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TRANSLATING THE POET: ALEXANDER POPE'S ENGAGEMENT WITH THE HOMERIC BIOGRAPHICAL TRADITION IN HIS TRANSLATIONS OF THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2021

Paola Bassino
Paola Bassino*
Affiliation:
University of Winchester, UK
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores Alexander Pope's experience as a translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, particularly his engagement with Homer as a poet and his biographical tradition. The study focuses on how Homer features in Pope's correspondence as he worked on the translations, how the Greek poet is described in the prefatory essay by Thomas Parnell and Pope's own notes to the text, and finally how his physical presence materializes in the illustrations within Pope's translations. The article suggests that, by engaging with the biography of Homer, Pope explores issues such as poetic authority and divine inspiration, promotes his own translations against European competitors, and ultimately establishes himself as a translator and as a poet. Throughout the process, Homer appears as a presence that forces Pope constantly to challenge himself, until he feels he can stand a comparison with the greatest poet ever.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , October 2021 , pp. 183 - 207
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

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References

1 Pope, A., The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Mr Pope. With notes partly by W. Broome. An Essay on the Life, Writings and Learning of Homer by T. Parnell (London, 1715–20)Google Scholar; A. Pope, The Odyssey of Homer. Translated into English verse, by Pope, W. Broome, and E. Fenton; with notes by W. Broome. A General View of the Epic Poem, and of the Iliad and Odyssey, Extracted from Bossu. Postscript, by Mr Pope. Homer's Battle of the Frogs and Mice Translated by T. Parnell, Corrected by Mr Pope (London, 1725–6).

2 Kelly, L. G., The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West (Oxford, 1979), 59Google Scholar.

3 Troy: Myth and Reality, British Museum (London), 21 November 2019–8 March 2020, <https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/troy-myth-and-reality>, accessed 22 January 2020.

4 All quotations from Pope's works are from J. Butt et al. (eds.), The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, 11 vols (London, 1939–69), henceforth abbreviated TE, followed by volume and page number. Here TE, iv.167–9.

5 The text of Pope's correspondence is taken from G. Sherburn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 5 vols (Oxford, 1956), henceforth abbreviated Correspondence, followed by volume and page number. Pope to William Broome, 16 June 1715 (Correspondence, i.297).

6 Levine, J., The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 191Google Scholar.

7 Ferraro, J., ‘Political Discourse in Alexander Pope's Episode of Sarpedon: Variations on the Theme of Kingship’, Modern Language Review 88 (1993), 15–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Shankman, S., ‘Pope's Homer and His Poetic Career’, in Rogers, P. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (Cambridge, 2007), 63Google Scholar.

9 On the Querelle and the place of Homer in it, see Levine (n. 6), 121–47.

10 Sowerby, R., ‘The Decorum of Pope's Iliad’, Translation and Literature 13 (2004), 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 TE, vii.3.

12 Ibid., vii.4. In claiming so, Pope, like the ancient audiences, recognizes the ἐνέργεια (‘force’) of Homeric poetry, namely its ability to draw in the mind of the reader or the hearer an image of the scene it describes. See, for example, Aristotle's Rhetoric (3.10.1411b–1412a), on which see M. Westin, ‘Aristotle's Rhetorical Energeia: An Extended Note’, Advances in the History of Rhetoric 20 (2017), 252–61.

13 TE, i.255. See also TE, i.228: ‘It is because Homer was able to see so clearly this nature in her original splendour, and thereby mirror her so faithfully in his work, that Pope can say that “Nature and Homer were the same”.’

14 An overview of scholarship on Pope's translation of Homer and its increase in the last few decades is given by P. Rogers, ‘Introduction’, in Rogers (n. 8), 8–9. A study of the influence of the classics on Pope's original poetry is offered in H. Weinbrot, ‘Pope and the Classics’, in Rogers (n. 8), 76–88.

15 B. Graziosi, ‘Embodiments of literature’, Living Poets, 2014, <https://livingpoets.dur.ac.uk/w/Embodiments_of_Literature>, accessed 22 January 2020.

16 N. Goldschmidt and B. Graziosi, ‘Introduction’, in N. Goldschmidt and B. Graziosi (eds.), Tombs of the Ancient Poets. Between Literary Reception and Material Culture (Oxford, 2018), 6.

17 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that in Pope's lifetime there seems to have been increasing interest in literary biography, which produced, among other works, various lives of Milton (including the one published in 1698 by John Toland) and Nicholas Rowe's Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr William Shakespeare (London, 1709). This contributes to putting Pope's interest in Homer's life into its historical and cultural context.

18 As suggested by the anonymous reviewer, it is useful to mention briefly the case of George Chapman. In particular, in the dedicatory verses to the Earl of Somerset in his The Crowne of All Homer's Workes (London, 1624; including translations of Batrachomyomachia, Hymns, and Epigrams), Chapman seems to draw a parallel between some features of Homer's life and his own. This work also has an engraved title page showing a blind and bearded Homer positioned strategically above a not dissimilar bearded Chapman.

19 TE, vii.lxxi. See also Canevaro, L. G., ‘Rhyme and Reason: the Homeric Translations of Dryden, Pope, and Morris’, in Bär, S. and Hauser, E. (eds.), Reading Poetry, Writing Genre. English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship (London and New York, 2018), 94Google Scholar.

20 On Wolf's work and its impact, see Grafton, A., ‘Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981), 101–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolf, F. A., F. A. Wolf. Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, translated with introduction and notes by Grafton, A., Most, G., and Zetzel, J. (Princeton, NJ, 1986)Google Scholar.

21 TE, vii.lxxv. The Vitae Homeri are published in the last volume of Allen's edition of Homer: T. W. Allen (ed.), Homeri Opera, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1912). This edition was particularly influential as it was part of the Oxford Classical Texts series and was used as the standard text of Homer and the Vitae Homeri for a long time. Allen also published one of the first modern studies on the Homeric biographical tradition: T. W. Allen, Homer. The Origins and the Transmission (Oxford, 1924).

22 TE, i.253.

23 In response to a letter from Joseph Addison, on 30 January 1713/14 he writes: ‘Your letter found me very busy in my grand undertaking, to which I must wholly give myself up for some time, unless when I snatch an hour to please myself with a distant conversation with you and a few others, by writing’ (Correspondence, i.208).

24 Pope to John Caryll, 11 October 1715 (Correspondence, i.318). See also the letter to Robert Digby dated 2 June 1717 (Correspondence, i.408): ‘It is not to be exprest how heartily I wish the death of Homer's heroes, one after another.’

25 Pope to Caryll, 11 August 1718 (Correspondence, i.484).

26 Pope to Jonathan Swift, 14 September 1725 (Correspondence, ii.322).

27 Pope to Caryll, 23 November 1725 (Correspondence, ii.341).

28 Pope to Caryll, 25 July 1714 (Correspondence, i.238).

29 For modern interpretations of Homer's blindness, see e.g. Graziosi, B., Inventing Homer. The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge, 2002), 138–63Google Scholar; see also A. Beecroft, ‘Blindness and literacy in the Lives of Homer’, The Classical Quarterly 61 (2011), 1–18. As will become clear in what follows, Pope engaged extensively with Homer's blindness, as it features in his notes and illustrations as well.

30 Pope to John Gay, 23 September 1714 (Correspondence, i.254).

31 Pope to John Arbuthnot, 2 September 1714 (Correspondence, i.250).

32 TE , viii.27.

33 Ibid., vii.31.

34 Ibid., vii.30. Versions of Homer's genealogy – featuring Apollo, the Muses, Orpheus, and Hesiod, among others – are found in the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi 4; in Proclus, Life of Homer 4; and in Suda, s.v. ‘Homer’ 1. For discussion see M. Kivilo, Early Greek Poets’ Lives. The Shaping of the Tradition (Leiden, 2010), 12–17; P. Bassino, The Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi. A Commentary (Berlin, 2018), 131–6.

35 TE, vii.31.

36 On Homer's death, compare, for example, the versions given by the anonymous Life of Homer 1.6, where Homer died ‘after finding himself at a loss, since he was not able to solve the riddle’, and Ps.-Herodotus, Life of Homer 36, where Homer dies ‘as a result of illness…not from his failure to understand what the boys said’. See overview and discussion of the sources in F. Kimmel-Clauzet, Morts, tombeaux et cultes des poètes grecs. Étude de la survie des grands poètes des époques archaique et classique en Grèce ancienne (Pessac, 2013), 38–48 and 285–97. On the contest with Hesiod, see e.g. the scholium on Hes. Op. 650–62, reporting Plutarch's opinion that the story contains ‘nothing of value’. For discussion of the sources, see Bassino (n. 34), 5–46.

37 TE , vii.67.

38 Ibid., vii.80.

39 Ibid., vii.21.

40 Ibid., vii.25. Another reference to Homer's search for patrons is found in Pope's notes to Odyssey 8.57 ff.: remarking that Homer shows his ‘colleague’ Demodocus receiving all sorts of honour and respects at the court of the Phaeacians, Pope claims: ‘Some merry wits have turn'd the last circumstance into raillery, and insinuate that Homer in this place as well as in the former means himself in the person of Demodocus, an intimation that he would not be displeas'd to meet with the like hospitality’ (TE, ix.265).

41 For example, in Ps.-Herodotus’ Life of Homer the poet repeatedly needs to rely on other people taking pity on him and offering help (e.g. 9 and 21).

42 TE, iv.169.

43 Ibid., x.391.

44 Ibid., x.384.

45 The fact that Lucian makes a parodic allusion to this debate in his True History (2.20), where he asks Homer himself about it in the famous encounter between the two in the Island of the Blessed, shows how widespread the debate must have been. More generally, Pope is engaging with the very common habit of assigning different poems to different phases of Homer's life and poetic career depending on their contents, quality, and genre. The comic Margites, for example, was often considered as part of Homer's juvenile production (e.g. Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi 3).

46 TE, ix.265.

47 For example, Homer was translated into French by Hugues Salel (1580) and into English by George Chapman (1614–16).

48 The identification of the ‘blind bard from Chios’ with Homer was not universally accepted in antiquity (the scholium to Pindar's Nemean Ode 2.1, for example, attributes the Hymn to the rhapsode Cynaethus). Talking about the ‘riddle’ of verses 169–72, Graziosi (n. 29), 67, convincingly claims that ‘the various hints…point toward Homer, without making the identification unavoidable’. We do not know whether Pope was aware of the debate surrounding the authorship of the Hymn in ancient and modern times, but Thucydides offered the solution that best served his purposes.

49 Pope to Charles Jervas, 16 August 1714 (Correspondence i.243).

50 G. Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1934), 316.

51 To Broome, 5 March 1725 (Correspondence ii.288). See also Correspondence ii.285, n. 3. On the conflicts between Pope and his editor, and the production and commercialization of the books, see D. Foxon and J. McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford, 1991), 51–101.

52 On this advert, see TE, ix.xiii.

53 Ibid., vii.54.

54 Ibid. The reference is to R. Fabretti, De columna Trajani syntagma (Rome, 1683), 345: barbam habet horridulam, et crispam, nec nimis longam, caput diadematum (‘he has an unkempt beard, curly but not too long; wears a diadem on his head’). Text and translation from N. Spivey, ‘Homer and the Sculptors’, in J. Bintliff and K. Rutter (eds.), The Archaeology of Greece and Rome. Studies in Honour of Anthony Snodgrass (Edinburgh, 2016), 119.

55 TE, ii.270.

56 See the caption to the bust at the Museum's website, <https://www.museoarcheologiconapoli.it/en/portraits/>, accessed 22 January 2020. See also S. De Caro, The National Archaeological Museum of Naples (Naples, 1996); C. Gasparri, Le sculture Farnese (Verona, 2009), 15–16.

57 <https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=460423&partId=1>, accessed 22 January 2020. Modern scholars doubt that the bust represents Homer, or indeed any poet, and it is thought that it might represent a Hellenistic ruler. See also R. Harding, ‘The Head of a Certain Macedonian King: An Old Identity for the British Museum's Arundel Homer’, British Art Journal 9 (2008), 11–16; TE, ix.xiii; Spivey (n. 54), 121.

58 I. G. Brown, ‘“Most capital in its kind”: Further Observations on Dr Richard Mead's Head of Homer’, British Art Journal 10 (2009), 9.

59 TE, ix.xiii. This bust, which according to the records was displayed in Pope's library together with other busts of notable intellectuals (such as Newton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden), might be the same one that Pope left to Lord Mansfield in his will. It is there called ‘Marble head of Homer by Bernini’, although the TE suggests that the authorship by Bernini is highly improbable.

60 TE, ix.xiv; the drawing is reproduced in plate 21.

61 TE, vii.55. F. Orsini, Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditorum ex antiquis lapidibus et nomismatibus expressa cum annotationibus (Rome, 1570), 20–1. W. Wallis, ‘Homer: A Guide to Sculptural Types’, Living Poets, 2014, <https://livingpoets.dur.ac.uk/w/Homer:_A_Guide_to_Sculptural_Types>, accessed 22 January 2020. For more information on the depiction of Homer on the Amastris coin, with further bibliography, see <https://livingpoets.dur.ac.uk/w/Amastris_Homer_Coin>, accessed 22 January 2020.

62 See Bassino (n. 34), 118–23.

63 C. Lagos, ‘A Study of the Coinage of Chios in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods’, PhD thesis, Durham University (1998), 400 and 681 (available at <http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1050/>, accessed 22 January 2020). On depictions of Homer on coins, see also K. Esdaile, ‘An Essay towards the Classification of Homeric Coin Types’, JHS 32 (1912), 298–325; Graziosi (n. 29), 85–6.

64 TE, vii.46. Depicting Homer sitting and holding a book was quite common not only on ancient coins but also in later manuscripts. See for example F. Pontani, ‘A Byzantine Portrait of Homer’, JWI 68 (2007), 1–26. Chatzidakis suggests that the Chian coin influenced the drawing of Homer made by Ciriaco d'Ancona in the MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Codex Hamilton 254 (1436–47), fol. 90r: see M. Chatzidakis, ‘Die Bedeutung der Münz- und Gemmenkunde für die Altertumsforschungen des Ciriaco d'Ancona’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 54 (2010–12), 31–58; and ‘Auf der Suche nach dem großen Epiker: Die Kenntnis und die Rezeption der antiken chiotischen Numismatik in einer Berliner Zeichnung Ciriacos d’ Ancona’, in U. Peter and B. Weisser (eds.), Translatio Nummorum. Römische Kaiser in der Renaissance (Rutzen, 2013), 47–57.

65 Leo Allatius, De patria Homeri (Lyon, 1640), 28: ‘dum eum et pallio, et barba Philosophum; tunica manicata suum, Graecum scilicet; Volumine adaperto Doctorem, ac Magistrum; taenia et vitta Poëtam, Vatem, Sacerdotem, Ducem, et quid non? Sella Iudicem nomine perpetuum, et gloria aeuo comparem, immo, quod omnium maximum est, Deum veneraretur, et coleret.’

66 As noted by Brown (n. 58), 12. The expression ἔνθα δ᾿ Ἀχιλλεύς comes from Od. 3.109 (Nestor laments to Telemachus, his guest in Pylus, the death of many Achaeans at Troy, including Achilles).

67 Translation from A. T. Murray (ed. and trans.), Homer. Odyssey, Volume I. Books 1–12 (Cambridge, MA, 1919). On Odysseus’ encounter with Achilles see, most recently, G. Gazis, Homer and the Poetics of Hades (Oxford, 2018), 182–95.

68 See above for the discussion of Homer's blindness and the dispute between Pope and Anne Dacier, as well as the letter by Pope in which he fears that blindness is the only way in which he might imitate Homer.

69 I owe this remark to Ian Gordon Brown, who pointed this out to me in an email exchange.

70 TE, vii.31.

71 Allatius (n. 65), 144. The Greek text of Hermias is that in C. M. Lucarini and C. Moreschini, Hermias Alexandrinus. In Platonis Phaedrum Scholia (Berlin, 2012). The translation is my own. Another ancient witness of this story that, to my knowledge, has never been mentioned is the so-called Vita Romana, an ancient biography of Homer that reports two stories about the poet's blindness. In relation to Achilles, it says (5): τυφλωθῆναι δ’ αὐτὸν οὕτω πως λέγουσιν⋅ ἐλθόντα γὰρ ἐπὶ τὸν Ἀχιλλέως τάφον εὔξασθαι θεάσασθαι τὸν ἥρωα τοιοῦτον ὁποῖος προῆλθεν ἐπὶ τὴν μάχην τοῖς δευτέροις ὅπλοις κεκοσμημένος⋅ ὀφθέντος δὲ αὐτῷ τοῦ Ἀχιλλέως τυφλωθῆναι τὸν Ὅμηρον ὑπὸ τῆς τῶν ὅπλων αὐγῆς⋅ ἐλεηθέντα δὲ ὑπὸ Θέτιδος καὶ Μουσῶν τιμηθῆναι πρὸς αὐτῶν τῇ ποιητικῇ, (‘They say that he became blind in the following way: when he went to the tomb of Achilles, he prayed that he might see the hero just as he was when he proceeded to battle adorned in his second set of armour. When he saw Achilles, Homer was blinded by the gleam of his armour; but Thetis and the Muses, feeling pity for him, honoured him with the gift of poetry’). Text and translation my own, from <https://livingpoets.dur.ac.uk/w/Anonymus,_Life_of_Homer_1>, accessed 22 January 2020. Both Hermias and this Vita add the version according to which Homer was blinded by Helen, angered at him because he depicted her in a negative light. The Vita is anonymous, cannot be dated with certainty, and does not report the name of the source for either episode. We cannot therefore know what relationships existed between the two witnesses of the story, but they are likely to be part of the same strand of biographical tradition.

72 Politian, Ambra 279–84: Ipse ardens clypeo ostentat terramque, fretumque, / Atque indefessum solem, solisque sororem / Iam plenam, et tacito volventia sidera mundo. / Ergo his defixus vates, dum singula visu / Explorat miser incauto, dum lumina figit / Lumina nox pepulit (‘That blazing figure displayed in his shield the earth and the sea and the tireless sun, and the sister of the sun now in her fulness, and stars revolving in the silent heavens. The poet was transfixed by these, and even while the unfortunate man gazed heedlessly on each, even while he fixed his lights upon them, night put out their brightness’). Translation from E. Cropper, ‘A Scholion by Hermias to Plato's Phaedrus and Its Adaptations in Pietro Testa's Blinding of Homer and in Politian's Ambra’, JWI 43 (1980), 264 n. 10. For Testa's drawing, see Cropper (this note).