4 - Alexander Pope's Translation: An Augustan Homer?

Summary

The poem ‘Sour Land’ by the Second World War poet Sidney Keyes, who was killed in battle at the age of 20, has an explanatory note affixed to it: ‘At Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire there is an ancient tower in which Pope completed the fifth book of his Iliad, when illness and disillusionment were beginning to oppress him.’ This text is filled out mainly in the second of the three parts of the poem:

So to his perch appropriate with owls

The old lame poet would repair,

When sorrow like a tapeworm in his bowels

Drove him to Troy and other men's despair.

His lame leg twisted on the spiral stair,

He cursed the harsher canker in his heart;

Then in the turret he would scrawl and glare

And long to pull his enemies apart.

When night came knocking at the panes

And bats’ thin screeching pierced his head,

He thought of copulation in the lanes

And bit his nails and praised the glorious dead.

At dawn the lapwings cried and he awoke

From dreams of Paris drowned in Helen's hair;

He drew his pride about him like a cloak

To face again the agony of the stair.

A memorable picture indeed, the ageing poet fighting what Keyes elsewhere in the poem calls ‘the running demon, thought’ in a ‘landscape of bulbous elm and stubble’. The only problem is that in virtually every respect the picture is an imaginative fantasy.

For example, the translations of Homer were not the work of Pope's old age: quite the contrary. One of the most important keys to understanding them is that they were done when he was relatively young. Although he was already a well-established poet, the first part of his Iliad was published in June 1715 when he was only 27 and the final part of his Odyssey in 1726, some eighteen years before his death at the early age of 56. They were a calculated attempt on Pope's part both to secure his financial position and to confirm his reputation with his contemporaries; and they succeeded in both aims.

As an extension of this, and in complete contrast to Keyes's depiction of an intensely misanthropic Pope orking in isolation and driven by disillusionment and despair, Pope's translations of Homer were intimately elated to the polite London society, both literary and otherwise, of their time.