Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T20:07:42.457Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Homer in Translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

A. G. Geddes
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the first term of last year I had two classes with whom I was reading the Iliad. In the Classical Studies class we had to read and discuss the Iliad in Richmond Lattimore's English translation, and in the Greek IIA class we read Book I of the Iliad in Greek.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , April 1988 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Lattimore, R., The Iliad of Homer (Chicago, 1961)Google Scholar.

2. The Greek IIA students wrote an up-to-date version of Matthew Arnold's essay, ‘On Translating Homer’ as part of their assessment. This article is the result of many discussions with these students. I would like to thank Tracey Duller, Claire Flenley, and Louise Prest for their interest and ideas.

3. Bruce Dawe is a poet and an Australian, and by choosing him from among the options on the English matriculation syllabus, students satisfy two compulsory requirements of their course.

4. The Collected Papers of A. M. Dale (Cambridge, 1969), p. 240Google Scholar.

5. Iliad 1. 43–52.

6. The Iliad: a Commentary (Cambridge, 1985), i.21Google Scholar.

7. Mimesis (Princeton, 1957), pp.4ffGoogle Scholar.

8. Thucydides 2.50.1–2.

9. He crouched rather; cf. the marble figure from the east pediment of the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, Munich, 84.

10. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London, 1967), vii.89, lines 61–72Google Scholar.

11. Dryden, J., The First Book of Homer's Ilias, 378; from The Works of J. Dryden (Edinburgh, 1885), p. xiiGoogle Scholar.

12. Homer, , The Iliad (Harmondsworth, 1950), p. 24Google Scholar.

13. Hudson Review 14 (Winter 1961–1962), 620Google Scholar.

14. Iliad 1.12ff.

15. The scholiast took it to be insulting. Erbse, V. H., Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (Berlin, 1964), p. 16Google Scholar.

16. Lines 30–31,Chapman, , The Iliad (London, 1901), p. 2Google Scholar.

17. Op. cit., 41–42. This is a good example on the backward-looking tendency of rhymes in English poetry. The word grace leads back to embrace instead of moving us forward in the progressive Homeric manner. Arnold, Matthew points this out in his essay ‘On Translating Homer’, in Essays Literary and Critical (London, 1911), pp. 218–19Google Scholar.

18. Erbse, , op. cit., p. 41Google Scholar.

19. Pope, 155, Lattimore, 122.

20. Kirk, , op. cit., p. 66Google Scholar.

21. Kirk, , op. cit., p. 68Google Scholar.

22. Lattimore, 149.

23. It is characteristic of Achilles to reflect upon the nature of war, cf. Griffin, J., Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980), pp. 99–100Google Scholar.

24. Pope, 232.

25. Knight, V. D., ‘The Augustan Mode’, in On Translation in HSCL (Harvard, 1959), p. 202Google Scholar. He explains that this gives Pope's work an ‘overriding interpretative coherence’.

26. The editors of the Twickenham edition say that Pope ‘…made translation a political act’ (p. ccxxi).

27. Lattimore, 106–19.

28. Kirk, , op. cit., p. xxiiet passimGoogle Scholar.

29. Young, V. in Hudson Review 28 (Autumn 1975), 429Google Scholar.

30. Arnold, , op. cit., p. 263Google Scholar.

31. Ecclesiastes 9.11. Orwell, G., Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 149Google Scholar, has translated this passage into public service jargon as a joke. The translators of the Good News Bible however are perfectly serious.