Page:The Iliad of Homer in English Hexameter Verse.djvu/13

 original, or to abandon the principle, here professedly adopted, of a line-by-line translation. When it is said that the present professes to be a line-by-line translation, it is not meant that each one line of the original is always accurately represented by one line of the translation—although such is usually the case—but that, (with some very rare exceptions, mostly, if not altogether, occurring in the first and second books,) each paragraph of the original, is represented by the same number of lines in the translation. And in each of the books the identity of aggregate result is maintained. Upon this, as upon all other points, a translator has to strike a balance between advantages and disadvantages. The case is necessarily one for compromises. Few, however, who have themselves tried to translate the Iliad, or who are intimately familiar with the poem, can doubt that a close adherence to the peculiar structure, is all but essential to a due rendering of the spirit of the original. The antithetical arrangement of that original, and the continual embodiment of separate images, in separate lines, or couplets—or even portions—of lines, can never be adequately represented by a translation which admits systematically of a breaking up and fusion of the ideas of the great poet. The result is like that of a cross sea breaking up and destroying the magnificence of the long succession of those rolling waves which form Homer's favourite simile for his advancing armies, and which are so suggestive of his own lines.

Upon the vexed question of metre, the Translator can vii