![]() Chapman certainly must take the crown for the third of these he claims he took fifteen weeks for his translation of the last twelve books of the Iliad. ![]() ![]() ![]() He proposes four benchmarks of a good translation of Homer: simplicity in thought, directness in style, quick completion of the work before loss of inspiration, and nobility. Arnold, on the other hand, forbore to translate Homer himself, but did offer 178 pages of advice on how to do so ( On Translating Homer. Pope accepts Chapman’s claim that he wrote as Homer himself would have written in English, but adds the damning twist that it is only as Homer would have written “before he arriv’d to Years of Discretion.” Perhaps Pope had an axe to grind after all, he includes the criticisms in his own 1715 translation of the Iliad. But it has had to avoid the comments of such weighty figures as Pope and Arnold. The new paperback has laudatory blurbs from Swinburne, Saintsbury, and, of course, Keats. He was the darling of the seventeenth century, replaced as the premier English Homer by Pope in the eighteenth century, then crowned again in the nineteenth century by English Romantics who found Pope too artificial. Since then his reputation has waxed and waned. So an early admirer wrote in 1656, 45 years after Chapman published his translation of the Iliad. Chapmans Incomparable Translation of Homers Workes.” ![]() So that the Learned well may question it, To vaile its Bonnet in our English tongue, Who by his skill hath made great Homers song, ![]()
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