for the prominence which they actually get in my mind. This or that absurdity in myth